Age of Overkill; 12; A Collection of World Will

mWaahi 4x4 3x4 4x4 8x6 8x8 8x7 9x8 ... President Kennedy said in his inaugural that we have at our command now, the means both for abolishing poverty and for abolishing mankind. The question is which will it be?

Only a collective world will can get these races and faces of mankind which you've been watching to establish the necessary frame of world order. This is the twelfth of my series of talks on our age of overkill and how the peoples and leaders of mankind can save themselves from this idiocy of destruction. I don't speak, of course, for any party or government, for liberalism or conservatism. I don't play such games when the stakes are life and death. The time is running short for all of us. I speak as objectively as I can for the survival of humanity and for the continued greatness of an open society in America. Thus far in this series I've spoken about the new weapons caught in a new balance of terror and about the grand design of communism and about the new nations in an undeveloped world. I've talked of the need for great leadership in a creative America.

I talked last time of how without abandoning the power principle entirely we might be able to transform it for our new purposes. I want to talk today about where we stand in this task of shaping a collective world will and what still remains to be done. Even though isolationism as a label has dropped out of use in America, it is still a force in our thinking today. It has transferred its energies to a struggle against anything which seems to cut down national sovereignty. Isolationists today blanche at the mention of the term world law. In effect they want to go it alone, even if it means dying a miserable death in a radiated jungle of nation states. The United Nations which began as an international agency must now become an engine of world law,

cutting across national sovereignty. When it was first formed at San Francisco, the UN was in one sense a triumph of reason over unreason and of order over chaos. Roosevelt had just died. And as Secretary of State Statenius came to sign the document for the United States, he must have recalled and I suspect that President Truman also recalled how much hope Roosevelt had placed in this. It was the fulfillment of his dream and also the fulfillment of Woodrow Wilson's shattered dream of a league of nations. The trouble was that Roosevelt and Stalin had both seen the UN as an instrument of the two great powers. They were confident that it would work so long as the great powers agreed.

Hence the crucial agency of the UN was to be the Security Council where the great powers met and consulted and where each of them had a veto power. The ink on those San Francisco signatures was scarcely dry before this whole assumption was shattered. The Cold War came and the Cold War broke the great powers agreement. And the UN became an arena of Cold War conflict rather than an instrument of world order. It still remained useful because it kept the lines of communication between the two camps open. But there was one breakthrough in the history of the UN which started as a tragic event but as it turned out it opened the way for history. I'm talking of the Korean War. When the Korean invasion took place and the Russian delegate had forfeited his veto by walking out of the council chamber, the UN voted to send troops. The brunt of the fighting in Korea was carried by American troops, by American tanks and guns.

The Korean War was messy and protracted and at the time it seemed completely futile yet it did accomplish one great result. It showed the detachment of soldiers and also of engineers and nurses and ambulance workers for many nations. It could work together toward the coming end of organizing order as part of a collective world will. And inevitably each further step in this direction we knew would have to come out of some world tragedy. Because only as new crises arose calling for the use of world will could that will be exerted this happened at Suez. When the British and French moved against NASA's Egypt from one direction and the Israelis from another and NASA was finally saved by the intervention of both the United States and the Soviet Union. But a policing problem remained so that the afraid ends of the Suez crisis would not lead to another world tragedy.

UN forces had to be used to police the Suez itself and then to police the Gaza Strip between Israel and the United Arab Republic. They're still there in one of the most effective UN operations that are patrolling a no man's land. It seems to be the destiny of many of our young men to be walking across a barren landscape going nowhere. It raises the question of whether they may not someday be used in patrolling a different kind of no man's land. The gap between potential world destruction and potential world law. Well the next great crisis for the UN and great tragedy for the world came in the Congo. The Belgian withdrawal had left a vacuum and that vacuum had to be filled and the UN filled it again with national detachment of soldiers. And Dag Hammershield tried to keep the UN presence in the Congo within a frame of general consent.

