The Evening Star (November 1, 1946)
On the Record…
Problems in semantics endanger lasting peace
By Dorothy Thompson
To pursue the previous argument regarding the difference between what is “sinful” and what is “unlawful”:
We start with the proposition: “War is sinful.” We then modify it with a qualifying adjective: “Aggressive war is sinful.”
I worry about that qualifying adjective. For to translate the simple proposition, “war is sinful” into “war is unlawful,” is much simpler.
Regarding Germany and Italy, we have said, “aggressive war is sinful, and in the judgment of the tribunal of those aggressed against, is unlawful, therefore we shall hang your national leaders and disarm you both forever.”
Thus, in the case of the Axis powers, all war has become unlawful, whether of defense or aggression, since hence forward these nations shall not possess means for waging any war.
If we wanted to generalize that judgment, we would therefore propose: War being sinful, it shall be made unlawful and no sovereign state may hereafter possess the means of waging war, namely armies, navies, armed airplanes, V-bombs, or any weapons, except such as are in common use for protecting the law within states.
We should then create some supranational (not international) instrument, not to enforce peace, but to enforce disarmament. This, of course, would define aggression. The aggressor would be anyone who re-armed or started to rearm. Since there would obviously have to be a supranational police force, no state would have a chance to commit aggression. This is the implication in the Baruch report, although the Baruch report leaves many loopholes.
I do not see how “aggressive” war can be defined or controlled apart from all war. It has always been easy to stir up border incidents as an excuse for quelling nonexistent or provoked aggressions. In contemporary times, states have stirred up internal dissensions within other states to capture their governments by organizing political factions and, having overthrown the government in favor of a Trojan horse cabinet, have annexed the state and occupied it with armies, as the result of an “invitation.”
To my mind, the most dangerous judgment in the Nuernberg trial was the acquittal of Von Papen, the engineer of the Austrian coup d’etat, and on the ground that his sort of conquest is not a crime under the Nuernberg indictments. On that argument, had the Austrians resisted, they would have been the aggressors!
Now, being unable or unwilling to define what is a sinful act and thereby to translate what is sinful into what is unlawful, we are creating a category in so called crimes which do not consist in what anyone or any state has committed, but in being what they are.
Spain, under Franco, is accused of menacing the peace, not because Franco Spain has waged international war, but, because it was friendly to the enemy, within non-belligerent limits, during the late war, and is a Fascist state. Its crime is to be Fascist.
When we move into such an area of judgment, we are moving away from any possible agreement in definition of international crimes.
A Russian writer recently defined as a Fascist “everyone who is opposed to the Soviet Union.” An American or British definition of fascism would include dictatorship – but not a Russian definition, which would include any dictatorship except of the proletariat. In Russian definitions, there is a whole range of fascisms: “Social-fascism,” “crypto-fascism,” “neo-fascism,” “clerical fascism.” And under one or another head come the social democratic parties, all parties that refuse fusion with Communists, all capitalists and monarchists, the Vatican and the Catholic church, the Zionists, and the British Empire. It seems that peace, in the Soviet and Communist view, is to achieve the liquidation of all these manifestations of “fascism,” with the political and armed support of the USSR.
Citizens of western powers are in danger of following the Soviet lead, and of defining as “aggressive” and “menacing to the peace” any Communist state. This is partly a natural reaction of alarm caused by specific acts. But I do not see how communism as such can be defined as a crime any more than fascism or any of its hyphenates can be.
Law must be specific; any law that attempts to judge and condemn people for what they are. not for what they have done, is lynch law, that is to say no law, and ends up by justifying the most atrocious deeds on the grounds that the victim is ipso facto an enemy of the people.
Communist practices can be prohibited within the domestic jurisdiction of states, but no law can prosecute a belief as such. Specific international practices can be forbidden by Fascist, democratic and Communist states, equally, but you cannot prosecute a person for believing in anything, because to prosecute a thought and not a deed is not prosecution but persecution.
If we don’t set our minds straight on a few matters of this sort, we shall be in for a most horrible age when everybody will be murdering everyone else, all in the name of “lasting peace.”