By Edwin Cooney
Exactly 101 years ago this very day, the war declared so that all humanity would end all wars was halted by an armistice rather than by a peace. The first mistake, of course, was to not adequately distinguish between an armistice and a peace and to plant that distinction in the public mind.
So, what was the ultimate problem? Was it a worldwide language barrier that no national leader could possibly comprehend? Of course, President Woodrow Wilson, British Prime Minister David Lloyd-George and French Premier George Clemenceau understood perfectly well what they were both saying and doing! However, the devil was in the details.
The 1918 Armistice was an agreement merely to stop the fighting without putting the German leadership in a position of being forced to surrender. The Paris Peace Conference would complete the substantive details. Ultimately, time demonstrated that Britain and France, even more than most nations, saw profit more satisfactory to their people than peace. For Britain and France, both profit and peace were the same thing. However, a mere peace couldn't mend their hurts or heal their injured national dignity which was responsible for beginning the conflict in the first place. Thus, the huge war debt the peace conference would force Germany to pay, no matter how difficult it might be for a defeated nation to feed, clothe and pacify its melancholy inhabitants, would cost both sides an even more devastating war in a mere twenty-one years.
The leaders of Britain, France, and the United States, as different as they were in personality, background, and experience, all saw themselves as democratically chosen representatives of a free people. Thus, the people's suffering was their political obligation to heal as quickly and profitably as they could, and to the maximum degree possible. Thus, work-a-day, and live-a-day folks didn't often draw distinctions between an armistice and a peace. (Just a short time ago, I wrote a column noting that the Korean conflict in 1953 was concluded by an armistice and not a peace.) The allies (Britain, France, Italy, Russia, and the United States) signed a "peace treaty” designed to draw much of the wealth and vital resources of the vanquished Central Powers which consisted of Germany, Turkey, Austria and the Austrian Empire (which was to be dismantled.)
The League of Nations was designed by Thomas Woodrow Wilson, the son of a Presbyterian Minister, and only reluctantly agreed to by David Lloyd George, the son of a Welsh Unitarian Minister and teacher, and by French Prime Minister George Clemenceau, the son of a French atheist. It was more of a political arrangement than it was a spiritual covenant. President Wilson, an American political practitioner who saw his election as our 28th president as an act of God as much as it was a political achievement, believed that a league of nations would ultimately provide the opportunity for international unity which would morally compel sustained international peace. The Treaty of Versailles which contained the League was ultimately rejected by the United States Senate under the leadership of Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr., a friend of Theodore Roosevelt’s and a bitter opponent of President Wilson. Both Wilson and Lodge were very willful men of substantial intellect who saw themselves as one another's moral and intellectual superior. Both men poisoned the League's potential by their personal vanity. Ultimately, there came a war claiming 50,000,000 plus rather than the 40,000,000 casualties and deaths of the just concluded “war to end all wars!"
Even today, as much as most of us are opposed to war, somehow the nature of peace too often escapes us. According to the Dutch 17th century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, peace is not the absence of war, peace is a state of mind! It would seem to me that both war and peace are a state of mind. During the middle ages, wars were seasonal, often fought on open fields and away from heavily populated cities. Most of the weapons inflicted personal injuries rather than multiple injuries to multiples of people. Thus, there is the distinctive possibility and even the likelihood that war may yet change in ways we cannot even fathom.
Just a few years ago, during the Carter administration to be precise, much horror was expressed with the development of the neutron bomb designed to kill people and leave physical structures intact. "What's war coming to?” People wondered if our leaders see value only in the maintenance of structures at the close of a devastating war.
It's just possible, even probable, that war may come to mean merely the destruction of a nation's functional economic and productive capacity. Perhaps we'll go to sleep one evening and wake up the next day wholly intact minus our money and property which was confiscated by another nation's super computer system while we slept. Let's call it the super grabber computer system. Rather than Communism, Fascism, Socialism, or any other social “ism,” we may be conquered by something called “Systemism.”
For most people, World War I was over on Saturday, June 28th, 1919 when Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau put their signatures to the Versalles Treaty containing the League. However, when our Senate rejected participation in The League in November 1919 and March 1920, we found ourselves still at war with Germany. Thus, on Saturday, July 2, 1921, while changing his golf shoes between games at the estate of Joseph Sherman Frelinghuysen, Sr. in Raritan, New Jersey, President Warren G. Harding signed the Knox-Porter Resolution. It had been passed by the Senate as a substitute peace treaty with Germany. (Who says vital business doesn't occur while playing golf?)
Beware of an ironic reality: the conditions that bring about both war and peace are never predictable!
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
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