War Is Only A Symptom

James H. Griffes

[Reprinted from Everyman, November 1917]

WAR is natural, wholesome, beautiful. War is the objective side of growth, the active part of being. Life is no pacifist. War is the vigor of life - its dawn and midday. War is the sun flaring thru the zodiac - March and July. War is the other side of the coin of Life - its outer breath, its maleness, its positive aspect.

Which doesn't explain the hideous insanity of human beings mangling each other, nor palliate Europe's mad spree of human blood shedding nor our participation therein. These are the ripening of concrete causes nearer home, the product of circumstances less remote than biologic conclusions - land monopoly's fruit.

What other fruit did you expect? You thought to change the course of nature, set aside the multiplication table, who thought to banish war between nations while fostering it between individuals and classes.

In a world of brothels, prisons, gallows, disemployment! where maids sell their sex for bread and boys eat out of garbage cans, and millions of men are idle on billions of idle acres! - you are shocked at war - your tender heart bleeds at the suffering!

The beautiful war is that of humankind against the elemental world - the Mangod wresting with demon forces. The natural war is that of Consciousness against the unconscious, intelligence grappling with the inert - man breasting the tide of blind events, daring the lightning, whipping the typhoon, beating back the flood, braving the Unknown!

There is no biologic necessity for human slaughter. The vestigal theories, that man must kill man because he is descended from brutes, are sufficiently discounted by the bare fact that hundreds of millions of human beings have lived and died since the dawn of history, and still do, without killing anybody. These vestigal remains, the ancestral bellicosity, that drive men to wholesale manslaughter, never operate on more than ten percent of a population ! What a fool science can be. The necessity for modern war is not biologic, but economic -on its objective side. Subjectively, it is the bursting forth of emotional intensity - a passional expansion - into the only channel afforded by the smugness, the puritanism, and the mechanistic concepts.

Viewed in this light, even this war is a beautiful thing -- to the millions who find in it their only avenue of heroic expression. Viewed materially, it is the Hope of the Economic Revolution. Whoever would suppress it, to return to the old status of disemployment, is a public enemy. Whoever finds in this wonderful war awakening his "reason" for not Now giving himself heart and soul to the economic revolution, doubtless had some other "reason" before the war, and will find still another after the war. Reasons are easy to find.

This is the hour, above all others in human history, for those who see the light of a true, actual, tangible freedom to press heroically, audaciously toward it. Out of this awakening will come the New Order, the reconstruction of society on the base of equal economic opportunity - or the seizure of the industries by the government and by the syndicalists, which, while the unseized portions remain privately owned, will mean endless disorder and new tyrannies.

Whichever it will be, the one thing the human cause does not want now is peace on the old status, with its Greater suffering, Greater mortality!

Peace is also part of life. The warrior sleeps at night. But they who ask for lasting peace are the only dead - if any are. Hours of sleep come, hours for reflection, for play - the rest of time is for the Fray, for war, war to the limit (the sky!) - war against the globe's heats and colds, its heights and depths, its densities and distances, disease, death, and the myriad veils that cover the face of Reality.

Yet the enemy of man is not man, but Fear! And if for the moment it is our fear of a mad kaiser bent on ruling the world, merely his undoing will count for little.

It seems likely now that "the man who kept us out of war" with Mexico, only kept the faith in plunging into war with Germany. The Spirit of democracy prevailed in the one case, economic necessity drives in the other. Wilson is the instrument. Finely he voiced the ideal and made it actual; stubbornly he resisted the necessity that was bound to have its way of a civilization based on land monopoly.

Here was a kaiserdom seeking world dominion - and perilously near encompassing it unless the world united to repel him. The evidence is pretty clear now that Wilson had no alternative, that no one could have done otherwise, or better. And having entered upon the war, the real Size of the man is shown in the way he pushes it. He would be more of a hypocrite than the pacifist thinks him, if he let the bare forms of democracy hinder. War is not democracy - war is hell - speaking of war as the murdering of human beings.

There is no democracy in this country - there never has been any since all the natural opportunities became privately owned. There was no free speech or free press before the war. All were bound by economic necessity - a greater tyrant than all the laws and courts combined, yet one more easily broken. Statutes and constitutions for free speech and free press on a monopolized earth were mockery. What freedom has one to speak, write, or print against the interests of those who "own" the means of subsistence? - the freedom to starve.

The meanest feature of the war policy is supplied by the superficial apologists for Wilson who spin out yards of fine reasoning to show that the President is acting constitutionally and democratically(!). If he did either now he'd be a weakling. If we had the tangible element of democracy there would be no war.

