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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Peacemakers'ÄîBlessed and Otherwise," Ida M. Tarbell employs her hallmark investigative rigor and narrative prowess to explore the multifaceted nature of peacemaking as both an ideal and a complex human endeavor. Her literary style merges meticulous research with compelling storytelling, drawing from historical examples of individuals and movements deemed peacemakers. Tarbell delves into the moral and ethical dilemmas these figures face, illustrating how their actions can lead to both harmony and discord in society. This work is situated in the early 20th century, a period marked by social upheaval and the questioning of conventional values, making it a pertinent read in understanding the evolving dialogue surrounding peace and conflict resolution. Ida M. Tarbell, renowned as a pioneering investigative journalist, was influenced by the tumultuous socio-political landscape of her time, particularly the rise of industrialism and its implications for society. Her rigorous pursuit of truth and justice reflects not only her journalistic integrity but also her deep empathy for the human condition. Tarbell's background as a strong advocate for women's rights and social equity informs her exploration of the moral ambiguities surrounding the quest for peace. "Peacemakers'ÄîBlessed and Otherwise" is a necessary read for anyone interested in the complexities of morality, social justice, and the nuances of peacemaking. Tarbell'Äôs insightful analysis not only invites readers to reconsider historical narratives but also encourages them to engage critically with the present-day implications of conflict and reconciliation.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Peacemakers—Blessed and Otherwise
Table of Contents
FOREWORD
This book does not pretend to be a history or even an adequate review of the work of the Conference on the Limitation of Armament, nor does it pretend to be the writer’s full appraisement of that work. It is what its sub-title suggests, a collection of observations, rejections and irritations. These were set down each week of the first two months of the Conference and were published practically as they stand here by the McClure Syndicate.
CHAPTER IPRE-CONFERENCE REFLECTIONS
When one attempts to set down, with any degree of candor, his impressions of a great gathering like the Conference on the Limitation of Armament, he will find himself swayed from amusement to irritation, from hope to despair, from an interest in the great end to an interest in the game as it is being played. My hopes and interests and irritations over the Washington Conference began weeks before it was called. What could it do? All around me men and women were saying, “It will end war,” and possibly—so deep was the demand in them that war be ended—believing what they said. It has always been one of the singular delusions of people with high hopes that if nations disarmed there could be no wars. Take the gun away from the child and he will never hurt himself. If it were so easy!
Their confidence alarmed the authors of the Conference. They did not mean disarmament, but limitation of armament. Moreover it was not even a Conference for but one on limitation. This was equivalent to saying that there were other matters involved in cutting down arms—the causes that had brought them into being in the first place, the belief that only in them was security, and that if you were to do away with them you must find a substitute, and a way to make this substitute continually effective. That is, there were several problems for the Conference to solve if they were to put a limit to armaments, and they were not easy problems. But those who kept their eyes on disarmament, pure and simple, refused to face them.
Along with the many who believed the coming Conference could say the magic word were not a few—the sophisticated, who from the start said: “Well, of course, you don’t expect anything to come out of it.” Or, “Are you not rather naïve to suppose that they will do anything?” And generally the comment was followed by “Of course nothing came from Paris.”
This superior attitude—sometimes vanity, sometimes disillusionment, sometimes resentment at trying any new form of international dealing—was quite useless to combat. You had an endless task of course if you attacked them on the point of nothing coming out of Paris when you believed profoundly that a great deal of good, as well as much evil, had come out of Paris, and that the good is bound to increase and the evil to diminish as time goes on.
Very singular, the way that people dismiss the treaty of Versailles, drop it out of count as a thing so bungling and evil that it is bound to eventuate only in wars, bound to be soon upset. The poor human beings that made the treaty of Versailles lacked omniscience, to be sure, and they certainly strained their “fourteen points,” but it will be noted that not a few of the arrangements that they made are working fairly well.
Moreover, what the Superior forget is that that treaty had an instrument put into it intended for its own correction. The Covenant of the League of Nations is a part of the treaty of Versailles and it says very specifically that if at any time in the future any treaty—if that means anything it must include the treaty of Versailles—becomes “inapplicable,” works disturbance between the nations instead of peace, the League may consider it.
