Civilization and Beyond by Scott Nearing
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Scott Nearing >> Civilization and Beyond
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Execution of this purpose involved a mass movement from the home
territory into that occupied by the "enemy". If the enemy resisted he
must be forced to do the will of the invaders. Instead of cooperating in
a joint effort to maintain and improve the general welfare, uniformed,
armed, expertly-led masses began beating up each other, until one side
gave in and cried "enough."
Plans for war had been drawn and redrawn for years, for decades.
Elaborate preparations had been made. Destructive weapons had been
designed and built. Transport had been provided, food stored. Defensive
preparations had also been made in the form of fortifications so placed
as to obstruct or prevent "the enemy" from crossing the "frontier".
When sport-lovers go from home for a day to play a competition in
another city or province, they go, play the game and then go back home
to continue the ordinary life routine. In the case of the project we are
now considering they left home in July, 1914 and returned months or
years later. Many never got back home because they were killed in battle
or died of wounds; many were "missing"; they disappeared.
If casualties in the 1914-18 war had been numbered in dozens, or scores
or even in hundreds, the communities from which they came could have
gone on without them--handicapped perhaps but not seriously disrupted.
But when they were numbered in thousands and tens of thousands it was a
quite different story. Actually, they were numbered in millions.
Mobilized to carry on the war were 42.2 million on the Allied side. On
the side of the Central Powers, 22.8 millions. The total: 65 million. 12
million of those mobilized were Russian, 11 million were Germans, 8.4
million were French, 8 million were from the British Empire. From
Austro-Hungary came 7.8 million, from Italy, 5.6 million. Turkey
furnished 2.9 million, Bulgaria 1.2 million; 4.4 million came from the
United States; 0.8 million from Japan. Lesser numbers came from other
countries.
Except for Spain, the largest contributions of war conscripts came from
the countries with the largest populations. With the exception of Spain,
all of the great powers of Europe provided the "cannon fodder"; the
human beings which Europe's "great powers" assembled to take part in
this profligate orgy of mass murder which went on for more than four
years, from July 1914 until November 1918.
Body count reports and "estimates" give the total number of human beings
murdered in the four year period as 8,538,315. (The legal definition of
"murder" is killing, not accidentally but with the intention of taking
life.)
This figure of 8.5 million murdered human adults, most of them in the
prime of life, refers to the murdered bodies that were recovered and
disposed of. In addition there were "prisoners" and "missing."
As the 1914-18 war proceeded it became less a series of combats between
human beings; more and more it was a war of machines such as
battleships, tanks, big guns and by war's end, of airplanes. Human
beings drew up the plans, made the blueprints, shifted the gears, pushed
the buttons. Their efforts were supplemented and multiplied by the
killing power of physics, chemistry and mechanics brought to the task of
wholesale murder, which produced 8.5 million dead human bodies.
"Prisoners and missing" accounted for 7,750,000 additional human beings.
Many of them were torn to shreds and smithereens by the gigantic
concentration of mechanical and explosive power, designed, constructed
and transported to the European battlefields for the express purpose of
carrying on this month-long and year-long collective endeavor to take as
much life as possible and destroy as much property as possible while war
declarations authorized and legalized mass murder and wholesale
destruction.
Not all victims of the hideous 1914-18 blood bath were killed. "Wound
casualties" numbered 12.8 million among the Allies; 8.4 million among
the boys, young men and adults mobilized by the Central Powers. Some of
the wounded were crippled for life. Some were less severely injured, but
all 22.2 million were more or less severely handicapped when they stood
up to face the rigors of civilian life at war's end. All were denied the
possibility of living normal, productive, creative, satisfying lives.
Wars are fought on battlefields. In the war of 1914-18 many of the
battlefields included villages, towns, cities. These complex
institutions, occupied by men, women and children were smashed and
burned wholesale.
