At 4:30 a.m. this morning news wires hummed with the following information:
1,000,000 brownclad German troops are pouring across the Northern French border and battering a wavering line of French defense troops.
In the Far East, acting according to a pre-arranged plan, the stolid Imperial Japanese army is taking possession of the Northern forts of the far-flung Mongolian chain.
France, weak from fighting a paralyzing internal crisis, is making emergency measures to man a broken defense line.
A panic-stricken London is gazing at the smoking ruins of Buckingham Palace and clearing wreckage from a desolate Fleet street.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt has called an emergency meeting of cabinet officials and leading industrialists.
The question facing 126,000,000 Americans is:
HOW CAN AMERICA STAY OUT OF WAR!!
Obviously the foregoing has yet to happen. It need not be these specific nations. Yet, the fact remains, that such events are possible and their possibility increases day by day. The question of American neutrality is of greatest importance. It may mean your life.
Before we discuss the means of retaining our neutrality, let us look at the reason behind war.
War, according to the late Senator Robert M. LaFollette Sr., "is a terribly destructive force, even beyond the limits of the battle-front and the war zones. It's influence involves the whole community. It warps man's judgement, distorts the true standard of patriotism, breeds distrust and suspicion among neighbors, inflames passions, encourages and develops abuse of power, tyrannizes over men and women even in the purely social relations of life, and terrifies whole communities into the most abject surrender of every right which is the heritage of free government."
Let us turn from the inhuman side of war and survey the economic background. Our present economy, technically called a price system, depends upon an expanding market for its prosperity. (With the exception of a few backward communities in remote spots of the globe, every nation in the world is operating under some form of a price system.)
When internal conditions are of such a nature that expansion at home is retarded, corporate enterprise must look to foreign fields for new markets.
But when corporate enterprise from the United States, for instance, seeks to exploit the resources of China, it finds itself hampered by rival groups from England, France, Japan, or Russia.
And when competition becomes very keen, friction is certain to develop.
As pointed out before me, the munitions makers and banking houses, overlords of industry, are quite willing to do their part to capitalize a profit.
That was the basic reason for the last war. In a sense, the world was getting too small to hold an expanding Germany, France, and England. After the last world war, a sadly disillusioned President Wilson reflected: "my fellow citizens, is there any man here or any woman, let me say is there any child here, who does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry? The real reason that the war that we have just finished took place was that Germany was afraid her commercial rivals were going to get the better of her, and the reason why some nations went into the war against Germany was that they thought Germany would get the commercial advantage of them. The seed of jealousy, the seed of the deep-seated hatred was hot, successful commercial and industrial rivalry.
"This war, in it's inception, was a commercial and industrial war."
There have been various plans advanced to remove the blot of war from our civilization:
Probably the most logical plan is that proposed by Senator Gerald P. Nye, of North Dakota, chairman of the Senate munitions committee.
We must guard ever so jealously the preservation in some form or another of our democratic liberties. We must be particularly alert to guard against infringement of those first 10 amendments to the constitution. We can leave the rest of the document to the Republicans and Democrats to scrap over.
We must preserve our rights of free speech and freedom of assembly, so that we can have intelligent discussions of the problem free from interference of dictatorial governments and subsidized press.
We must guard against propaganda in all its vicious phases.
One of the most unholy of the lies deliberately manufactured to mislead the American public is the statement that war will bring back prosperity.
It's true that much of the increase in industrial production today is due to government war orders for the capital goods industries.
When Howard Scott, Director-in-Chief of Technocrary, Inc., was in Cleveland a few weeks ago he pointed out that our own White Motor Co. has a $1,800,000 order for artillery transports. And every shipyard, whether government or private, is on practically a 24-hour basis, building ships for our Navy. Practically every truck company is busy supplying trucks to the CCC and the National Guard or the U.S. Army. The unemployed, working on government relief projects, have practically rebuilt our forts and army bases. We're building one of the greatest war machines in the world. For what purpose?
War is always good business in a price system.
But who pays the bill?
The war orders of the United States government in 1935 and 1936 are the largest peacetime budgets for military purposes that have ever been made by any government, in history. Naturally we should have a semblance of national defense, but it is a senseless, economic waste to lead the world into an arms race.
Are foreign markets so important? No! I subscribe wholeheartedly to the statement made by Charles A. Beard, historian, that we need look no further than the confines of our own nation to find the greatest market in the world.
With all our tremendous advances in physical sciences, and industrial technology, we have been shamefully inactive in the field of social sciences. Despite our semblance of intelligence, we can't seem to outlaw war.
To today's youth belongs the America of tomorrow. Would you rather die draped across the charged barb-wire, feeling your very flesh burned from your bones and with glazed eyes watching your lifeblood pouring from a gaping, jagged two-inch wound? Or dying so fast you can't think how stupid you are? Would you rather live, secure in the belief that you were contributing your part to make a finer America, an America that you would be proud of, an America of true progress and of liberty.
If you've the pioneering spirit to stamp out the visciousness of war, and the courage to preserve our sacred freedom, and make our flag the emblem it really stands for, here's more power to you.
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