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]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]] THE LESSON OF HISTORY [[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[
(c) 1983 Samuel McCracken
President Reagan and other unsympathetic critics of the peace
movement appear to be totally ignorant of the many successes in dis-
armament treaties and other antiwar activities which the movement
already has to its credit. Their crude attacks on the movement are,
therefore, launched from an intellectual and historical vacuum. What
with recent Soviet disarmament initiatives, the departure of Eugene
V. Rostow from the U. S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and the
sentencing of Ed Hasbrouck of Massachusetts to 1000 hours of "alterna-
tive service" for his refusal to register for the draft, the time is
ripe for a retrospective glance at the history of peace-making in the
20th century. For what the critics of the peace movement do not under-
stand is that the peace movement has a history. It is not as if its
moral premises were not those of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and
it is not as if its political premises had not been repeatedly tested
in the demanding theatre of international politics.
Although the two Hague Peace conferences convened by Tsar Nicho-
las II in 1899 and 1907 were important, albeit failed, precursors, the
seminal event in the history of our march towards peace was Sir Norman
Angell's 1910 best-seller The Great Illusion. Without the widespread
influence of Sir Norman's demonstration that war had become so ter-
rible and expensive as to be unthinkable, tensions that had been
building up in central Europe might well have led to a terrible war.
Absent Angell's brilliant analysis of the cost/benefit ratios of any
new war, Jean Renoir's cinematic masterpiece--his ingenious specula-
tion about a world that had not been shown Angell's grim picture of
the fate of the earth--might have dealt with an actual war! As strange
as the idea now seems, a world unaware that in war the bottom line
always shows a loss might actually have gotten involved in a major
one.
The next step towards peace was the Washington Naval Treaty of
1922. The great powers had been engaged in an increasingly dangerous
arms race involving the production of succeeding generations of bat-
tleships with ever greater operational ranges and ever heavier throw-
weights. The Washington Treaty was a brilliant first step in arms
control which froze the relative naval strengths of the United States,
Great Britain, France and Japan. It has largely rescued the reputation
of President Harding from the domestic difficulties that shadowed him
at the end of his life. Had not this treaty put an end to the threat-
ening arms spiral in battleships, one of the signatories might have
built a great fleet that would have tempted it to aggression. Japan,
for example, by the mere possession of such a fleet, might well have
been led into using it. Emulating the example of Japan's highly suc-
cessful 1904 attack on Port Arthur, her leaders might have attempted
to attack the former U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in what is now
East Honshu.
Once the great powers had determined to freeze their strategic
arsenals, they moved more deeply into the process of making peace
rather than war. In 1925, Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy Ger-
many and Belgium signed the Locarno Pact. Nations that until the late
19th century had made a cockpit of Europe publicly and formally agreed
that war was bad.
To borrow an entirely theoretical but possibly illuminating phrase
from the abstruser ranges of physics, the peace movement had attained
critical mass, for in 1928 and thereafter some 63 nations signed the
Kellogg-Briand Pact.
The leaders of 63 sovereign states met and proclaimed that not
only was war bad, but that they would not study it any more. It is
hard to believe that the next decade would have passed so tranquilly
without this landmark of peace-making.
We need only imagine the outcome had Britain, France, and Germany
not been bound by solemn treaty to forswear war as a means of settling
differences. One can well imagine that national rivalries might have
led to a border confrontation that would have rapidly escalated into a
full-scale war.
Aristide Briand of France and Frank Kellogg of the United States
richly deserved the joint award of the 1928 Nobel Peace Prize. Five
years later two decades of injustice were righted -- scandalously late
-- by the award of the Prize to Sir Norman Angell.
The Oxford Peace Resolution of 1934 was another major develop-
ment. When the Oxford Union, a debating society numbering among its
members the flower of young England, many of them the grandsons of
those who had died fighting Queen Victoria's wars, voted "Resolved,
this House will not fight for King and Country," who could have
doubted that peace had triumphed?
In the same year, A. A. Milne published his classic with Peace
with Honor. Although his title looked back to an earlier triumph of
British statesmanship, when in 1878 the Congress of Berlin had brought
lasting peace to the Balkans, his message was nothing if not forward-
looking. It is not possible to summarize his complex argument here,
but it may suffice to quote his devastating refutation of the base
canard that Germany, under its new and progressive leadership, desired
conflict: "It is often said that Germany prepares for war while paying
lip-service to peace. The truth may be that she prepares for peace
while paying lip-service to war."
There were cynics who said that Milne, before he took up the
cause of peace merely a writer of popular tales for children, should
have stuck to his last. But the majority of Englishmen were deeply
moved by Christopher Robin's conversion to the cause of peace. This
development, Christopher's subscription, so to speak, to the Oxford
Peace Pledge, was probably responsible for the British people's final
rejection of the old warmonger Winston Churchill, who through four
decades of peace had never tired of attempts to relive the murderous
glories of his service in the senile military establishment of the
dying Victorian age.
After that, the road to peace was downhill all the way. During
1938 and 1939, the European community maturely accepted the integra-
tion of Austria into Greater Germany and the restoration to their
homeland of millions of Germans living in the short-lived nation of
Czechoslovakia. Almost monthly, national differences that would once
have led to war were peaceably adjusted at the conference table. Mr.
Chamberlain, after the Munich Conference, modestly claimed to have
achieved "peace in our time." Now we see that he builded better than
he knew: he had, it seems, achieved peace for all time.
We Americans can especially be thankful that during this period
our country was racked by economic depression and thus unable to
intervene in European affairs and interrupt the Old World's march
towards peace. Given a somewhat more adequate industrial base, a
bellicose Franklin D. Roosevelt might well have attempted to interfere
with the coming pacification of Europe through some ill-judged mili-
tary adventure in the Rhineland.
Finally came the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, still
dictating the peace of the world over forty years later. It boggles
the imagination to consider what might have happened had Britain and
France tried to frustrate the Fourth Partition of Poland, which lanced
what been for centuries a festering boil on the European body politic,
bringing at long last a final solution to the Polish question. Indeed,
the pacification of Europe and the West might have been strangled in
its cradle.
The reader may believe that in this essay I have relied too
heavily on fantasy. What might have been, he may feel, is as nothing
compared to what is and has been. But that is just the problem: we see
among us today warmongers sometimes called by the euphemism of
"hawks."
These persons must be made to see the truth of Santayana's obser-
vation that they who do not remember the past are condemned to relive
it. Throughout this century, we have, by our resolute and vigorously
stated belief that peace is preferable to war and by our repeated
willingness through solemn treaty to pledge ourself committed to that
belief whenever the opportunity presented, prevented a major conflict.
But we may not always be so lucky. The time may come when good
intentions no longer pave the road to heaven.
* * *
[Prof. Samuel McCracken is Assistant to the President of Boston Uni-
versity, author of the book "The War Against the Atom," and a Charter
Subscriber to Access to Energy.]
* * *
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