LAST DITCH OF DEMOCRACY - Majority Rights

’em. When noticed, the reaction was in most cases merely a cordial
invitation to join in the great betrayal. “La trahison des clercs,” as Julien
Benda called it. The cry was NOT, tell us more, perfect your own
understanding of this knotty, or these knotty subjects. The cry was: be
quiet, it is indecent for a man of letters to touch such a subject. And now
you are in a mess. You are spiritually in the worst mess than you are in
materially. Despite the loss of tonnage and markets, your loss of tonnage
and markets.
I wonder if you have any concept of what Europe means by England’s
betrayal of Europe. I should like to sort certain things out. Your defense
of your empire, for example, as distinct from the drive to START war. To
keep the war going, to extend the area of the war. Both your attempt and
that made by your pals in the U.S.A.
I should like to distinguish between war and mere violence. I should like
to distinguish between valor on the field of battle, and the bombing of
civilians, the sinking of hospital ships. I do not think the two kinds of
activity are necessarily inseparable. And neither do you.
Nothing is without efficient cause. You can’t beat Aristotle on that
statement. Something causes the destruction of mosques, and museums.
Something totally different from the will to die for freedom’s cause: for
King and country, for the defense of the homeland. The two activities are
NOT identical; nor are they inseparable. Now, hospital ships have been
bombed, and not by accident. And the typical American feeling is one of
revulsion and the soldiers’ is one of revulsion.
An American airman had been floating about the middle sea for some
days on an inflated rubber raft. He and his pals were at the end of their
tether. They were picked up by an Italian hospital ship, put to bed, told
they were patients for the time being but would be prisoners on landing.
The hospital ship was sunk on a later trip, but one of the nurses who
escaped tells this of one of the American airmen. She came to his berth