CABBAGES AND KINGS

I'm not writing this column because I want to show off any fancy literary style or any profound historical knowledge. Nor do I have a new angle in the well-worn intervention-non-intervention debate that I want to get out of my system. That, it doesn't seem to me is of real importance. I am writing it because I am mad, as most everyone else is mad, that we should be doing something that clearly doesn't help us achieve our aims, and that we clearly don't want to do. I am mad because we are blind, because we don't realize the hopeless contradictions between our ideals and our action's because we don't test our beliefs on the basis of things we know, because we are apathetic and helpless when we should be clear minded and strong.

What are our aims, how do we determine them? I determine mine very simply- by desires: desire to live, desire to wake up in the morning and feel that the day is mine to spend, desire to know the million things I see. I think it is the same with every one. To me this is all I need to know of Christianity. Every thing I see in the world is an expression of the desire of people to live. For us this idea is expressed in the three great heritages of liberty, legalism, and Christianity. For others it is nationalism or communism, or socialism--all are ways of realizing the same end. Where we fail is when we forget the idea of toleration and become engaged in ideological struggles forgetting that ideologies are based on the common desires that you and I have.

This seems very simple, this way of analyzing the world. The point is this general will of the people is everywhere misrepresented. While it is the justification of every action a government takes, the actions themselves belie it. It is misrepresented in individualistic capitalism which protects the interests of the successful individual over the society; it is misrepresented in the idea of freedom of the seas which protects the rights of the powerful over the world community; it is misrepresented in Christianity which is continually embroiled in wars between stated.

These are the paradoxes which are being exploded by the Nazi revolution. If they are to be really exploded, these misrepresentations of the popular will, we must attempt to understand what that will is. Nazism is reaction; it is everything we hate. Yet it is not imposed from above. It has sprung out of the conditions of a world we have dominated. It shows unmistakably the hopelessness of that world in attaining for man the ideals he most wants.

To defeat it I feel we must make real this thing I have called the popular will, made up as it is of very simple yet profound desires. I am writing this column because that will which seems so obviously right doesn't have any voice at all in the present. We are apathetically accepting our role in the world without faith, without hope. The feeling that ideals are being attached as decoration to our policy is one that destroys any strength we might have.

I want in this column to show how our aims are being controverted by our actions. I want to express the importance of the simple and individual emotions in moulding a faith that will be strong enough to assert itself as the faith of the world.