Austin J. App: History's Most Terrifying Peace, Part 2/2
[Der Weg 1947-05] An Original Translation of "Grundlagen für den Frieden"
Title: History's Most Terrifying Peace, Part 2/2 [de: Grundlagen für den Frieden]
Author(s): Austin J. App
“Der Weg” Issue: Year 01, Issue 05 (October 1947)
Page(s): 333-335
Dan Rouse’s Note(s):
This text is originally published in English in America, but I have not found a copy of Fundamentals for Peace! and thus this is a back-translated version.
Reference Documents:
See the Table of Contents for links to the relevant Der Weg scans.
[LINK] History's Most Terrifying Peace
[NO LINK] Fundamentals for Peace!
[LINK] Ravishing the Women of Conquered Europe
[LINK] Slave-Laboring German Prisoners of War
The Editor:
Dr. Austin J. App, from whose book History's Most Terrifying Peace we published several excerpts in the previous issue, is the author of the following article, which we will present in two parts. Dr. App is a professor at Incarnate Word College in Texas and the leader of the “Committee for a Just Peace” (legally recognized on June 16, 1944), on whose behalf he has written these Fundamentals for Peace.
Fundamentals of Peace
The United States of America must establish a just peace. The foremost consideration for a noble and independent people must be a peace that is worthy of enduring. Such a peace must rest upon the golden rule: that all nations should be treated as North America would wish to be treated under similar circumstances.
The United States must act according to the unshakable conviction that security must be sought, yet can only be found in fairness—not in power politics nor in unjust measures. Towards the defeated and the small nations, it is the primary duty of the United States to plan and proclaim such a just peace for all. The American policy of unconditional surrender has elevated this impartial and just peace beyond a mere duty: it is a sacred responsibility. The United States must insist on a peace that all honest people of every nation—victors, neutrals, and vanquished—can endorse. This peace must find its highest sanction not in the military might of the victors, nor in the power of a world police force, but fundamentally in the approval of all right-thinking people throughout the world. Either we must despair of the vision of a peaceful world, or the United States must proceed unwaveringly with the conviction that those who think justly outnumber those who think otherwise.
To establish such a just peace and ensure its acceptance by all other fair-minded victorious states, the following measures are necessary, though they cannot be imposed by force:
The government of the United States must officially declare and define a peace founded on absolute fairness to both the vanquished and the victors.
The government of the United States must proclaim that this peace is to be established through collaborative effort, not by diktat, and that, consequently, the interests of the vanquished must be adequately represented by delegates and experts freely selected by the governments of the defeated nations, whose voluntary agreement is essential. Should the other victorious powers deny the defeated nations equal participation, the United States should invite representatives from those countries to join its own delegation, with decisions made only with the voluntary consent of these invited delegates. The United States should steadfastly maintain that addressing European issues without Germany, or Asian issues without Japan, would be as erroneous and imprudent as if some future “Big Four” were to decide North American affairs without the United States. Both the government and the people of the United States should demand that no peace terms agreed upon by the respective governments shall be binding unless ratified by a voluntary popular vote in every nation or territory concerned.
Below, I outline the principles and political guidelines regarding specific issues that “We, the Sovereign People” wish the United States and its government representatives to adhere to and advocate for at the peace conferences.
Specific Issues
I. The Question of Revenge and Guilt
Retaliation and any semblance of vindictiveness must be excluded from the peace. A just peace must respect the honor and reputation of the defeated. Introducing the question of guilt can only be an attempt to justify a peace of vengeance. Imposing a guilt clause on the defeated means leaving them the choice between breaking their commitments or engaging in a hopeless rebellion that must end in their destruction. Guilt cannot be dictated by the victor; only facts can determine it, and it is the role of history to establish those facts. In a peace founded on the true concept of justice, there is no room for questions of national guilt. It has been stated often enough that one cannot indict an entire people.
II. War Criminal Trials and Executions
Collective condemnation and punishment of a nation is indefensible. It is also obvious that it is unacceptable to apply one law to the victor and another to the loser. Unilateral war crime trials are utterly dishonest and unjust. They are dishonest in that they do not so much punish individuals as guilty, but rather stigmatize an entire nation with the aim of imposing upon it a peace based on revenge and power politics. Such unilateral trials, conducted only against the losers, are a hypocritical substitute for the sole guilt clause forced into the infamous Treaty of Versailles.
It is a fundamental fact that individuals on both sides commit crimes in every war. While looting, for instance, is always a grave offense, we cannot single out one looter among many for punishment or target only the looters of a particular race or nation while forgiving the looting by others. Hanging a German for requisitioning a crate of wine, while not hanging an American for requisitioning a camera, or letting a Russian go free for requisitioning a bicycle, is clearly wrong. Yet, hanging National Socialists for invading Poland, and not hanging Bolsheviks for invading Finland, is equally wrong. One cannot claim that a particular act was so heinous that the perpetrator can be hanged, ignoring the fact that many others, including those among the victors, committed similar crimes without punishment. But this is precisely the fallacy on which the war crime trials against the defeated have been conducted. As long as the equally guilty among the victors are not also punished, these defective one-sided trials must be annulled and declared invalid.
III. Reparations
Reparations as such are merely a pagan disguise for the “Woe to the vanquished” policy of antiquity. They are ethically wrong and economically unsound. Ethically, they rest on the assumption that the defeated are solely guilty. They tacitly endorse the long-discredited notion that might makes right. History teaches all too clearly that the victors have no right to simply assume their own innocence and the guilt of the defeated. The causes of a war are too complex, especially in a conflict involving many nations, to base reparations on guilt. Russia’s reparation demands against Finland should suffice to prove to all honest people among the victors that reparations are rooted in vengeance, not justice.