Constitutional provisions and democratic forms on a monopolized earth are - toys for good children. Wilson's business now is to win the war and win it soon. Chance has made him truly the Man of the Hour, and he seems to fit the job. The radical press should stop knocking him and attend to its own business - which is to create the democracy that the Allies are to make the world safe for. To fight war, after it is on, is bootless. To hinder its quick effective prosecution is of course traitorous.

Whether it is a Wall Street war or not isn't worth enquiring. What could it be on a monopolized earth? What was the peace that preceded it? - the peace!! I mean the industrial, daily war of economic life, of which this war is but the natural and inevitable explosion, symptom, effect. Was it for Wall Street? Should war change the ratio of profit?

And this sudden accession of tenderness for human life which moved so many at the call for the draft! Was it because their sons were in jeopardy? With what sweet patience had these same people (most of them - not quite all, it is true) endured the slaughter of the babes in the slums, the crushing of childhood in mill, mine, and sweatshop, the long list of daily tragedies incident to the wage slaveries, pauperism, and prostitution of Peace! Whoever proposed to end them quickly was scorned by these same pacifists, called a mad dreamer, a social disturber. But when the drum sounded for the draft and your sons were caught - how sacred human life became! how suddenly! Twenty thousand people braved two hundred policemen and marched into Madison Square Garden in single file - to demand "Democracy and Terms of Peace" on a monopolized earth. Within a stone's-throw of them were a thousand starving infants and a thousand maids driven to the street for bread! - but no mass meetings for them.

Was it profound sympathy that so quickly stirred the pacifists? Or was it the froth of emotionalism awakened by the drum taps - at least in those whose knowledge of economic principles was fundamental? It was no attack on Privilege. When will we see such a mass meeting in a frontal attack on Privilege?

Just now we are all shocked and outraged at the infamous treatment of so fine and good a man as Herbert Bigelow. He is our friend; we love him personally. Is that why we are so deeply stirred? Must the atrocities of the industrial warfare reach our very physical eyes and flesh before we awake? Must our own homes be violently invaded before we will specifically and directly attack privilege at its base?

Death and destruction are the blessings of plutocracy. On a privately owned earth nothing else brings such "good times" to so large a number of people. San Francisco's earthquake and fire was a blessing. It halted starvation and pauperism instantly. Just before it occurred many were in deepest penury, children starved, thousands were disemployed. Immediately thereafter everybody had at least enough to eat and a warm bed. This period in San Francisco well typifies the "democracy" of which our pacifists are now so keenly jealous.

Before the earthquake the stores, warehouses, and homes of a few rich people, were glutted with necessities and luxuries. The surplus was so great that quantities of it were destroyed. Shelter was so abundant that thousands of houses, offices, and stores were vacant. Yet there were thousands of people there without adequate shelter, with little or no food, and in shabbly clothes or rags.

The earth shook, starting a general conflagration, which to checkmate, dynamite was employed. In a few hours nearly the whole city was in ruins, all the warehouses and stores with their accumulations of necessities and luxuries were destroyed. The devastation was complete - and pauperism was ended!

Immediately food, clothing, shelter, and transportation were offered to All - to whoever needed them. If one found himself possessed of a surplus of anything, he hunted up someone who lacked. There was no one starving - where just before hundreds starved. For months every human being on the peninsula fared much better than thousands had fared amid the filled warehouses and stores. No child went hungry, or insufficiently clad and housed. There was work for everybody and wages were high. There was no destitution or acute poverty in San Francisco for several years thereafter - not until the city had been rebuilt and great warehouses again were filled with surpluses. Then want came again, the slums returned, disemployment ensued, wages fell.

That is our American (and English, and Christian society of whose "democracy" some people are now so anxious. Amid plenty, many are in want and some must starve. Amid devastation, food, clothing, shelter and transportation are accorded to all who need, according to their need. It was so in San Francisco, in the Chicago fire, the Charleston earthquake, the Baltimore fire; it is so everywhere in Christendom, that is to say in Plutocratica, for plutocracy rules everywhere in Christendom (tho in lesser degree in Denmark, Switzerland, France, and Australasia, where the land is held largely by the people - in Mexico where the peons have regained their land, and in the New Russia - hopeful exceptions!)

It is so today under war conditions. Times were never so good. Disemployment is gone. Wages are higher, trade busier. Fewer are insufficiently fed than for fifty years before.