Look At The Cost

For our decision, let us try to assess the value or otherwise of war by considering its nature, effects and consequences, and measuring these in terms of happiness of the people in the world (the individual persons, you and I and the Germans and the Indians and the Russians). The consequences of war are conceded by all to be terrible beyond description. Atom bombs, guided page 2 missiles, death sprays, flamethrowers, and bacterial warfare offer small hope indeed that the next war, if we have one, will be one whit less agonizing and indiscriminately destructive than the last one. The economic waste caused by war will also have its inevitable repercussions. Hopeless, destitute, despair-pitted people will again die of slow starvation, of slow burns, of all the ravages and aftermaths of war. Some have said the next war will mean the destruction of what has been called Western Civilisation. Cold reason seems to show that fairly simply. War is never the lesser of two evils.

War has in the past always cost even the victor far more than it has been worth. Measured in terms of wealth or in terms of happiness, or of both, it seems clear to me that it would be better to let an invader walk in rather than risk the terrible agony, havoc, and dying that war brings. The next war will be worse.

Even if this price is said to be worth it, in no case in the past has a war achieved all the things it was ostensibly fought for. War has not worked as a means to a good end in the past. And in the case of us in New Zealand, to restrict freedom by conscription is to deny the very principles for which we ostensibly fought and won two wars (and to give in to totalitarianism after all).