rity, able to unite all types of individuals, leaders and common people, to mobilize their strength, raise their morale and restore their confidence so that they would fight to preserve their own freedoms. General Eisenhower's background of simple, forthright religious devotion shines through the roughest exterior of responsibility, as when he knelt and prayed on the sands of Malta. And perhaps in this mood he addressed the Freedoms Foundation in New York, December 22, saying, with respect to American-Soviet friction, "If we are going to win this fight we are going to have to go back to the fundamentals. If we can be strong enough to sell ourselves this idea at home, we can win this ideological war. . . . It is my conviction that the great struggle of our times is one of the spirit. It is a struggle for the hearts and souls of men-not merely for property, or even merely for power. "It is a contest for the beliefs, the convictions, the very inner-most soul of the human being." During World War II in England, it is often said that he won the hearts of the British soldiers as he did his own men. One Britisher is quoted saying. "We all call him Ike, but there's a lot of Abe in him." NEW OUTLOOK Your Responsibility For Peace one or I WISH TO begin by recounting the thread of a one act play which I saw a few years ago. It was written by a young Hungarian, and was entitled, "After World War III." There were three survivors of that war. They had come together to effect a peace settlement. There were two continents for each of them, so the problem seemed not too difficult. One item remained unscathed after the use of the absolutely absolute weapon. This was a supply of cigarettes, enough to last the world for twenty million years. But there were only eight matches, and one eight. man had all So they began to Tempers rose; there were mutargue. terings of "invoking the veto, etc." Finally one man asked for a brief recess. He left the stage. One of the others said, "Don't you think we should send him a strongly worded note?" The other replied, "No, the element of surprize is essential." So he left the stage and soon returned with a bloody knife. As he wiped the blood from his knife, he said, "Now let me have my four matches." The other said, "Four? I shall keep five and give you James Bristol three." "But it was I who struck the fatal blow," said the one. “Ah, but the strategy was mine," said the other. Thereupon the man with the knife lunged toward the other. As he did so, the second one drew his revolver and fired. As the second to the last man in the world lay dying, he gasped, "Do you realize what you have done?" The other replied, "Oh sure. I have finally secured eternal peace for all mankind." Then the curtain descends. This bitterly cynical play seems to me to be grimly prophetic if we attempt to keep the peace by building more armaments. It touches the heart of our trouble, reveals the bitter, biting cynicism which we meet when we talk of peace, the complete roadblocks which we encounter. When people are convinced that peace is impossible, we cannot move in the direction of peace. Is the feeling of hopelessness due to the fact that we have had Nazis in the world; that we now have Communists, bloody, barbaric, who will not listen to reason? I do not think that is the reason. The people who are making the world so cynical are the good people, church-going people, hosts of Christians, who say, "We believe in the way of peace, in the way of the Cross"; believe it, say it, sing it, and without recanting, they do all the hideous things, stopping at nothing. They drop bombs anywhere, on cities, hospitals, churches, all the time believing in another way of life. They talk brotherhood to their children, teach them the little rhyme : "Red and yellow, black and white, They are precious in His sight." Yet they express this in a Jim Crow society. Recently an adviser of the Indian Delegation at the UN told of what was happening in the Belgian Congo. There they are sorting out the natives on the basis of their muscular strength to send them to work in the uranium mines. The one thing that will make peace possible is to close in this gulf between ideals and conduct. It is not enough to say that we must practice what we believe. We do the things we believe in, really. We live by the almighty dollar, by guns, by a privileged society. We believe in these things, or we would not accept them. We must place our confidence in something else if we really want peace. We must trust the way of forgiveness, even of our enemies, the way of love and brotherhood. Let me spell out the essentials of this other way. It includes four basic convictions: man 1-We believe in the worth and dignity of human beings, that there is that of God in every and woman, however diabolical or bestial their behavior. This is a revolutionary conviction. It does not mean that we become naive, assume that everybody is really good; but it does mean that there is a spark that can be lighted in each, whatever his behavior may have been. This belief carries with it the conviction that man is more precious than money, that the human being is more precious than property. 