The figures which I have used in listing the 1914-18 war losses were
compiled by the United States War Department. They are more or less
accurate, but they underline the fact that for years on end the centers
of western civilization concentrated their energies and devoted every
means at their disposal to cripple or destroy fellow human beings and
their habitations.
When we read of the destruction of the Roman Empire we console and
perhaps try to fool ourselves by saying that the immense network of
civilization which the Romans and their Greek associates spread across
Eurasia and Africa during the historical period that began about 700
B.C. was destroyed by hordes of migrating "barbarians." When we turn to
our own civilization, however, there are no barbarian hordes to take the
blame. The wholesale destruction which took place in Europe from 1914 to
1918 and which was repeated and multiplied during the wars of 1936-1945
was carried on officially by spokesmen for the most advanced, most
highly developed, most civilized countries of the western world.
We have been using the word "murder" to describe the wholesale slaughter
of Europeans by Europeans that took place from 1914 to 1918 and from
1936 to 1945. The word "murder" is inaccurate. The Europeans who carried
on the wholesale destruction and mass murder during the two most general
wars of modern times were committing murder in one sense. In quite
another sense they were engaged in collective suicide. Europeans were
blotting out the life and well-being of fellow Europeans. When the
process came to a temporary halt in 1945 every European participant in
the struggle was weaker in human potential and poorer in economic means
than they were when the war began.
Arnold Toynbee describes the entire episode as the "down grading" of
Europe. He might have added two words and reported "the down grading of
Europe by Europeans", as a glaring example of large scale, long
continued, deliberate self-destruction.
Fundamental social changes were bound to follow the revolutionary
technical transformations that took place during the world-wide
revolution of 1750-1970. Changes may be made in various ways. Some are
slow and relatively painless, particularly when they extend over
generations; other changes are so rapid that they are agonizingly
painful. Involuntary changes, made under outside pressure are almost
always painful. World-wide revolution, under the best of conditions,
promises to be painful. When it comes from alien sources, and is under
forced pressure, the costs are almost sure to be excessively high.
This brings us face to face with one of the most important problems
facing mankind at the present moment. Given the worldwide revolution of
the past two centuries, what changes--political, economic, sociological
and ideological--must be made to prepare the way for the new society and
shift the family from the old homestead to the new apartment with a
minimum of pain and a maximum of satisfaction?
CHAPTER TWELVE
TALKING PEACE AND WAGING WAR
Blatant contradictions disorganized human life after war's end in 1945.
In the crucial area of war and peace three groups were bidding for
attention: dedicated peace partisans (peacenicks); nationalist
enthusiasts waging wars of liberation; and massive semi-official and
official nationalistic groups busily preparing for the next big war.
Occasionally these groups joined hands on "hot" issues. Generally they
were far apart. Often they were in active opposition.
Dedicated peace advocates were an important factor in this post-war
period. They had been vocal and influential in July, 1914 immediately
before the outbreak of the first general war. They had continued to play
an active role between the first and second general wars. In the autumn
of 1972 the World Peace Council called together a peace assembly in
Moscow representing significant elements from 143 countries. The largest
single element in the World Peace Council was the Socialist bloc, headed
by the Soviet Union.
Peace advocates mobilized wide public support for the "no more war"
movement that developed during the closing months of the 1914-18 war;
for the Briand-Kellogg Treaty of 1928 which renounced war as an
instrument of policy; for the effort to secure general disarmament that
resulted in the General Disarmament Conference of 1933 and for the
United Nations Charter of 1945.
Official declarations in favor of disarmament and peace had been
paralleled by the organization of unofficial peace committees and
societies in western Europe, in the Americas and in the socialist
countries.
Peace efforts had been strengthened by the outbreak of local
wars--between India and Pakistan, between Israel and the Arab League; by
wars of independence and liberation in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, North
Africa.
Much of the public backing for the peacenicks came from student groups
in official and private high schools, colleges and universities.