The problem was one of tribal rivalries and of hatreds and of racist nationalist passions against whites. But once the UN forces were on the spot all the old hatreds seemed to be transferred to them. Everyone blamed them for whatever went wrong. And when Lamumba was made a prisoner by his enemies he was a tragic solitary figure with some dignity enduring the inhumanity which in his time he had also inflicted. And when Lamumba was murdered it looked for a moment as if it were the end of the UN in the Congo. Yet the fact is that there was no alternative in its chaos to an agency of the collective world will. The grief of Mrs. Lamumba was only part of a general Congolese grief over him and a censor shock in the world as a whole. The problem of using the UN turned on the question of how a body meant originally as an arena for debate could assume executive powers.

The fact is that no executive had been provided for in the UN. No one had been envisaged as having power over armies with the function of deploying them in trouble areas over the face of the earth. Viewed as a living constitution not as a dead document on paper the UN constitution was stretched to meet the world's needs of world order. The Secretary General of course still depended on voluntary contingents from each country for the UN Army. Much as George Washington had depended on voluntary state militia during the American Revolution. Yet a new force had come into being fraught with great meaning for the world's future. The Soviet leaders came to understand what had happened.

Khrushchev proposed instead of a single UN secretary, three secretaries, one for the communist block, one for the democratic world block and the third for the neutralists, probably Africa. In theory this was a return to the original conception of Roosevelt and Stalin of the UN as a sort of gentleman's agreement between great powers, each with a veto over the actions of the others. But in practice a triple secretariat would mean no secretariat and therefore no UN executive and therefore no UN police force that could be used against the wishes of any of the great powers. This fordrew produced a protracted UN crisis and its consequences are still incalculable. It made out of the Secretary General a target for attack by the communists and by their allies. It debased as it were the currency of UN exchanges introducing a note of violence in language and gesture and action.

The climax came in that riotous scene in the gallery of the Security Council while the Congo issue was being debated while Adelaide Stevenson was presenting the American position on the Congo crisis. The rioters were mostly American egos. They were expressing their resentment of the UN as a force of order in a world in which they felt that racial injustices had to be dealt with by direct action. And the very violence of their explosive passions showed that men who had contrived such ingenious modes of destruction had not moved far in mastering the turmoil of his own inner spirit. And yet Khrushchev made a mistake. His mistake was in downgrading the UN, that symbol which meant so much to the leaders of the new African nations. By almost a single leap they had emerged out of their primitive traditional African societies in the nationhood.

They had a hunger for status, a craving to be recognized as equal actors on the new stage of history where they had been thrust so dramatically. It was a mistake for Khrushchev to think that many of them would join him in an effort to destroy this stage. When Adelaide Stevenson became head of the United States delegation to the UN, he held a press conference at which I think he came closer to expressing the mood of the new nations. He underscored how important the United Nations had become for all small nations. He favored stretching the UN idea to its ultimate possibility. He saw it as the nucleus of what may someday become a genuine world authority enforcing world law in a disarmed world that will have to be kept disarmed. This is a glimpse of a possible vision of world order. One area in which progress can be made is that of regional unity for order.

In Europe, for example, the struggle to unite the European continent has been going on, I suppose ever since 1940. In the American hemisphere, the goal of common action by the nations of the Americas is equal crucial. What is involved, you see, is a working agreement to apply penalties against any nation that acts as aggressor against another, or that seeks to destroy another nation from within. For example, in the summer of 1960, at Caracas in Venezuela, an attempt was made to assassinate President Betancourt. It failed, although I must say it failed by a small margin, but the members of the organization of American states felt that it was a good occasion for establishing the principle of hemisphere unity and order, meeting at San Jose in Costa Rica. They passed a resolution, which called for severing diplomatic relations by member states with the Dominican Republic, which they suspected was the instigator of the assassination attempt.

