Peace and Morality

But we too would be remaining in the abstract if we had to restrict ourselves to the expression of a wish for peace. There have been other movements for peace—for instance, that of Gary Davies (an American who renounced his nationality and called for a government of the world, camping on the steps of the Palais de Chaillot when the U.N. was sitting there.—Ed.). Gary Davies was a good chap, probably quite sincere, but he believed that peace was a question of morality, so that when asked to take a stand against the war in Viet Nam he refused because "It would be taking part in politics." But here we know that you can't condemn war in a general way or praise peace in the absolute. The pacifist is very badly equipped to answer the warrior, for since he wants peace at any price why should he not accept a peace imposed by force of arms?

So in occupied France we saw certain pacifists rally to the Hitlerites because they believed in good faith that Germany was about to impose a German peace upon the worlds—albeit a little brutally. But we cannot say that we want peace at any price, particularly at the price of a reign of terror. The other day our reactionary Press, commenting upon the English atom bomb experiment, shouted "Another bomb—there indeed is Peace on the march." On reading that, we understand that our first duty is to dig out the beautiful word Peace from the mud into which it has been thrown and to clean it up a bit. No! No peace in terror, not in humiliation, not in bondage. No peace at any price. Right here among us there are representatives of peoples which have been struggling for years for their liberation. Only we say that today at this very moment and taking everything into account, there is in the historical situation we are now in both a chance for Peace and a chance for war. We say that we have chosen the chance for Peace and that we wish to show that such a chance exists and to seek out what must be done so that it shall not pass us by.

Unlike Gary Davies we know that we must act in a political way; we know that Peace is not a permanent condition that is bestowed upon us one fine day like a good conduct certificate, but a long term construction project to be carried out on a world-wide basis and demanding the collaboration of all the world's peoples.

All the world's peoples are here in the persona of their representatives. Where else, in what other place on earth, could they meet together today ? All the peoples are here ready to build peace as the peoples should build it. That is to say concretely and starting out from the concrete life. Between capitalist and Socialist States as would today be inevitable if it could be shown that their co-existence was economically impossible; that is, if it so happened that the peoples living under one of these regimes, in order to work and to satisfy their hunger, needed the destruction of the other regime. Now there is nobody saying that. Representatives of socialist countries, for their part, tell us in so many words that they want peace and that coexistence is possible. But the exponents of preventive war, of rearming Europe, of blackmail by the atom bomb—what do they say? Do they Justify the pressure they apply in terms of economic pressures? Not at all. You will not find this idea expressed by Burnham, the State Department adviser, nor by Monnerot or Aron, the two French theorists whose work is to defend the Atlantic Pact. Aron goes so far as to remark that the present attitude of the U.S.A. towards the Chinese Government is not Justifiable on the grounds of economic necessity because in 1939 U.S. trade with China represented only three per cent of U.S. foreign trade. What do they say then? Well, they talk of political imperialism, of socialist aggression, of religious wards and of a crusade against communism. In short, these are political, not economic, arguments—and passionate ones at that, aiming at attitudes and an ideology.

In a word, they are afraid, and—what comes to the same thing—they are trying to make others afraid. And some people who want peace as surely as we want it are being drawn into the dangerous situation of running the risk of making war against "the others" out of sheer terrar that "the others" might make war on them.