The belief in political magic on one side and doubt of all new political ventures on the other, made the preliminary days of the Washington Conference hard for the simple-minded observer, prepared to hope for the best and to take no satisfaction in the worst, not to ask more than the conferring powers thought they could safely undertake, to believe that the negotiators would be as honest as we can expect men to be, and that within the serious limits that are always on negotiators, would do their best.
One had to ask himself, however, what substantial reasons, if any, he had that the Conference would be able to do the things that it had set down as its business. This business was very concisely laid down in an agenda, divided into two parts and running as follows:
Limitation of Armaments:
(1) Limitation of naval armaments under which shall be discussed the following:
(A) Basis of limitation
(B) Extent
(C) Fulfillment
(D) Rules for control of new agencies of warfare
(E) Limitation of land armaments.
Far Eastern Questions:
(1) Questions relating to China
First. Principles to be applied
Second. Application
Subjects:
(A) Territorial integrity
(B) Administrative integrity
(C) Open door
(D) Concessions, monopolies, preferential privileges
(E) Development of railways, including plans relative to the Chinese Eastern Railway
(F) Preferential railway rates
(G) Status of existing commitments.
Siberia:
Sub-headings the same as those under China.
Mandated Islands:
Sub-headings the same as those under China with railway sections eliminated.
What reasons were there for thinking that the nations—England, France, Italy, China, Japan, Belgium, Holland, Portugal—could, with the United States, handle these problems of the Pacific in such a way that they would be able to cut their armaments, and, cutting them, find a satisfactory substitute. There were several reasons.
A first, and an important one, was that the difficulties to be adjusted were, as defined, confined to one side only of the earth’s surface which, if huge, is nevertheless fairly simple, being mostly water. It was the problems of the Pacific Ocean that they prepared to handle. These problems are comparatively definite—the kind of thing that you can get down on paper with something like precision. They had one great advantage, and that is that in the main they did not involve a past running into the dim distance. England has held Hongkong for only about eighty years. We, the United States, have had port privileges in China only since 1844. France first got a stronghold in Cochin China in 1862, and her protectorate over Annam is less than forty years old. It was only twenty-five years ago that the war between Japan and China over Korea began; the complications in eastern Russia are still younger. So are those in Shantung, Yap, the Philippine Islands. That is, the chief bones of contention in the Conference were freshly picked. In most of the cases there were men still living who helped in the picking.
It was the same when it came to concessions. The question of the ownership and administration of railroads and mines—they belong to our age. We can put our fingers on their beginnings, trace with some certainty what has happened, find the intriguers, the bribe givers and takers, the law breaker, if such there have been. In the case of most of the concessions we can get our hands upon the very men involved in securing them and in carrying on their development.
How different from the problems of Europe, running as they do through century after century, involving as they do successions of invasions, of settlements, of conquests, of incessant infiltration of different races, and the consequent mingling of social, political, industrial and religious notions. The quarrels of Europe are as old as its civilization, their bases are lost in the past. Without minimizing at all the difficulty of the questions on the agenda of the Conference, they did have the advantage of being of recent date.
There was encouragement in the relations of the conferees. These were not enemy nations, fresh from wars, meeting to make treaties. They were nations that for five years had been allies, and from the life-and-death necessity of coöperation had gained a certain solidarity. True, their machinery of coöperation was pretty well shot up. The frictions of peace are harder on international machinery than the shells of war. The former racks it to pieces; the latter solidifies it. Nevertheless, the nations that were coming to the Conference were on terms of fairly friendly acquaintance, an acquaintance which had stood a tremendous test.
These nations had all committed themselves solemnly to certain definite ideals, laid down by the United States of America. True, their ideals were badly battered, and as a government we were in the anomalous position of temporarily abandoning them after having committed our friends to them. However, they still stood on their feet, these ideals.
