Imperialism and Peace
We do not have, today, the peace yearned for by millions all over
the world. In Korea we see a full- scale modem
war waged relentlessly against an entire nation whose one wish, for
centuries, has been unity, with independence from foreign aggression. In
Malaya and Indo-China two decaying imperial powers struggle desperately to
maintain the privileges of an outworn colonial system over the opposition
of people who will no longer be denied freedom. Military operations in Greece, Indonesia, Kashmir, Palestine, have shown us for five
years other facets of the same malignant activity.
Yet the supporters of peace have a power which can stop this
violence and bloodshed. For all these wars and acts of aggression-even the
war in Korea-have been waged in the name
of establishing peace. At first, we were given various mutually
contradictory reasons why the Koreans were to be saved from themselves.
Then we were told that General Mac- Arthur meant to supply the aggressive
leadership which is all that Asiatics can appreciate. He seems to think
that we Asiatics will naturally appreciate saturation bombing of peaceful
villages, destruction of schools and hospitals, savage reprisals against
civilians and prisoners of war. But this is an error. What we do appreciate
is that his utterances show quite clearly who is the real aggressor in Korea. We Asiatics also belong to
the human race; we also are made of flesh and blood; we tread the same
earth, breathe the same air.
The peace we want means true democracy. The experience of
millennia has shown us that no other kind of peace will last. No man shall
claim to be another's master whether by divine right, the right of birth,
the right of armed conquest, or the right vested in accumulated private
property. Such rights can only be exercised by fraud and violence against
the vast majority of the people, by destroying the very foundations of
peace, namely, truth and justice. The lowest in the land must raise himself
to full stature as an individual member of a great society. He must
exercise in full, by actual participation in governing himself and others,
his right to receive according to his needs, his duty to contribute
according to his ability. Formal recourse to the ballot-box for a periodic
but ineffective change of masters will not suffice.
The stale proclamations of all imperialisms, from Rome to the present day, have
again been proved false in the British, French, and Dutch empires. The
people of China rejected, in favour of
democracy, the aggressive leadership of Chiang Kai- shek, who was so amply
supplied with foreign arms and money. But the only lesson imperialism can
draw from these rebuffs is that puppets are unreliable, that open
intervention is a far better road to conquest- provided the other side is
poorly armed. The Pax Romana and the Pax Britannica should now be replaced
by a dollar peace, the Pax Americana. Tacitus gave a candid opinion of a
contemporary Roman emperor: "He made a desert and called it
peace." A modern historian might say of Hitler: "He waged total war,
and called it peace. This kind of "peace" did not succeed in Europe, nor will it in any other
part of the world.
Let us trace this crazy logic to its source. The issue of peace
or war does not depend upon a single individual who is ostensibly at the
helm of a nation, but upon the dominant class which really holds the power.
We are all convinced of the late President Franklin D. Roosevelt's
liberalism and sincere desire for world peace. Yet in attempting to
"quarantine the aggressor" in Spain, he only helped to destroy
the democratic victims of fascist aggression. Hitler's advance into Czechoslovakia went unchecked, as did
Mussolini's into Abyssinia, Japan's into China. We can trace this kind of
aggression right back to World War I and its aftermath, to the grim intervention
against the young Soviet Union which had sounded the call
for peace at its very birth. There is indeed a broad continuity of policy
against peace and against democracy. This undercurrent has never changed
its direction, no matter what appear on the surface. Leaders like Mr.
Churchill just carry out the interests of the dominant class and would get
nowhere without its backing; they are merely a symptom, not the main cause.
Look at another aspect of this underlying policy. Ploughing
cotton back into the soil, burning up or dumping millions of tons of food
into the ocean were desperation measures introduced at the beginning of Roosevelt's New Deal. Instead of
changing the ownership of the means of production, or designing a better
distribution mechanism, these transitional measures rapidly became a
permanent feature of the American way of life. The United States government began regularly
to pay subsidies to produce food which was then destroyed to keep prices
up. Up to 1950, American farmers were paid by their government to destroy
mountainous heaps of potatoes and to feed to livestock wheat produced by
the most modern farming technique; at the same time, Canadian wheat was
being imported into the United States because, even after paying
the protective tariff, it was cheaper than the subsidised American product.
This insane economic system shows exactly the same kind of twisted logic as
that of modern imperialism which wages war in the name of peace and calls
any move toward, peace an act of warlike aggression, which bombs people
indiscriminately to save them from Communism.
The crooked roots of imperialism lie deep in the need for profits
and ever more profits- for the benefit of a few monopolists. The
"American way of life" did not solve the world problem of the
great depression of 1929-33. In the United States this was solved by World War
II. But only for a time. Korea shows that the next step is
to start a new war to stave off another depression. The one lesson of the
last depression which stuck is that profits can be kept up by creating
shortages where they do not and need not exist. War materials are produced
for destruction. Producing them restricts consumer goods, which increases
profits in double ratio. Any logic that proves the necessity of war is the
correct logic for imperialism and for Big Business, which now go hand in
hand. Mere contradictions do not matter for this sort of lunatic thinking
where production of food is no longer the method of raising man above the
animals, but merely a way of making profit while millions starve.