Moreover, reparations are economically impossible. The losers are naturally those who need the most assistance but are least able to pay reparations. If reparations continue to be imposed on the defeated, the entire world, including the United States, will eventually be plunged into misery and near bankruptcy; for ultimately, reparations can only be paid by those who have the means. Reparations are an illusion, as they can only be met by wealthy nations—that is, primarily by the United States.
The Christian and practical approach to postwar reconstruction must be a mutual and sincere desire among both victors and vanquished to heal the wounds of war as swiftly and effectively as possible. Proponents of the Morgenthau Plan are deliberately allowing millions to starve, yet no truly Christian nation can consent to this. The focus should not be on seizing whatever one can. All peoples and nations should endeavor to help where they can and where help is most needed. Prosperity arises from production, not from looting and robbery, and thus reparations, particularly in kind, must be recognized for what they are. A catastrophe like war demands that all people aid those most affected, rather than seeking to profit from the most damaged victims. Politically, reparations imposed on the defeated are equally impractical. Any government burdened with such long-term reparations is destined to fail. No people will support a government that collects slave tributes for foreign powers. Such a government, no matter how “democratic,” will inevitably be supplanted by a strong regime promising liberation from oppression.
The most inhumane and contemptible form of reparations is the enslavement of people—the so-called “human” reparations—which the victorious states have employed on a scale unprecedented in human history. The millions of German and other prisoners of war and civilians being used as slave laborers by the victorious states must be immediately repatriated. Even if other forms of reparations were feasible from the defeated, the crime of human slavery as practiced by the victors would alone have long since settled any accounts. The policy of reparations involving human beings must be terminated and renounced for all time.
IV. Borders
A good peace requires a just determination of borders. Transferring territories as rewards for victory or as reparations is utterly impermissible and constitutes a war crime in itself. Exchanging territories under the pretext of alleged security is power politics of the worst kind, following the principle that might precedes right. Transferring territories due to supposed economic necessities is fraudulent, dangerous, unstable, and equally unjust; for if one country needs another’s coal mines, that other could just as well demand the first’s farmland.
No territory whose established population wishes to belong to the defeated nation may be torn from it. Furthermore, all territories unjustly transferred under the Treaty of Versailles must also be restored.
V. Minorities
The one utterly impermissible method of treating minorities is their forced resettlement or expulsion. This is not a policy—it is an atrocity.
Where such atrocities are still being committed, they must cease immediately; where they have already been carried out, they must be undone as far as possible. The estimated 20 million people, utterly plundered and expelled from their homelands under the Potsdam Declaration, must receive support to return to their homes and properties. Their farms and homes, shops and factories, must be restored to them. There is no redemption for a thief until the stolen goods are returned. Likewise, there is no redemption for the victors until they relinquish the possessions gained through mass plunder—not under the guise of military necessity, but amidst peace and triumph.
Attempts by those who have driven others from their homes to claim stolen territories, farms, homesteads, and factories, arguing that the native population has already been successfully expelled, must not be met with territorial awards as a reward. Rather, they should face the same fate as those convicted at Nuremberg for carrying out expulsions. Under no circumstances may the crime of human displacement be rewarded with territorial gains.
VI. Form of Government
It is evident that all peoples should have the right to choose the form of government they desire. Since the United States, through its policy of “unconditional surrender,” has stripped the defeated nations of all means of defense, it appears to be a duty of responsibility for the United States to protect them from having an unwanted government imposed upon them or being subjected to a foreign power. Beyond this temporary responsibility, all North American intervention should cease.
The American people must resolutely reject the kind of intervention cloaked in the slogan “making the world safe for democracy,” trumpeted in two world wars, which arrogates to itself the right to wage war against a people over their form of government and impose a so-called democratic system with bombs and bayonets. If such a right is granted to the United States, then Russia has the same right to impose a communist government on the peoples under its power.
The question of centralization or federalization in the conquered lands lies entirely outside the victors’ purview. The peoples of those lands have the right and duty to decide for themselves how they wish to resolve this matter.
VII. Reeducation of the Defeated
Broadly speaking, the entire policy of reeducating defeated peoples is an act of arrogance and hypocrisy. Forcing ideas upon peoples through military might is both a crime and tyranny. The monstrous nature of this crime becomes evident when the Russians, following the North American example, impose their communism on the German people in the name of “reeducation.” The victors today have no more right to bludgeon their political ideas into the defeated than missionaries have to bludgeon Christianity into indigenous peoples.
The entire policy of “denazification” as currently practiced—mass dismissals, imprisonments, protracted trials—is wrong and must not be tolerated. The defeated peoples alone have the right to alter their political or religious ideologies; the victors may exert no coercion over them. Thus, the policy of reeducation and denazification through force must be wholly abolished.
VIII. Disarmament
Since fairness must be the foundation of peace, and fairness means treating others as one would wish to be treated in the same situation, the victors must not divide the world into two camps: one armed (and dominant), represented by themselves, and the other disarmed and weaker, namely the defeated. In a peaceful brotherhood of humanity, no such discrimination can exist. The United States must persistently advocate for gradual disarmament among all nations, but it must not demand of others what it is unwilling to apply to itself.