Mythology has it that, heeding timely warning, Ulysses lashed himself to the mast of his ship and had his seamen fill their ears with wax until he had passed the isle of the Sirens. By this simple device he was able to avoid yielding to the fascination of their sweet music!—and to escape the destruction of himself and his followers which would otherwise have surely followed.
Would there were some equally simple device available to us now!
The Siren call of Peace is music so sweet to the war-weary peoples of the earth that few are able to discern the “potent herbs and baneful drugs” of which it is concocted, nor hear in the distance the relentless pounding of the breakers which wait open-jawed to consume the foolish ones who yield to its enticements.
For to listen to its call is to change our course from the hardships and sacrifices which duty requires of us, and to fritter away the priceless heritage of our sons and daughters in order to satisfy a fatuous and ungrateful interest in our own momentary comfort and convenience and safety.
At the risk of being tagged a warmonger, it is necessary that I record my thoughts on this matter, because I am frankly weary of hearing and reading in practically every public utterance that clutters the press or irritates the airwaves, loud and loose clamoring for peace, peace, peace as our assumed international objective.
Peace has never been, in the American scheme of things, the primary objective.
Sure we love it. But there are many things we have always held more important. For instance, fighting against oppression in any form “The gentlemen cry ‘Peace, Peace’ ” shouted Patrick Henry—“But there is no Peace save that purchased at the price of chains and slavery.” The clank of chains in Siberia and Manchuria provides a current echo for his words.
I have tried to discover when Peace started to creep into our national talk and national thinking as the summum bonum. It seems first to have achieved parlor prominence when World War I was being fought to end all wars. Certainly you will look in vain through the Preamble to the Constitution to find even the word peace. And in the Declaration of Independence, although the word is used three times, nowhere is it even remotely considered in terms of objective. There is talk of “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness,” and of the right to set up a government which will best effect our “Safety and Happiness.” It is worth remembering that we had to fight a war for the right to set up our own government, we had to fight each other about the form it should take, and we had to fight a war between the states to see whether we should keep it.
This is no mere matter of semantic confusion. It does not do to say that half of the people who say we are “fighting for peace” really mean that we are fighting for the items I have mentioned above. Because the mere use of the term, especially by those in positions of supposed leadership, points our national thinking in the wrong direction.
The careful selection—and statement—of the right objectives is as important as the careful selection of the right navigation lights. The consequences of being wrong are identical. If our main objective is Peace, then we do anything to maintain it; we sink our own ships to prevent provoking our neighbors, as we did after World War I. We tolerate almost any indignity rather than fight. We have—and deserve—our Manchukuos, our Ethiopias, our Ruhr reoccupations, our Munichs, our Koreas, and our Dien-Bien- Phus. We listen to peace-at-any-price talk. We become suckers for such Communist fakeries as the Emergency Peace Mobilization Committee of early World War II, which, it will be remembered, as soon as Germany attacked Russia, became overnight the Emergency Peoples Mobilization Committee. Our leaders listen to the pusillanimous counsel of those spiritless ones or traitors in our midst who assert that it is better to let our sons in the field be slaughtered than to take action—even that sponsored by international law from time immemorial—which “might precipitate World War III.”
If on the other hand, in considering our international objectives, we talk of a system of collective security under a system of international law, fairly conceived and fairly administered, enforced by such police force as may be required, then we have announced an understandable and practical objective. Such talk creates no Elysian illusion in our minds. We may lower our guard a little but we do not drop it entirely. We realize that peace is no more likely to exist internationally than it does in Chicago or New York or Paducah. We realize that there is a price to pay—in blood and money—for enforcement of international as well as local law. But the concept of enforcement excludes the concept of peace-at-any-price.
As far as forseeable human progress is concerned, there will always be men with illusions of grandeur who will try to build themselves little empires outside of the social order, local or international. We shall always have with us our corrupt political bosses, our robber barons, our Mussolinis, our Hitlers, and our Stalins. The problem will be, as it has always been, to slap them down before they have time—or the encouragement of initial success—to get big enough to bother everybody. There is not one of the social cancers named above who, at one time or another in his development, could not have been scooped out and eliminated by a little ready and skillful political surgery. Our Intelligence effort should tell us when and where the scoop is needed. Our military forces should be ready and able to apply the scalpel as required. Our Leaders should guide its energetic application.
