Читать книгу Blessed Peacemakers - Robin Jarrell - Страница 33

29 January 1866—30 December 1944

Betrayal, Imperialism, War

When war erupted in Europe in 1914, it was greeted with jingoistic enthusiasm by the populaces of all the belligerent nations. Even more remarkable was the equally enthusiastic response of most of the Christian leaders in Germany, France, England, Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. Each of them all but declared the conflict a holy war. Each of them piously assured their fellow countrymen that God was on their side and encouraged young men to enlist for God and country.

A few people refused to jump on the martial bandwagon, even though they were vilified—at least in the early years of the war, before its futility and waste of human life sunk in—by virtually everyone else. One of them was the French novelist Romain Rolland, Europe’s leading man of letters. Rolland, an ardent pacifist for most of his life, had already condemned warfare in his epic novel Jean-Christophe. But after actual war broke out, Rolland’s pacifism became unfashionable—and, according to many of his countrymen, even treasonous.

But Rolland was undeterred. In 1915 he published Above the Battle, a collection of essays in which he castigated the war as well as its supporters. The book infuriated nearly everyone who read it, not only because of its condemnation of the war but perhaps even more because it accused Christians of hypocrisy and governments of dissimulation.

To Christians who backed the war by saying that it “exalts the virtue of sacrifice,” Rolland responded by saying that they “seek consolation for having betrayed their Master’s orders.” Is there no better way to encourage “the devotion of one people than the devastation of another?” he asked. To national leaders who insisted that the war was a necessary defense against external enemies, Rolland answered: “The worst enemy of each nation is not without, but within its frontiers, and none has the courage to fight against it. It is the monster of a hundred heads, the monster named Imperialism, the will to pride and domination, which seeks to absorb all, or subdue all, or break all, and will suffer no greatness except itself.”

As Rolland saw it, religious hypocrisy and governmental dishonesty are each, separately, bad enough. But when they become allies they invent noble-sounding reasons for going to war that persuade a gullible public to take actions counter to its own good. The church and state alliance rarely suffers from its encouragement of warfare; the ordinary man who enlists to fight and the ordinary wife and children he leaves behind do.

In Above the Battle, Rolland called for the formation of an international tribunal that would hold the religious and secular authorities who pushed Europe into war responsible for their deed and would seek nonviolent resolutions of future international conflicts. Such a body was founded in 1919 as the League of Nations.