Nationalist liberation movements were active in settled communities such
as Ireland and Canada's Province of Quebec. There were less established
movements in newly liberated restless ex-colonies and remaining colonies
of the chief European empires, of Japan and of the United States. The
widely advertised World Peace Council turned more and more from general
advocacy of peace, such as the Stockholm Peace Petition, to the support
of liberation movements among colonials and supressed minor
nationalities.
Preparations for another general war were expanded and intensified as
the competitive struggle for oil and other natural resources mounted. By
the end of the 1960's total arms expenditures of the chief powers were
running at $200 billion per year. In 1973 the total reached $225
billion.
There was much general talk about peace, but the most insistent note
sounded for a high level of spending on armaments. Britain's Prime
Minister Heath voiced a sentiment vigorously promulgated by every
representative of national security "British interests come first".
Confusion was heightened by the presence of men who faced all three
ways: talking peace, waging small wars and preparing for the next big
one. In February, 1974 in his State of the Union message to the U.S.
Congress, President Nixon spoke of "our goal of building a structure of
lasting peace in the world." At the same moment the Washington
administration was feeding the fires of war in South East Asia and
asking the United States Congress to increase 1975 U.S.A. defense
appropriations from $80 billion to $90 billion per year.
When war ended in 1945 there was a planet-wide sigh of relief and a
devout hope that after so many years of local and general wars, the time
had come for western man to take a long decisive step in the direction
of peace. The United Nations Charter expressed this hope to end the use
of war as an instrument of policy.
Since the period of general social relaxation usually known as the Dark
Ages was superceded by the multiple innovations of the Reformation, the
Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the scientific-technical developments
of the 1750-1970 Revolution, man the dreamer, inventor, designer,
planner, architect and engineer has modified many aspects of nature and
transformed the social environment.
Until the Reformation and the Renaissance, European ruling oligarchies
in territories along the Mediterranean and throughout western Europe
were able to perpetuate their privileges and preserve the life styles of
an agricultural-feudal society. Improvements in navigation and the
growth of trade, commerce and industry opened the way for the bourgeois
revolution with its rapid growth of cities and the parallel increase of
wealth, income, and living standards among the newly-enriched
businessmen and their associates and dependents.
Social changes in feudal Europe had been gradual. The dynamism implicit
in the bourgeois revolution escalated the rate of social change with
corresponding modifications in the pattern of European political,
economic and cultural institutions and practices.
In the early stages of the transformation the awareness of change was
limited to a minority of city dwellers. To the rural illiterate
majority, change was a closed book. A great social gulf separated the
feudal countryside from the growing centers of trade, commerce and
industry. Bourgeois life processes narrowed and gradually bridged the
gulf. Differences between city and country living persisted, but the
stark contrast between city abundance of goods and services and their
virtual absence from the common life of the countryside grew less and
less marked as the proportion of the total population living in the
countryside declined with the trek to cities and their suburbs.
Europeans living for the most part in a pre-civilized rural environment
passed through generations of illiterate unawareness of the social
process through which European life was expanding. The rapid extension
of industry and commerce after 1750 (the bourgeois revolution) completed
the transformation of a rural, semi-feudal west and central Europe into
a continent of town and city dwellers devoting their lives to pursuits
unknown to their immediate forebears. In this new Europe the countryside
played a decreasing role, as food supplies and raw materials came
increasingly from less developed parts of eastern Europe or from the
colonies which were opened up by the planet-wide trade and commerce
promoted by the aggressive expansion of the European empires.
Most Europeans, satisfied with the axiom "old fashions please me best"
were stand-patters in the early stages of this transformation. As the
conversion of Europe from feudal status to urban dynamism continued,
however, an ever larger part of the population became aware of the
change through which their society was passing. With the Renaissance and
the Enlightenment inert unawareness gave place to enthusiastic
propaganda in the writings of pamphleteers, essayists, poets, novelists
and social reformers who set the intellectual tone for the new society.