What is important here is not who did what to whom, or who was punished for it, or even the fact of the punishment. The number of it is that each member state of the OAS commits at least a portion of its national sovereignty, to the decision of a body of which it is only one member, and over which it has only its own portion of control. But the question arises for what purpose will sovereignty be committed in this way? I recall when Del Wilkie used to say that sovereignty is something not to be horded but to be spent. But again, we must ask, for what should it be spent? My answer is, you should be spent for a world police authority. I use the analogy of the police authority of any American city, which of us has not had the experience of working alongside of someone on his job in the factory in the office, on a college campus, someone whom he hates and who hates him. Which of us has not had, in effect, had murder in his heart. But the murder doesn't take place, at least not in most instances. Not because the intent is lacking, but because the punishment would be swift and decisive.

The answer we have is a framework of law which makes possible a framework of order. Now there are some who point out that a world police authority is impossible unless it is part of a world state. They say you can't have a police unless you have a law to enforce in a state to make that law. Well, I don't quite see the analogy. I see no reason why we must jump all the way from a world of nation states to a single world state. I don't even regard it as desirable. The national unit and the national regional or hemisphere unit ought to be quite enough to maintain internal order to develop the resources and raise the living standards of the people inside each nation. All of these functions of the state can be exercised within the nation state without a world state.

But there is one function which does require the intervention of a world authority. And that one function is that of preventing nuclear world suicide. This is a police and military function and you've got to have a system of world law to do that. Can we achieve it? I think we can. Perhaps in three stages. One is the use of the United Nations Police Force by an extension of that principle that we saw in the Gaza Strip and the Congo UN Force. The second is the process of disarmament about which I talked last week. We've got to have a disarmament dialogue with the Russians and with the Chinese. The third and the final one is to keep a disarmed world disarmed by giving the United Nations Police Authority a monopoly of nuclear weapons to be used against an aggressor. Beyond the world state there has been some talk of a world society. What this means is abolishing not only the nation state but also the national culture.

There are some who seem to feel that the root of evil lies not only in the principle of national sovereignty but in the differences the diversities of national cultures. That these diversities of cultures carry within them the seeds of conflict and that the only way to do away with conflict is to destroy these seeds. Again I can't go along with this. To me much of the savor of life lies in the diversity not only of persons but also of national cultures. I suppose I'm a kind of culture patriot in that sense. You see the instinct of the herd is taught conformity always toward ironing out differences. This is what the French dramatist Ionesco tried to say in his play rhinoceros which was a satire on the herd, a satire on conformity.

Wouldn't it be an anticlimax to try to save the world from nuclear destruction only to find that the method you use for doing this is to iron out all the things that make the world interesting and make life rich? No we don't want a single world society but neither do we want a world which is crisscrossed by walls of cultural noncommunication. That's what's true at the present time. It is these walls which have in the past made the political and racial conflicts more bitter and have nullified efforts to resolve them. We've already seen some steps toward breaking down these walls of noncommunication between Russia and America. When the American pianist Van Kleibern went to Moscow to play for the Russian people his reception was a tumultuous one. They were very warm to him.

Partly it was a way by which the Russians said in effect to their own government even in the teeth of their own power elite that they liked Americans, that they didn't want to destroy them and be destroyed by them. But it was also a way of saying that there is a universal language in music itself which cuts across national political boundaries. Something of that happened when the Bolshei ballet visited the United States and was again acclaimed by its American audience. Here was again a protest against the notion that a suicide pact was inevitable between the two systems. But again it was an affirmation of what the human spirit has in common even when there are political conflicts which will continue for some time and cultural diversities which are healthy. There's a common tradition in science as well. It has become a truism to say that nuclear energy can be used not only for death but for life.

But nevertheless it's a truism which is true. For example at Shippingport, Pennsylvania. There's one of a number of projects in which the possibilities of nuclear development for peaceful purposes are being explored. Built expressly for civilian uses its fishing atoms began in December 1957 to produce electricity for homes and industries for a city of 120,000. Here's a glimpse of a not impossible future where the original notion of science as an instrument of progress may yet be fulfilled. The same kind of thing can happen in the possible collaboration of Russian and American scientists in exploring interstellar space above the heavens and the waters under the earth of pooling the scientific resources of all nations in order to extend the knowledge of each. Here again the UN has shown the way. From the start it had as one of its purposes the focusing of the best abilities that the world can muster upon the worst problems that the world can offer.