2-We believe in the power of love. Most of us seem to believe that power comes through mastery over people; but Jesus taught that power lies in serving. We have to abandon our desire to shake goodness into people, to eliminate those who are evil. We have to transform these anti-social people through the love and sacrifice of our own lives. That wonderful woman who was with Gandhi in prison, answered this question. Some one suggested that working with the British was An Address delivered last July at the Institute of International Relations at Whittier College, Whittier, California. Dr. Bristol, Dean of the 1952 Institute, is Director, Peace Education Program, AFSC, Philadel phia. comparatively easy, but that it wasn't possible to work with the Communists because they are basically cruel and ruthless. She replied that the British had been ruthless too; that they had turned their machine guns on helpless women and children. Suppose we grant that the Communists are worse than the British; that the power of love cannot be effective with them. This would really be saying, “Ah, God has at last met his match. Love won't work here. God needs help, battleships, bombs." 3-We believe it is more important to do good ourselves than to try to overcome evil in others. This is hard, for we are convinced that the fault lies with some one else, with some other nation, that we must shake some of our righteousness into them. If we overcome evil within ourselves, within our own nation, there will be a contagious quality emanating from us which will elicit a response. 4-We believe this is a moral universe, and that peace must mean justice for every one, everywhere. There can be no peace while millions are starving, and there shouldn't he. We must have a world of justice in which peace will eventuate just as naturally as tyranny and injustice now result in war. The minimum program for bringing about these conditions for peace includes the following six points. 1-We must make democracy work, particularly in the fields of economic and race relations. 2-We must support the "authentic revolution" which is taking place throughout the world, and which would continue to take place if there were not a Communist alive. 3-We must develop a program of technical assistance for differently developed countries, and this assistance must be offered in the right spirit. Three summers ago, I was with a work camp in Jamaica. I was with a man from British Honduras, another from Jamaica, one from Haiti. We were all dirty and all browned either by the sun or natural pigmentation. A very good lady came to talk to us, a Protestant Christian woman, who was concerned about our condition. She said in part, "I am sure that you are not so bad as you seem. Remember what your condition was like fifty years ago; think of the enormous strides that you have made since then." Now that is not the way we approach people to whom we are offering help of any kind. 4-We must support the UN as a peace making body, not as a war making body, nor as the tool or front for the foreign policy of the United States. NEW OUTLOOK 5-We must preserve our civil liberties, freedom of speech, of thought, of discussion. 6-We must recognize the need for disarmament. In connection with the last point, General Vandenburg said not long ago that if war broke out with Russia, nine out of ten of our bombing planes would get through and strike their targets and the Russians could do nothing to stop them. Then he added, nine out of ten of the Russian planes would get through and hit their targets, and we could do nothing at all to stop them. So long as we rely on armaments, the threat of war hangs over us. "We dare not be hit first", we say; so we have developed such phrases as "anticipatory retaliation", striking back for what we think the enemy might do to us. There was Walter Reuther's thrilling plan for peace, a program for the next hundred years; yet shortly after proposing that plan. he telegraphed President Truman that tanks would roll off the assembly line. The wonderful plan has not left the ground, but the tanks are rolling off the assembly lines. Psychologically, it would seem impossible to move in two opposite directions at the same time. Yet that is what we seem to be doing. We are determined not to have a police state like the Russians, but have FBI, bombs, armies etc. to protect us from the loss of freedom; then in order to protect the bombs, we take away our liberties and our freedom. I met a man in London who had just returned from Africa where he had been a missionary. He said that on one of his trips home, he had decided that he wanted to render some real service to these people; so he took them a sun dial; they learned to tell time by it, and cherished it above all other possessions. In fact, they cherished it so much they decided they had better build a shelter over it to protect it from the weather. So we in our search for peace, build armaments; in preserving our freedom, we deny it; in our faith in the "authentic revolution," we prevent it. There are two approaches to this question of disarmament: one universal disarmament, the other unilateral. We are suspicious of the first method, because we don't trust our enemies, not because they are so different from us, but because they are so like us. The Russians come out with a disarmament proposal, and then they say, "Of course the Americans will never accept it, so we had better get ready to wipe them off the face of the earth". Then the Western powers develop a disarmament program, and they say. "Of course those Russians won't accept it; so we had better get NEW OUTLOOK |