It could be counted as an advantage that the associations of the years of the War had made the men who would represent the different nations at the Conference fairly well acquainted with one another. Whatever disappointments there might be in the delegations we could depend upon it that the men chosen would be tried men. They were pretty sure to be men of trustworthy character, with records of respectable achievement, men like Root and Hughes and Underwood in our own delegation. They would not come unknown to each other or unknown to the nations involved. It would be a simple matter for us, the public, to become acquainted with their records. If by any unhappy chance there should be among them a political intriguer, that, too, would be known.
These were all good reasons for expecting that the Conference might do something of what it started out for. How much of it it would do and how permanent that which it did would be would depend in no small degree upon the attitude of mind of this country, whether the backing that we gave the Conference was one of emotionalism or intelligence. We were starting out with a will to succeed; we were going to spend our first day praying for success. It would be well if we injected into those prayers a supplication for self-control, clearness of judgment, and willingness to use our minds as well as our hearts in the struggles that were sure to come.
Alarms went along with these hopes. There were certain very definite things that might get in the way of the success of the Conference—things that often frustrate the best intentions of men, still they were matters over which the public and the press would have at least a certain control, if they took a high and intelligent view of their own responsibility.
First, there were the scapegoats. There are bound to be periods in all human undertakings when the way is obscure, when failure threatens, when it is obvious that certain things on which we have set our hearts are unobtainable. Irritation and discouragement always characterize these periods. It is here that we fall back on a scapegoat. An international conference usually picks one or more before it gets through—a nation which everybody combines to call obstinate, unreasonable, greedy, a spoke in the wheel. Then comes a hue and cry, a union of forces—not to persuade but to overwhelm the recalcitrant, to displace it, drive it out of court. The spirit of adjustment, and of accommodation which is of the very essence of success in an undertaking like the Conference on the Limitation of Armaments is always imperiled and frequently ruined by fixing on a scapegoat. Would this happen at Washington?
Of course the nation on which irritation and suspicion were concentrated might be in the wrong. It might be deep in evil intrigue. It might be shockingly greedy. But it was a member of the Conference and the problem must be worked out with it. You work nothing out with scapegoats. Abraham Lincoln once laid down a principle of statesmanship which applies. “Honest statesmanship,” he said, “is the employment of individual meanness for the public good.”
It takes brains, humor, self-control to put any such rule as this in force. If unhappily the Conference did not furnish a sufficient amount of these ingredients, would the press and public make good the deficit? They are always in a strategic position where they can insist that everybody must be considered innocent until he is proved guilty, that nothing be built on suspicion, everything on facts. Something very important for them to remember if they insisted was that these facts had a history, that they were not isolated but related to a series of preceding events. For instance, there was the high hand that Japan had played with China. We must admit it. But in doing so we must not forget that it was only about sixty years ago that the very nations with whom Japan was now to meet in council in Washington had gathered with their fleets in one of her ports and used their guns to teach her the beauties of Christian civilization. She had decided to learn their lessons. She has wonderful imitative powers. She had followed them into China, and if she had played a higher hand there than any of them—and there might be a question as to that—it should be remembered that she had only sixty years in which to learn the degree of greed that can safely be practiced in our modern civilization. We must consider that possibly she had not had sufficient time to learn to temper exploitation with civilized discretion.
No scapegoats. No hues and cries. And certainly no partisanship. Was it possible for the United States to hold a truly national parley, one in which party ambitions and antipathies did not influence the negotiations? We had had within three years a terrible lesson of the lengths to which men’s partisanship will go in wrecking even the peace of the world. Would we repeat that crime? It was an ugly question, and be as optimistic as I would I hated to face it.
There was another danger on the face of things—crudeness of opinion. We love to be thought wise. There are thousands of us who in the pre-Conference days were getting out our maps to find out where Yap lay or the points between which the Eastern Chinese railroad ran, who would be tempted sooner or later to become violent partisans of, we will say: Yap for America—Shantung for China—Vladivostok for the Far Eastern Republic. There was danger in obstinate views based on little knowledge or much knowledge of a single factor.
