Page:The Autobiography of a Catholic Anarchist.djvu/69

CHAPTER 4. SOCIAL WORK 56 called an unjust war; we fought an unnecessary Civil War to free the Negro and we have refused to give him his real freedom; we grabbed the very islands for which we are now fighting from Spain in an equally imperialistic venture; we started a revolution in Columbia and stole Panama, we invaded Nicaragua and countless other countries to protect foolish foreign loans and investments; we sold war materials to Japan until recently and helped build up her imperialism in the Far East; we excluded an energetic and noble people from our shores; we refused to support or to build up a decent League of Nations or to live up to our own Kellogg Peace Pact, renouncing war. We do not come before the bar of history with clean hands.


 * More recently the President, with the aid of his erstwhile opponent, has duped the country inch by inch until we are in this war. Likely, he sincerely believed that "the end justified the meanness" and good would come of it. History has proven him mistaken now, and will increasingly prove that evil defeats itself. His slogans tell this story of trickery: "Fools Gold;" "Cash and Carry;" "The draft is just a census... your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars;" "all aid short of war;" "lend and lease;" "patrols not convoys."


 * I predict that we will not conquer Fascism, although we may defeat Hitler; we will have a Fascist dictatorship under the name of Democracy upon us I predict that Germany and Russia will make a separate peace and that England, as always, will fight only for herself and we will be left to fight the world.


 * By my action in refusing to register for the draft, I speak and act only for myself. Others have to draw the line where they see fit. I speak, also for the millions who were fooled by the slogans of the War-Party and who now, but dimly, realize how the President maneuvered them into this war. I speak for the millions of Christians who have been again sold out by their leaders who value church property and power more than they value the example of Christ, and who accept the "lesser evil" rather than the ultimate good and the counsels of perfection. I speak for the millions of union men who have succumbed to the glory of "time and a half," little realizing that they are accessories before the face of legal murder, in making the weapons of death. I speak for the thousands of radicals whose leaders have forgotten the ideals of Debs, Lansbury, old Bob LaFollette, Berkman, the I.W.W.'s, and Sacco and Vanzetti, and who now support the war. I speak for those individuals and small groups in and out of Protestant and Catholic churches who do not go so far in opposition to war as I do. I speak for my fellow-vegetarians, many of whom have succumbed to this wholesale blood-letting