PACIFIST POLICY USELESS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22819, 28 August 1937, Page 1 (Supplement)

PACIFIST POLICY USELESS

Opinions of Sandy

By KOTARE

SANDY was in great fettle when I called on him last week. A youthful pacifist had looked him up to point out to him the error of his ways and to lead his tottering steps into the true light. I judged that youth had dealt most faithfully with age, but had not been able to achieve a conversion. Sandy had liked the young man, admired his earnestness and his pluck and hia eager intelligence. "He was a fine lad," he said. "Knew what he was talking about, Hoo. I thought at first it was the usual young fellow who has caught an idea jind then proceeds to ram it throat. In a month or tWjo'it is replaced »* by another infallible plan for saving the world: but he works it mighty hard while it holds the centre of the eonfusion he calls his mind. I ha\ f e suffered from these emotional exhibitionists with a mission to make a new world, and a neat little formula to solve every problem. . "I suppose you have; too. I misjudged this lad. He soon showed ep that he had thought his ideas through and was prepared to accept their logical consequences in his own conduct. He had as much love of life and liberty as you or I —a perfectly normal young man with none of that passion for martyrdom which Bernard Shaw insists is the only thing that enables a man tc become famous without ability. "There are pacifists who establish their faith in their interpretation of Christianity. They cannot conceive how the fundamental Christian law of love can be reconciled with war as modern conditions have determined it. They have been commanded to love their enemies, and no jugglery can persuade them they are loving the enemies whom they mutilate by high explosive or torture with poison gas. The Modern Mind "C. F. Andrews, a saintly man if over there was one, describes how he camo to see his duty. It was during the Great War. Like most of us he had been caught in the fierce eddies of the war spirit. 'The brutality and'cruelty, the meanness and falsehood of war soon brought with them moral shocks which ought to have aroused me to action. Yet instead of this the war-spirit found a lodgment in my own mind, and I could almost feel rising within a secret eagerness for a victory, for my country at whatever moral cost. The scales at last fell from my eyes and I saw war for the hateful thing it was—clean contrary to the Golden .Rule of Christ.' "That is quite understandable. But my young visitor told me frankly that he had no religion at all so far as he knew. He was one of the post-war generation that found 'the world in which they were to have their .being a chaotic tangle of hate and disillusion, -and not unnaturally laid the blame for all the mess on the ideas and ideals of the generations before the war. He argued something like this. Vicitorianism and its derivatives enthrorild capital and religion and looked upon war as necessary and inevitable. Everything that had contributed to the stupendous disaster of 1914 should be cut out of the modern man's mental equipment if he would make a world fit for decent human beings to live in. r '4u t "He had swung away from Christianity without ever investigating its claims. It had had its chance and it had failed, and he had no use for failures. Capital had deliberately and for its own ends created the conditions that had made war necessary. So here he wasj definitely anti-Christianity, anti-capital and anti-war:

Ideal and Real "I suggested to him that he must look at the world situation as it is. . It was not a question of what might' be possible in some Utopia of" a thousand years hence, but what was imposed upon us by the actual situation as it confronts us to-day. Ideals were admirable, but they must - have their feet on earth. They must be related to actuality. The rabbit might decide that, in an ideal world, burrows would be unnecessary. The animals ought to live together as they did in the Golden Age, the lion and the lamb lying down together, and the dog and the rabbit ' living in perfect amity of. mutual re-'-spect and helpfulness. But if the rabbit abandoned its only means of defence and decided to live in the open it would soon rank with the dodo and the moa. "It was a poor line to take with him He asked me if man might not be expected to have evolved some higher standards of living than were inevitable among the brutes, and anyway the Utopia of the future would depend upon the men of to-day that believed in it and worked and lived for it in a world that would have none of it. "Idealism is a fin<j thing, but it can easily become the gburce of disasters more desperate thanfthe ones it is trying to eliminate. P&rticularly is that so in the present situation. Our idealism put our nation behind the League of Nations. Wo thought we had dis-r covered a new method of preserving the liberties the British spirit had won for man throughout the centuries. Collective security was the watchword. But the issue proved that our idealism was leading us into grievous dangers. . "Basil de Selincourt has noted that tho tendency of much of modern idealism is to base life on hope rather than to base hope on life. Extravagant expectations get us nowhere. The mere wish for the right, he says, will not bring it into being. 'The ideal comes not from dreamy or frantic hopes, hut by steady establishment, and tho capacity to see and take the necessary next step.' ,

The New Situation "That is the problem, the necessary next step. Europe maySblow tip at any minute. The British .Jfavy at present is just sufficient t(£ keep the home coasts safe and perhaps to guard the Gibraltar-Port Said ■ highway. It certainly cannot provide adequate protection for the Pacific and the area served by the Singapore base. The Dominions, by their new status under the Statute of Westminster, are by implication responsible for their own defence. Britain is no more bound to come to >;-p the help of New Zealand than Canada is. "Even if she were, in the event of a Pacific flare-up synchronising with urgent trouble in Europe, we would have to defend ourselves, or throw up ■ the sponge without an effort. That is the reality tho idealist must face. Pacifism is' about as useful as a pleasant, friendly look would bo to check tho onrush of a herd of mad elephants. "You remember what Tennyson said eighty-two years ago: For I trust if an enemy's fleet came yonder round by the hill And tho rushing: battle-bolt sang from the , i three-decker out of the foam. That the smooth-faced, snub-nosed rogua / would leap from his counter and till, . And strike, if he could, were it but with his cheating yardwand, home. - • • That is the spirit; but a lot of use his yardwand, cheating or otherwise, would • be. And it is no use running to insure Vyour house while it is passing in one 'ij?, red, fiery coal."