Even when the millennium shall have arrived, and the swords have all been duly beaten into plowshares, my guess is that someone had better stand by with the scabbards to beat over the head the few who will inevitably decide to take advantage of the situation.
There is nothing new about the idea that we must, as a people, be ready to fight a series of little wars all the time if we are to avoid having to fight for our lives and our national existence every twenty-five years. Not only must we fight such little wars, but we must win them. The coral sands of Okinawa and the bleak snows of the Korean hills, blowing through new crops of crosses, thirty years and half a world away from the poppies of Flanders Fields, should serve to make it clear that there is no corner of the earth too remote to be a theatre in which we may have to do our fighting. To this bitter truth we must steel our minds and our hearts—individually, and as a people. In a speech before the House of Commons in November, 1950, Winston Churchill summed it up this way:
“ . . . The best hope of avoiding a third world war [is] . . . not by appeasement of opponents from weakness, but by wise measures, fair play from strength, and the proof of unconquerable resolve.”
To be ready to fight anywhere at any time indeed requires on our part an “unconquerable resolve.” Eternal vigilance has been mentioned as the price of liberty. But it is clearly not the only price. To vigilance must be added a certain unwavering toughness of sinew and spirit, a ruggedness of character, which serves notice on all the world that here, at least, there can be no pushing around.
The late Lord James Bryce, great British student and protagonist of the American Commonwealth around the turn of the century, hailed this nation as having “become what its founders hoped it might be—an example for those smaller nations which had more lately emerged into the sunlight of freedom.” At any rate, whether by intent or by default, we have become the champion of freedom and of law and order for an ailing world. With this uneasy crown has come a certain responsibility which can neither be shirked nor discharged by the recital of idle blandishments or innocuous platitudes of peace. In evaluating this responsibility squarely it amounts to something like this: we cannot voluntarily allow one individual, anywhere in the world, to despair of achieving eventually, with our help, the inalienable rights of a free man. That is the essence of the leadership required of us.
We either accept the job—or we do not. We discharge our clear obligations—or we are past our zenith as a nation and are already headed for the limbo of those civilizations such as Greece and Rome which rose to greatness and, then waxing apathetic and lazy, lost that ruggedness of spirit without which no nation can long endure. And another thing is certain: we cannot lead the world by backing down. There can be no appearance of cowardice in the standard bearer. Few will take heart from evidence of pusillanimity, nor will they follow for long one who leads them thorough repeated defeats.
Nations, like people, are governed by simple principles. Everybody knows that if you have something good, it’s worth fighting for. If you aren’t willing to fight for it, the inference is not unreasonable that what you have doesn’t matter too much anyway.
Let us then belay this continuing and enervating palaver about peace as an international objective. Let us rather let the world know by our every public utterance that like our fathers before us, we love our liberties with a great and overriding zeal. Let us rather accept and discharge our responsibilities to civilization as the surviving leader of all those peoples who are willing and ready to fight for our freedom; as a nation grown strong in its own freedom and under constitutional guarantees of fair play in government; as a nation which does not abuse its strength but uses it to insure the good things in life to its neighbors large and small, as a nation which, on fundamental issues, and to enforce an effective code of international law, stands ready and willing to fight it out at any time regardless of the cost. If in the process of doing our job, we enjoy “Peace in our time,” let it be in the nature of a welcome byproduct of fair dealing, hard work, sound planning, and a readiness to fight for the right things at the drop of a hat—and not as something which we have a right to expect the gods to drop in our lap.
Admittedly this is not a concept for which by any stretch of the imagination the symbol could be a Dove of Peace perched in an Olive Tree. More appropriate would be the American Eagle, high on the wing, with all his majesty and strength and rugged beauty.
These are the things we should state fairly to a world hungry for leadership. And then, having stated it, may God help us that we do not yield to the call of the Sirens, but act sincerely to acquit ourselves like men.