Let us now consider the deeper fact that food is itself a
weapon-a negative weapon, but no less deadly than the atom- bomb for
bacteriological warfare. A bomb or a bullet shortens a man's life. The lack
of proper nourishment also shortens a man's expectation of life by a
calculable number of years, even when there is no actual famine or death by
starvation. Deprive a man of food and you make him prey not only to hunger
but to disease; do it year after year, generation after generation, and you
produce a race whose minds and bodies are stunted, tortured, warped,
deformed. You produce monstrous superstitions, twisted social systems.
Destroying stockpiles of food is the same kind of action as building up
stock-piles of atom- bombs.
But the war waged by means of food is different in one very
important respect from national and colonial aggression. It is war against
the whole of humanity except that tiny portion to whom food is a negligibly
small item of expenditure, war also against millions of American workers.
In a word, it is class war, and all other wars of today stem from attempts
to turn it outward. Even the Romans knew that the safest way to avoid inner
conflict, to quiet the demands of their own citizens, was to attempt new
conquests.
Quite apart from the destructiveness of total war, the crooked
logic of Big Business and warmongers is fatal to the clear thinking needed
for science. The arguments that modern science originates with the
bourgeoisie, that the enormous funds devoted to war research are a great
stimulus to science, are vicious. The scientific outlook came into being
when the bourgeoisie was a new progressive class, struggling for power
against feudal and clerical reaction. Science is cumulative, as is large-scale
mechanised production which congeals the result of human labour and
technical skill in increasingly large and more efficient machines. But for
modem capitalists, a class in decay, the "findings of science (apart
from profit-making techniques) have become dangerous; and so it becomes
necessary for them to coerce the scientist, to restrict his activity. That
is one reason for vast expenditure on secret atomic research, for putting
third- raters in control to bring big-business monopoly to the laboratory.
The broad co-operation and pooling of knowledge which made scientific
progress so rapid is destroyed. Finally the individual scientist is openly
and brutally enslaved for political reasons. Science cannot flourish behind
barbed wire, no matter how much money the war offices may pay to
"loyal' mediocrities. Freedom is the recognition of necessity; science
is the investigation, the analysis, the cognition of necessity. Science and
freedom always march together. The war mentality which destroys freedom
must necessarily destroy science.
The scientist by himself can neither start nor stop a war .
Modern war has to be fought by millions in uniform and greater numbers in
fields and factories. But a scientific analysis of the causes of war, if
convincing to the people at large, could be an effective as well as a
democratic force for peace. We have to make it clear to the common people
of the world that any aggression anywhere is, in the last analysis, war
against them. We have to tell them not to be misled by the familiar but
insidious whisper: "Things were better when we had a war". This
is just like a criminal drug peddler saying to his victim: "See how
much better it was for you when you had the drug than when you sobered up
afterwards. Buy another dose." The real problem is how to straighten
out our thinking and to change our economy, to transfer control of all
production to society as a whole. Only then can we have real democracy and
lasting peace.
It must be understood quite clearly that the war between nations,
World War III, is not inevitable and can be stopped by pressure of public
opinion. The inner conflict, the class war, on the other hand, must be
settled within each country without foreign armed intervention. The peace
movement cannot deny to any people the right to revolution (including
counter-revolution), nor even the right to wage civil war. It can only
demand that no nation's armed forces should go into action upon foreign
territory. That is aggression even when done under cover of "defence",
restoration of law and order, or a forced vote in the United Nations: The
purpose of the United Nations was to settle all international differences
without war, not to provide a joint flag for the ancient imperialist
"police actions". If unchecked, such an adventure is a clear
invitation to the aggressor to initiate the next world war as can be seen
by the history of appeasement during the 1930's.
But there is one important difference between that period and the
present. There were then large powers such as the British Empire and the United States which could assume a
position of formal neutrality while fascism was being built up as a
military and political counterpoise to Communism. Even this formal
neutrality is impossible today; only mass action by the common people of
the world remains as the bulwark of peace.
Monthly
Review, (New
York)
3,1951, pp. 45-59. Colonial liberation greatly promotes world peace because
it wipes out the great tension between the imperial power and the subject
people, and because it does away with the outcry for colonies by the
"have-not" nations of the West. The previous exploiting nation
will actually profit, for it would logically be the best source of help for
the liberated colony to develop its own resources on a free and equal basis.
This is because of long' contact, cultural influences, and local knowledge.
The loss to the small group of people who monopolised colonial profits and
made money out of armaments would be negligible as compared to the national
savings in armaments and the total profit by the new trade. The sole
condition for all these mutual benefits is that liberation should take
place before the colonial population is enraged beyond all limits. The
British seem to have learned this lesson (except in places like Kenya where there is virtually no strong native
bourgeoisie), whereas the French show by their behaviour in Algeria that the lesson of Vietnam has not yet gone home.
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