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| From the archives of The Memory Hole |
Antiwar Propaganda: Word of Encouragement to the Radical Press
The following comment by James J. Martin was published in a 1958 issue of Liberation.
The Happy Warriors
by James J. Martin
I want to tell you how delighted I was on seeing the articles by Jeannette Rankin and Edmund Wilson in the March issue...It is material I would never expect to see in the liberal weeklies or The Reporter or The New Leader, and only an outside chance that it might show up in Anvil or Dissent. But this is what is going to have to be done and in increasing volume if we are going to make any headway against the permanent establishment of a form of military socialism in this country which will be our No. 1 export to the rest of the planet.
...As I see it, the main task of any anti-militarist or pacifist work today must be that of thoroughly debunking World War II. Unless we do, there is little hope of making headway against the new war brewing. The liberal left quarterbacked the last big blood bath, after swallowing whole two decades of Russian foreign policy under the delusion that it was international Marxist socialism. They were so completely bamboozled that a goodly part of it remains so to this day. A substantial part of the anti-war liberal left of 1939-41 is now deeply entrenched in the rightist column; vide Frank Hanighen, of Human Events, John T. Flynn, James Burnham and several others. A sizeable bunch of others lie along-side: Sidney Hook, William Henry Chamberlin, John Chamberlain, and a battalion of others I can name. But these liberals turned right have done more to debunk World War II than all the liberal flock remained loyal combined; this latter have not been able to divest themselves of their idolatrous relationship to Franklin Roosevelt, and may never do so, as the efforts to canonize him today seem to indicate. But I propose that unless a divorce from the liberal left delusion on the war takes place on a wide front, publications like Liberation and Peace News and the Pendle Hill pamphlets might just as well be printed in invisible ink and the whole apparatus of anti-war societies might as well convert to agencies advertising the desirable qualities of lead underclothing. They do not have to divest themselves of any aspirations to domestic reform to do so; as Edmund Wilson so honestly points out, going to war was a treacherous betrayal of domestic reform in this country, and not a single piece of significant reform legislation has been added to this country's statutes for over twenty years. The reform movement has been paralyzed this long because of the freezing of itself to the political chariot of Mr. Roosevelt's group, and the necessity of defending the imbecilities and idiocies of the whole war drive and its aftermath. The route chosen was that of dissolving the domestic problem into a world problem, perhaps under the delusion that if it was not capable of solution on a small scale, it would be on a larger one...
It takes two to make a fight or a war, and the opponents of Hitler and Mussolini are just as responsible for what happened as they are. Unless a serious attempt is made to establish that they had some virtue on their side, that their advances and those of Japan in the interest of peace were at least partially genuine, and that the pious Anglo-Franco-Russo-American protestations had large elements of dishonesty, then it is no use trying to argue today that we can have peace today by attempting negotiation in good faith. If it was not possible then, it is certainly not possible today.
But demolishing this two-valued good-guy, bad-guy stuff may take a long while. Since we spent so long establishing it, it may take as long disentangling ourselves from it. But it must be done sometime by somebody, or we might as well forget the hope of preventing a planetary barbecue...
The foreign policy of the whole world has been based on maintaining to the letter the pipe dreams which were dispensed to the world publics as the reason for the 1939 and 1941 apocalypses. The world foreign offices just want to start at different times and stress different aspects. The "free world" still keeps a few Nazis locked up, still supports histories which yell with pride of our days of wedlock with the Reds, but insist that knavery was a late season defection in the line of their gallant East European ally. The Communists chomp their jaws over the dirty Germans, yet strive mightily to climb into bed with them now and incorporate all manner of ex-Nazis in the new Red order, and use them by the gross in their projects. We pushed a race war against the Japanese, reduced them on the scale of evolution below insects, and since 1946-7-8-9 have been glamorizing and humanizing them via all manner of public media, with great profit. We demolished both Germany and Japan for their threat to Russia, and now beseech them to put on their bucklers etc., again and go forth to do once more the things which we just hanged a whole passel of their late leaders for doing in the recent past.
The group which can do the revisionist job shivers in the corner and remains as quiet as an oyster, and smears all attempts to do so as hate-Roosevelt stuff. In a century they may wake up to the fact that they may have a few reasons for doings so. No "reactionary" ever strangled reform in America as effectively as FDR and his war machine. Their basic legacy has been adopted and pushed a little further by the inheritors since 1945. But I want to de-emphasize that there is absolutely no hope for the in the future as long as he clings to the noble people's war tripe of World War II. Either this one was no better, and maybe worse, than, the others, or those in the future are not only reasonable but desirable.
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