In a very real sense, the bourgeois Europe which emerged after 1750 was
something new under the sun. Large elements of the population,
previously engaged in producing and consuming the bare necessaries of
food, shelter and clothing were increasingly engaged in trades and
professions and rendering services unknown to the feudal countryside. As
the expansion of western civilization continued, entire European nations
like the Low Countries, England and Germany turned to trade, commerce,
industry, leaving only a dwindling minority engaged in agricultural
pursuits. The change was speeded by the revolution in science and
technology.
Changes in economic and social relations are paralleled by corresponding
alterations in the total way of living. Western civilization was, in its
entirety, a cultural departure from the pattern of any preceding
experiment with civilization because of the drastic changes that the
revolution in science and technology had introduced into human society.
Throughout the life-cycle of western civilization minor and major
alterations have been made in its structure and its function. Some of
the earlier political changes were part and parcel of the bourgeois
revolution. They included:
1. The abolition of absolute monarchies and hereditary aristocracies and
their replacement by limited monarchies and republics with various types
of representative and popular governments selected by ballot.
2. The replacement of personal tyrannies and autocracies by written
constitutions and laws passed by elected parliaments.
3. Replacement of war as the sport of kings and the chief instrument of
policy makers, by negotiation, diplomacy, and treaties which became the
core of existing "international law."
4. Arbitrary national sovereignty was supplemented by more or less
permanent alliances and by the formal international organizations such
as the Universal Postal Union, the World Court and the League of
Nations.
5. Regional Associations were organized; the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization; the Organization of American States and the Organization
for European Unity.
6. Disarmament conferences were held. General peace treaties were signed
like the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact of 1928 and the United Nations
Charter.
7. Two major efforts were made to establish a general confederation of
nations and empires--the League of Nations in 1919 and the United
Nations a quarter of a century later. Both the League of Nations and the
United Nations proved to be feeble and ineffectual efforts to bridge the
gulf between limited national sovereignty and planet-wide order and
peace. But they were tentative steps in the direction of a federation of
the world and they did mark a notable advance from the chaos and
conflict incident to the planet-wide expansion of the European empires
toward more stable economic and social conditions and more orderly
international relationships.
Paralleling these changes in the political life of western civilization
there have been a number of drastic economic reforms. One was the
abolition of chattel slavery. A second was the replacement of serfdom
and peonage by free labor receiving fixed wages and salaries. A third
change was the division of large feudal estates and other concentrated
landed properties into small units owned and operated by working
farmers. A fourth change was the establishment of free trade areas
within and among sovereign states. A fifth innovation was the transfer
of individually operated and family businesses into associations and
corporations with limited liability and widespread ownership by bond and
stockholders. Sixth, trade unions and consumers' cooperatives were
recognized and legalized. Seventh, legal provisions were made for social
security against accident, sickness, unemployment, old age. Minimum
incomes were guaranteed. Eighth, many steps were taken toward public or
social ownership of the means of production, including land and other
natural resources. Ninth, repeated governmental efforts were made to
deal with the inflation that attends prolonged exhausting wars. These
efforts included the regulation of credit and debt and the substitution
of new currencies for old ones that had been hopelessly devalued.
Political and economic changes in the life-patterns of western
civilization have been accompanied by far-reaching cultural reforms such
as the provision of free public education; the emancipation of women;
the provision of public recreation facilities; popularized culture
through information, the drama, music, literature, art; equalizing
opportunity and facilitating movement up and down the ladder of
recognition, approval, disapproval.
Political reforms of western civilization date from the Reformation and
the Renaissance. Economic reforms were speeded by the industrial
revolution. Together they are often described as the bourgeois
revolution, which resulted in the power shift from landlords,
ecclesiastics and knights in armor to businessmen, protected and
assisted by the state, the church, channels of information and
propaganda, the police and other armed forces. Cultural reforms
accompanied the reforms in politics and economics.
