THE NEXT CONFLICT

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 155, 29 December 1938, Page 16

THE NEXT CONFLICT

BERNARD SHAW'S VIEW

EFFECT ON CIVILISATION

PACIFIST OUTLOOK

What about this danger of war which is making us all shake in our shoes at present? writes George Bernard Shaw in the "Winnipeg Free Press."

I am like yourself: I have an intense objection to having my house demolished by a bomb from an aeroplane and myself killed in a horribly painful way by mustard gas. I have visions of streets heaped with mangled corpses in which children wander crying for their parents and babies gasp and struggle in the clutches of dead mothers.

This is what war means nowadays. This is what is happening in Spain and in China; and it may happen to us tomorrow. And the worst of it is that it doesn't matter two straws to Nature, the mother of us all, how dreadfully we misbehave ourselves in this way, or in what hideous agonies we die.

Nature can produce children enough to make good any extremity of slaughter of which we are capable London may be destroyed; Paris, Rome. Berlin, Vienna, Constantinople may be laid in smoking ruins and the last shrieks of their women and children give way to the silence of death. No matter: Mother Nature will replace the dead. She is doing so every day. The new men will replace the old cities and perhaps come to the same miserable end. To Nature the life of an empire is no more than the life of a swarm of bees; and a thousand years are of less account than half an hour to you and me. "THERE ARE PLENTY MORE." Now the moral of that is that we must not depend on any sort of Divine providence to put a stop to war. Providence says "kill one another, my children; kill one another to your heart's content. There are plenty more where you came from." Consequently, if we want war to stop we must all become conscientious objectors. I dislike war not only for its dangers and inconveniences, but because of the loss of so many young men any of whom may be a Newton or an Einstein, . a Beethoven, a Michelangelo, a Shakespeare, or even a Shaw. Or he may be what is of much more immediate importance, a good baker or a good weaver o;r builder. If you think of a pair of combatants ar a heroic British St. Michael bring the wrath of God upon a German Lucifer, then you may exult in the victory of St. Michael if he kills Lucifer, or burn to avenge him if his dastardly adversary mows him down with a machine-gun before he can get to grips with him. In that way you can get intense emotional experience from war. But suppose you think of the two boys as they probably are; say, two good carpenters, taken away from their proper work to kill one another. That is how I see it; and the result is that whichever of them is killed, the loss is as great to Europe and to me. ... PUGNACITY AND COURAGE. I am not forgetting the gratification that, war gives to the instincts of pugnacity and admiration of courage that are so strong in women. In the old days when people lived in forests like gorillas or in caves like bears, a woman's life and that of her children depended on the courage and killing capacity of her mate. To this day in Abyssinia a Danakil woman will not marry a man. until he proves that he has at least four homicides to his credit. ... On the outbreak of war civilised young women rush about handing white feathers to all young men who are not in uniform. This, like other survivals from savagery, is quite natural; but our women must remember that courage and pugnacity are not much use against machineguns and poison gas. The pacifist movement against war takes a? its charter the ancient document called the Sermon on the Mount, which is almost as often quoted as the speech which Abraham Lincoln is supposed to have delivered on the battlefield of Gettysburg. The sermon is a very moving exhortation; and it gives you one first-rate tip, which is, to do good to those who despitefully use you and persecute you. L who am a much-hated man, have been doing that all my life; and I can assure you there is no better fun, whereas revenge and resentment make life miserable and the avenger hateful But such a command as "love one another," as I see it, is a stupid refusal to accept the facts of human nature. Pray, are we lovable animals. . . . Have you an all-embracing affection for Messieurs Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, and the Mikado? I do not love all these gentlemen, and even if I did, how could I offer myself to them as a delightfully lovable person? ' NO RIGHT TO DO INJURY, 1 find I cannot like myself without so many reservations that I look forward to my death—which cannot now be far off—as a good riddance. It you tell me to be perfect as my Father in Heaven is perfect, I can only say that I wish I could. That would be more polite than telling you to go to the zoo and advise the monkeys to become men and the cockatoos to become birds of paradise. The lesson we have to learn is that our dislike for certain persons, or even for the whole human race, does not give us any right to injure our fellow-creatures, however odious they may be. As I see it, the social rule must be live and let live. And as people who break this rule persistently must be liquidated, even pacifists and non-resisters must draw a line accordingly. When I was a young man in the latter half of the nineteenth century, war did not greatly concern me personally, because I lived on m island far away from the battlefields and because the fighting was done by soldiers who had taken up that trade in preference to any other open to them. Now that aeroplanes bring battle to my house-top and Governments take me from my proper work and force me to be a soldier whether I like it or not, I can no longer regard war as something that does not concern me personally. You may say that I am too old to be a soldier; but if nations had any sense they would begin a war by sending their oldest men into the trenches. They would not risk the lives of their young men except in the last extremity. THE OLD SHOULD FIGHT. In 1914 it was a dreadful thing to see regiments of lads singing "Tipperary" on their way to the slaughter-house; but the spectacle of regiments of octogenarians hobbling to the front and waving their walking-sticks and piping up to the tune of "We'll never come back no more, boys; we'll never come back no more," wouldn't you cheer that enthusiastically? I should. But let me not forget that I shall be one oi! them.

