Eliminate the Cause of War

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

In the exhaustive treatment of the military draft and UMT proposals in your columns, only one thing has never been held disputable, and this is the advisability from a national policy point of view of having a standing conscripted army at all. It is difficult for a student of draft-able age to speak about this matter without being misunderstood to be defending his immediate and obvious self interest.

At the risk of being thus misunderstood, I suggest that it is amazing that with all our modern psychological insights, we continue to think we are doing something about the cause of aggression when we attack with armies and navies the men and institutions which are at best the means of expression, and at worst the personal usurpers of human feelings and social demands which are much more basic and much more immortal than Mao or Stalin. Jealously of America's wealth, symbolized by the 200 million bushels of what and 100 million pounds of butter in storage of the Community Credit Corporation; fear of our power, both military and economic--these are the things which feed the fire of hate for us all over the world, and which make bearable to half the world the immeasurable oppression of totalitarian dictatorship; for, what won't we bear while we struggle? Jealousy and fear, these are the causes of aggression, and these we must fight as if we are to end aggression.

For example, the Indo-China war, which has cost countless human suffering, and which may yet take on much larger proportions, could have been won without a soldier or a gun. Eighty percent of the followers of Ho Chih-Minh are non-Communist nationalist, who could have been our anti-Communist friends has we not financed and supplied the war which denies their independence, but instead spent the same millions toward helping them reconstruct and reform their country.

It is not too late to shift our energies, gradually but decisively, from preparation to kill and crush men and institutions to the more challenging and more rewarding task of destroying fear and jealously by sharing our wealth and restraining our power. Our youth cannot both train for war and work for peace. Walter Schelder '52.