Underlying the changes and supplementing reforms were improvements in
the means of communication and transportation; the discovery and use of
new sources of energy and the changes in production and merchandizing
which have played so vital a role in the transition from a skimpy
economy of scarcity to an open-handed economy of abundance, extravagance
and conspicuous waste.
Through all of the political, economic and social changes made in the
structure and function of western civilization its basic activities have
remained unchanged. The nuclei of civilized life have been cities
concerned primarily with trade, commerce, industry, finance--planned,
organized and administered by businessmen, their professional and
technical associates and assistants. In practice, city centers of wealth
and power have expanded, using the military as the readiest means of
implementing policy. They have occupied and garrisoned the foreign
territory brought under their control. At home and abroad they have
exploited nature, men and other animals in their interest and for their
profit. The trading cities of medieval Europe, the emerging nations of
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the colonizing empires of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the industrial European
empires of the nineteenth century devoted their energies increasingly to
expanding into new territory, occupying and exploiting it, and fighting
the wars which pock-marked the ceaseless struggle for pelf and power. In
short, they continued to build up the institutions and to follow the
practices of civilized peoples. This has been true of the millennium
that began with the crusades and has hastened the rise of western
civilization and its extension to planet-wide proportions.
Similar conclusions can be drawn from the life stories of the score or
more of civilizations that rose, flourished and sank into inconsequence
during the previous five thousand years.
Each civilization has had its own habitat, its own life pattern. Each
has had its own languages, laws, traditions and customs. But despite
such local differences, all of the civilizations have had in common
those characteristics which justify their inclusion in the family of
civilizations.
Anyone who wishes to test the accuracy of these generalizations may be
satisfied by reading and observing the events that began with the wars
between Japan, China and Russia, the Spanish American War, the Boer War,
and the revolts in Cuba, China and the Philippines, all of which took
place between 1895 and 1905. The present century opened in a period of
critical struggle between empires, within empires and between imperial
centers and colonial dependencies. These preliminary skirmishes led up
to two general wars in 1914-1918 and 1936-1945, accompanied and followed
by a score of minor wars and a planet-wide rash of civil wars and wars
of independence waged by peoples of the erstwhile colonies.
Three johnnie-come-lately empires played star-roles in the drama:
Germany, the United States and Japan. The histories of all three
countries from 1870 to 1950 provide ample support for the contention
that the central theme of western civilization, as of its predecessors,
is a competitive struggle for wealth and power, aimed at expansion and
exploitation, using war and the threat of war as instruments of policy.
Even under the pressures generated by the innovations and the political
and economic changes of the current world wide revolution, the principle
objectives of civilization have remained constant: geographical
expansion; military, economic and cultural occupation; exploitation of
the newly acquired territories and peoples. Each civilization has built
up and maintained a professional military apparatus and used it as the
final arbiter in the determination of domestic and foreign policy.
The means used to achieve these objectives have varied from time to time
and from place to place. The basic pattern of civilization has
appeared, disappeared and reappeared.
Each civilization has made heroic efforts to reform itself when
submerged in a time of troubles that made its institutions and its
practices intolerable to those in power or those groups and classes
which had grown so desperate under its exploitation and oppression that
they preferred death to continuance of the established order.
Each civilization has made its contribution, retaining its essential
form while modifying its practices to meet the requirements of
particular situations. Western civilization is no exception to this
general rule.
Following the all but universal principle that "action and reaction tend
to be equal and opposite," subjugated, occupied peoples revolt against
"foreign" occupation and exploitation. Again western civilization is no
exception, as the movements for independence and self-determination that
followed the 1946 post-war collapse of the European empires clearly
showed.
Reaction against western civilization went beyond revolt to include the
rejection of the obsolete concepts, forms and practices inherent in
civilization. Rejection has been accompanied and followed by proposals
for replacing civilization by concepts, forms and practices more in
keeping with the social relations and situations resulting from the
current world revolution.
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