Peace Aims

When World War II is finished two nations will hold in their hands the destiny of the western world: the U. S. and the winner. If Germany wins, the U. S. must come to terms or to blows with a German-dominated New Order. If Great Britain wins with U. S. aid, the U. S. will have the right and the duty to participate in an Anglo-Saxon New Order. The outlines of Germany's New Order are already clear: serfdom for everybody except the people who run Germany. Those of the Anglo-Saxon New Order are not clear.

Since the war began, many sections of the British press and public have tried to force their Government to state its aims for war and peace. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain dodged the question; Prime Minister Winston Churchill begged it again last week: "The first of our war aims [is] to be worthy of that love [of the Dominions]." To many people it would seem silly for a man who is being choked to death to waste breath talking about what he will do if he survives. But an increasingly articulate body of opinion, both in Britain and the U. S., holds that to fight a good war, or to help others fight it, people must know what kind of world they are fighting for.

U. S. pressure for a British statement of peace aims has come not only from isolationists (who hope the statement will be unsatisfactory) but from the Government itself, which wants to unite the public behind its policy of all-out aid to Britain. In Britain the case of the peace-aims advocates has been best stated by Author John Boynton Priestley, chairman of a Socialist-minded group which calls itself The 1941 Committee. Said he:

"What we want is a short, clear creed, acceptable to the decent common man everywhere, that will act like a trumpet call. Then we must proclaim it everywhere. ... If we fought with ideas as well as weapons, we should not only help to construct a world worth living in, but also shorten the war."

Awaited Action. Last week President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's friend and boarder, Harry L. Hopkins, left London for the U. S. after four weeks of the closest intellectual intimacy with British Government leaders. He had even attended meetings of the inner War Cabinet. It was certain that he would tell the President all he had learned about British peace aims. It was all but certain that Franklin Roosevelt would then tell the U. S. as much as he thought it ought to know. That would probably be enough to convince most of the U. S. that Britain was fighting for democracy.

In Washington last week the new British Ambassador, Lord Halifax, worked on a draft of his first speech in the U. S., to be delivered at a Pilgrims dinner in New York Feb. 24. Since this will be soon after Envoy Hopkins' return, it seemed not unlikely that Lord Halifax would also have something to say about peace aims. Whoever said it first, the U. S. was soon to know a great deal more about what Britain is fighting for. And the U. S. was due to discuss Britain's, and the U. S.'s, war and peace aims more and more earnestly in the months to come.

Churchill on Privileges. Britain's vaguely declared war aim is to preserve that indefinity called democracy. Yet to thoughtful Britons it has long been clear that either democracy does not establish equality, or else democracy has never existed in Great Britain. War has thrown the inequalities of the social order into stronger relief, made them clear even to unthinking Britons. So there has arisen a powerful feeling that a better social order must arise out of the war. While Britain fights to win its war, its domestic war aim is revolutionary.

Out of the speeches of Britain's leaders there has emerged a pattern of thinking which recognizes not only the need for revolution at home but the necessity of a revolutionary world order. If the British Government is honest with its people and its supporters abroad, its statement of war aims will follow this pattern of thinking.

Closemouthed as he has been on the subject, Winston Churchill told Harrow students last December: "When this war is won--as it surely will be--it must be one of our aims to establish a state of society where the advantages and privileges which hitherto have been enjoyed by the few shall be far more widely shared by the men and youth of the nation as a whole." A few days earlier, in answer to the question: "Is it not desirable that the German people should suffer humiliation and defeat?", Churchill answered: "I will be content if they suffer defeat."

Labor Leaders have been more articulate than the Conservatives. Labor Minister Ernest Bevin has made pointed allusions to postwar social revolution, and the British public is convinced that Bevin and his friends will not sell out the Labor Party as Ramsay MacDonald did in 1931.

Party Leader Clement Richard Attlee said, soon after the war began: "There must be an international force possessed of such overwhelming strength that no would-be aggressor would dare challenge it. ... Bold economic planning on a world scale will be . . . imperative."

Said Minister of Home Security Herbert Morrison last December: "I conceive us to be aiming at a cooperative international system. . . . This depends on and involves the end of selfish national interests. . . . There must be no more private monopoly. If monopolies there be, they must serve the State."

Soon after he was appointed chairman of what is virtually a Ministry of Postwar Reconstruction last month, Laborite Arthur Greenwood broadcast his ideas as follows: "Britain, after the war, will not tolerate in her midst the tragic spectacle of abject poverty, nor the existence of . .. unemployment."

The Liberals have gone as far as, or farther than, Laborites in expressing revolutionary war aims. Liberal Leader Sir Archibald Sinclair has made it clear that he sees eye-to-eye with Laborite Attlee. Most influential M.P. in war-aims councils is tall, thick, bespectacled Sir Richard Thomas Dyke Acland. a Liberal. At Manchester last December he said: "We are fighting, not to restore the old order, but to establish the real democracy, economic as well as political. . . . There must be common ownership of great resources . . . because without this we cannot move forward to a new way of life based on service, not self--a way of life as different from the way of 1939 as free capitalism was from the feudal system that preceded it. ... It is essential that you should, at the very minimum, take over the banks, the railways, the mines, the key industries, the engineering industry--and do it now."

The Church. The Archbishop of Canterbury, no progressive, has broadcast this contribution to war aims: "Our task is ... to establish among nations the great principles of justice and freedom. ... As for the claim that in trying to establish justice and freedom we are doing God's will, it lays on us the responsibility at least of establishing these principles in our own land. . . ."

The Archbishop of York, who is more liberal, has also been more specific: "With security for France must go equality for Germany. The aim must be to cooperate with Germany as an equal partner. . . . If we establish justice even approximately, we may hope for peace."

Old Tie. If all this was Socialism, there were those in Britain who remained unreconstructed. On being re-elected Master of the famed Whaddon Chase Hunt last fortnight, Captain H. T. Morton of Aston Abbots, Bucks, proclaimed this characteristic, amiable aim for the Old School Tie: "We are told that after the war life will be quite different. Hunting, shooting, fishing, racing, darts and football must be protected because they are in the blood of all Englishmen. We must see that these are carried on so that after the war we will be able to enjoy these wonderful sports that make England worthy of living in."

Capitalist Speaks. In the U. S., which in many ways is socially about where Britain was a year ago, at least one capitalist has spoken plain words to his colleagues about the revolutionary aims of the world. He is Charles Edward Wilson, new President of General Electric Co., who said last month: "The world, our nation included, is passing through what history may later record as the second stage of a revolutionary movement of the masses--a movement born during World War I and likely to last, with intermittent armistices of one kind or another, for two or three decades more. . . . Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler and the Japanese Army leaders are but symbols of this movement. . . . As a world movement the scope of this conflict extends beyond . . . these symbols.

"The ardent aim of the millions of heroic common people in Britain, first to defend themselves against the dictators and finally to destroy them, arises basically from the deep-held desire to insure for their masses and for their fellow men in other lands a much larger measure of economic freedom and security than the conventional capitalistic and imperialistic system has previously provided. . . .

"The aim of the majority of the American people . . . has been substantially that of the revolutionaries. . . . The private-enterprise system is faced with two alternatives. Either private decisions wall be made and enforced by public-spirited leaders in finance, industry, commerce, labor and agriculture, or public decisions will be made and enforced by the Government of the whole people for the whole people."

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