In the work of the WHO, the World Health Organization, you get an instance of how men can combine their resources and attack on plague and on pest and spreading the knowledge of sanitation and using human knowledge and compassion for the ends of life. And in the work of UNESCO it has again shown the world mind in action with the basic premise that neither political independence nor the lifting of living standards will have much meaning in the undeveloped world unless they are accompanied by the life of the mind. You see there are have nations and have not nations not only in the economic realm but in the educational realm as well. This brings us close to the end on the question of the shaping of a collective world will. What remains is two questions.

One is the question of the machinery that we shall use to get there and the other is the question of attitudes. Now about the machinery, there is a detailed painstaking study by Grenville Clark and Louis B. Stone. It's a book that I have found very useful. It's now in its second revised edition. It's called World Peace Through World Law. And it's a study, a very detailed study of the United Nations Charter, section by section, and of the functioning of the UN. And how the existing charter can be revised in order to make such a police authority possible and effective. And note that these authors are not talking of building a new organization, they're talking of using the same one. And I'd like to read what they say toward the end of their introduction.

They are speaking of the United Nations Police Force. They say this world police force would be the only military force permitted anywhere in the world after the process of national disarmament has been completed. It would be built up while disarmament was taking place so that as the last national military unit is disbanded, the organization of the Peace Force would simultaneously be completed. Now this isn't just a question of legalism. The changes will come out of sheer necessity, just as in the case of the Congo crisis, where there was no alternative to a UN police force, at least for a time. And the changes will come if there is a world will to respond to this necessity in the future. That brings us finally to the question of attitudes. How can you trust a UN group to make the decisions that may run counter to the interests of any nation, even the United States, and to the ruling group in that nation? How can you trust the UN when the members of the UN are themselves nation-states with ruling groups of their own?

The only possible answer I think is the development of a world civil service whose members have loyalties to no one nation, but only to the world authority. Now there's a real question about whether this can be done. A question because the roots of national loyalty go very deep. The larger part of our thinking and feeling is within the frame of the nation state. This is what is taught to us in the schools. This is what is written for our children in the textbooks. This is what is so deeply rooted that it will be very hard to uproot. Hard, but not impossible. If the spirit of scientific research cuts across national boundaries as it does, if the spirit of music, of dance, of art, cuts across national boundaries, then isn't it possible to develop a spirit of commitment to world order and world law which also cuts across national boundaries? For example, Doug Hammershield, whether or not he lasts in the UN, has in his own person and in his own mind been a prime example of this possibility.

His commitment is neither to east nor to west. It's neither to America nor to Russia. It's a commitment to world survival. What keeps him going, I suppose, is a religious faith just as what keeps the scientists going is a faith in science. But whatever the main spring of his being, it should prove possible to train the young people from every nation, perhaps in a kind of world academy, to become civil servants not of a nation but of the world will. It should also be possible to develop a body of world law, whether it be in the council or the assembly or the decisions of a world court. The history of the United States has shown that we have a Supreme Court where we built a body of legal opinions that can be subjected to criticism, out of those opinions and that criticism, and along with a world civil service. We have some kind of hope and trust that men can be able to shape a collective world well.

Next week on the Age of Overkill, Brandeis University Professor Max Loner will discuss Life Force or Death Urge. This program was produced for the National Educational Television and Radio Center by the Lowell Institute Cooperative Broadcasting Council, WGBHTV Boston. This is NET National Educational Television.

This program was produced for the National Educational Television and Radio Center by the Lowell Institute. This program was produced for the National Educational Television and Radio Center by the Lowell Institute Cooperative Broadcasting Council.