Читать книгу The Common Sense of War and Peace - H.G. Wells - Страница 6

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AND here I come to something still more vital and fundamental, about which I think all men of good will should come to a common understanding. Either you have to declare that what I am now going to say is misstated or altogether untrue-or I do not see how you can avoid making it the basis of your interpretation of our difficulties. I do not apologise for stressing this, because matters are too urgent for genteel understatement.

I encounter an extraordinary inability on the part of earnest, peace-seeking people to incorporate the realities I am putting before you with their always amiable and earnest proposals. I do all I can to keep those ideas before them. I write my propositions in capital letters. I state the truth gently but persistently, and they smile and disregard it; I put the idea to them insultingly; they seem pained by my manners and they pass on as though nothing had been said. I cannot persuade them to treat these fundamental verities as primary facts in our world problem.

Their resistance to these ideas is, I think, due mainly to the way they have read and been taught history. Old-fashioned history is saturated with the idea that there is nothing new under the sun, kings and empires come and go but there are always more kings and empires, and you cannot change human nature. But Science disentangled our minds from that dull belief in routine and assures us that under the sun every morning the day is a new day. People are so saturated in the old-fashioned conception of history that they are impervious to the recognition of any fundamental change in human conditions. Why, I ask, will people go on discussing the riddle of peace upon an historical basis, in historical terms, that are superseded?

The bedrock realities upon which all our ideas of social and political policy must now rest, are, I assert, as follows:

A complete biological revolution has happened to our species. There has, in the past half century, been a complete reversal of the conditions under which human beings have to live. A tremendous development of invention and discovery has swung us round, in less than half a century, from need to possible abundance, and from remoteness to unavoidable contact.

One most obvious result of that development has been to bring all the people of the world together upon each other's doorsteps. This is spoken of generally as the abolition of distance, and this abolition of distance is something that has made every national, sovereign state in the world too small for contemporary conditions. Let me repeat these words. They are too small for contemporary conditions. But there they are!

There has also been an incredible increase in power and productive capacity. It is now a simple statement of fact that we could have a world of universal prosperity, if we had peace. That was not true half a century ago.

There has been a tremendous release of energy, and the present political, social and economic organisation of the world gives no scope for its utilisation except in destructive violence and war.

* And here I put a star to direct your attention to what is surely the very central factor in our present complications. It is not only mechanical energy that is set free, but human energy of a most urgently restless type, in the form of great numbers of restless unemployed young men. These supply the driving force for the Hooligan, the Nazi, Fascist, Communist, the I.R.A. movements that are everywhere tearing our social order to pieces; and until we find a way out of this incessant revolt and conflict that will turn the human energy into creative channels, matters will go on from bad to worse, war will go on from bad to worse.

We have to adapt ourselves to these new conditions, or, like every other species which does not adapt itself to new conditions, we have to perish. Now here I have stated what I believe to be the gist of the present human problem. For consider: what we call war to-day is not war as history has known it. It is a different thing. Its destructive effect is immeasurably greater. It is now a truism that if we do not end war, war will end us.

Nor is the competitive hunt for profit and dividends the same tolerable process that it was in the past. I find few people rea1ise how much of our business exploitation to-day is a wastage of resources that can never be replaced. Few people realise the destructiveness of business competition nowadays. Because of this change in our conditions.

We are not only burning up our coal and our oil, and sweating and degrading the workers who are employed for that service, but we are rapidly stripping our planet of its forests, and so turning a wholesome, mitigated rainfall into an alternation of droughts and soil-destroying torrents. We are exterminating hundreds of precious and interesting species that can never be replaced, whales, elephants, penguins, seals and the like, and we are turning millions of acres of grassland into dusty deserts. All this is ascertainable fact. Unregulated competitive business, because of the new teeth and claws invention and discovery have given it, is doing this.

We have power and more power, and everywhere it is being used to knock our world to pieces. That is why it is now urgent to replace not only our Sovereign States, but also our competitive and wasteful economic exploitations, by a more highly organised method-or perish. To achieve a progressive world organisation as speedily as possible, before extinction overtakes us, is, therefore, the primary problem, about which Mr. Everyman-you and I-has to get his mind clear now. Everything rests on our ability to solve that. Unless we are clear about that, not merely world peace, but the survival of our species in its present form, is just futile aspiration.

We are fighting now face to face with an enemy whose one passionate aim is manifestly destructive conquest; we are ruled by governments that betray us by their passionate desire to keep on the propitiatory defensive. The plain truth is that we cannot stay where we are. We have to go on or succumb. We have to achieve the reorganisation of the world as one continually progressive, political, social, economic and educational community, and embark upon the realisation of the abundance and ever-fuller life for man that is now attainable. We have to do that because there is no other road except the road to destruction.

Am I right in that? Or have you some other end in mind about which I know nothing? And if so will you tell me what that end is? Can you set up the universal peace and plenty that is now clearly possible on earth, in any other way?

Let me ask you now what the setting-up of one sovereign peace in the world and one general economic control, means. It means World Revolution.. I ask you not to be afraid of the word "Revolution." Speak English. Don't think of Revolution as an affair of street barricades, the heads of beautiful ladies on pikes, and tumbrils going to the guillotine. Our "Glorious Revolution" in 1688 had none of these ingredients, and the Revolution that established the Hanoverian Succession was practically bloodless. You can have a Revolution without massacre or violence. But anyhow, I submit that organised world peace and welfare mean such a Revolution in human life as will dwarf all previous revolutions to comparative insignificance. It means such a universal scrapping of time-honoured institutions as mankind has never faced hitherto. Consider: Man has always been a war-making animal. Our sovereign national governments arose as war-making organisations, and now we are under the necessity of setting up one single Pax in the world. That is a quite fundamental change of front for humanity. How can we do that without either completely amalgamating all existing governments, so far at least as their power to make war goes, or else reducing them to the position of ceremonial memories like Halloween or the Ancient Society of Druids and setting up a common control over them? I put it to you with the utmost deference that anyone who runs about now demanding permanent world peace and who is not prepared to scrap the sovereignty of his own government and amalgamate the general control of political and economic life into a world-wide system, is either muddle-headed or insincere or both. This means the end of the British Empire quite as much as the end of German Imperialism. You have to face it. In other words, I am saying that if we really want World Peace and World Welfare, that means we are World Revolutionary Socialists, and for my own part I cannot see how we can escape the chain of reasoning along which I have been led to this conclusion.