The League of Peace

Here’s an article that was written in 1919, shortly after the close of “The Great War,” by the maternal grandfather of one of my best friends.

Obviously, it’s a bit off-topic here at 2GreenEnergy, as no one ever dreamed that the world would need clean energy in the early 20th Century.  In fact, 1919 found the world right in the middle of the era that made the great oil men and the other robber barons rich beyond belief.  But the piece deals with a subject that I have to think will interest a great number of readers: war — as well as the “League of Peace,” one of the early ideas that ultimately morphed into the United Nations. 

In the aftermath of the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I, as information leaked to the general population about the ever-advancing “art of war,” in this case, the widespread use of poison gas on both sides, as well as torture, the question was raised: “Does each sovereign nation need to develop and maintain its own defenses against these horrors, or can the ‘civilized’ nations somehow come together to create some sort of network of mutual defense?”

I love this paragraph:

“Some time ago it was said that war would not be tolerated if it broke as many dishes in aristocratic houses as it killed men at the front. Well, war has suddenly reached and passed the crockery-breaking stage. There are now few places in the world where any one’s dishes or any one’s life is safe if wars of the modern type must go on. And the mere force of moral opinion has not been very successful in preventing war. During the last twenty years the world has been at peace for only about half the time. There have in that period been seven wars. The time seems ripe for taking a radical step forward.”

To me, the line: “The mere force of moral opinion has not been very successful in preventing war” is sadly comical. If you live in the U.S., as a shade over 55% of our readers do, you may have noticed that nowadays there is essentially no moral opinion “preventing,” or even opposing war.  Our leaders here just tell the people what they need to hear, and then send the American military, replete with technology that the article’s author couldn’t have possibly fathomed, to the next war zone. It’s who we are; it’s in our collective DNA.  If a few thousand of our kids come back in bags, it’s a cost of doing business.

We’re told that God smiles on our endeavors; I’m not so sure.

Again, our fate will be decided on the basis of the number of voices that come together and say: No More.