Thinking While We Fight

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 119, 3 October 1941, Page 4

Thinking While We Fight

VERY day now till the war ends more and more people will be asking how to preserve peace when it comes. All agree about some of the necessities-more justice, better security against sickness and unemployment, healthier and more dignified living conditions, and so on; and because the world will be very tired, very sick, and very sad before the fighting ceases, there is a growing fear that many of the causes of war will remain unless we commit ourselves irrevocably to their removal. So it is both healthy and encouraging that the number of questioners and protesters continues to grow. It would however be a very disturbing sign if, while the fighting is at its height, we began quarrelling about our plans, or spent too much time formulating them. Plans, as distinct from principles, can be exceedingly dangerous. To begin with, they have a habit of going wrong. However sincere we may be when we draw them up, we may have to modify them, and the longer we have nursed them the more shaken we must be when they miscarry. And in the second place, the more precise a plan is-we are speaking of course of plans for new worlds-the fewer unqualified supporters it will have unless it is so simple that it is not a plan at all. What gives Mr. Churchill his power as a leader is the fact that he stgnds so firmly for those things on which we all agree, and avoids so shrewdly raising issues that divide us. His principles are clear enough, and his aims, but the only. plan he allows himself at- present is the destruction of the enemy. This, of course, does not mean that we. should not think while we fight. We should, and even if we should not, we would. It is not possible, and only a slave nation would think it desirable, to go through all the anguish of a long and bitter war without asking why we have come to this, where we are going, what we can do to save our children from the same black misery. But thinking as we fight is one thing, thinking instead of fighting another. The first is health, the second lunacy.