It has become a commonplace to say that another great war would destroy civilisation. Well, that will depend on what sort of war it will be. If it is to be like the 1914 war, a war of nations.

it will certainly not make an end of civilisation. It may conceivably knock the British Empire to bits and leave England as primitive as she was when Julius Caesar landed in Kent. Perhaps we should be happier then; for we are still savages at heart, and wear our thin uniform of civilisation very awkwardly. But anyhow, tK?re will be two refuges left for civilisation. No national attack can seriously hurt the two great federated republics of North America and Soviet Russia. They are too Dig, the distances are too great. But what could destroy them is civil war; wars like the wars of religion in the seventeenth century. And this is exactly the sort of war that is threatening us today. It has already begun in Spain, where all the big capitalist Powers are taking a hand to support General Franco through an intervention committee which they think it more decent to call a Non-intervention Committee. This is only,,a skirmish in the class war, the war 'between the two religions of Capitalism and Communism which is i bottom a war between labour and land-owning. WE COULD ESCAPE IT. We could escape that war by putting our horse in order as Russia has done, without any of the fighting and killmfiand waste and damage that the Efcflrsians went through; but we don't seem to want to. I have shown exactly how; it can be done, and in fact how it must, be done, but nobody takes any notice.-1 Foolish people in easy circumstances flatter themselves that there is no such thing as the class war in the British Empire, where we are all far too respectful and too well protected by our parliamentary system to have any vulgar unpleasantness of that sort. They deceive themselves. We are up to the neck in the class war. What is it that is wrong with our present way of doing things? It is not that we cannot produce enough goods. Our machines turn out as much work in an hour as ten thousand hand-workers used to. But it is not enough for a country to produce goods; it must distribute them as well; and this is where our system) breaks down hopelessly. Everybody ought to be living quite comfortably by working four or five hours a day with two Sundays in the week, yet millions of labourers die in the workhouse or on the dole after sixty years of hard toil so that a few babies may have hundreds of thousands a year before they are born. LEARNING FROM HISTORY. As I see it this is not a thing to be argued about or to take sides about. It is stupid and wicked on the face of it- and it will smash us and our civilisation if we do not resolutely reform it. Yet we do nothing but keep up a perpetual ballyhoo about Bolshevism, Communism, Liberty, Dictators, Democracy, and all the rest of it. The very first lesson of the new history dug up for us by Professor Flinders Petrie during my lifetime is that no civilisation, however splendid and illustrious, can stand up against the social resentment and class conflicts which follow a silly mis-distribu-tion of wealth, labour, and leisure. And it is the one history lesson that is never taught in schools, thus confirming the saying of the German philosopher Hegel- "We learn from history that men never learn anything from history."

Think it over,