permission, said in reference to 'The March of Folly' that:
"History teaches."
Not always, it can be said, or peace would have been achieved by now and neither she nor i would still have the "concerns" we do for the survival of the peace movement.
However, i agree with her basic analysis about history.
It will teach if there are students to be taught who will learn from history so that the same
mistakes won't be made over and over again.
And as i am an individual who was raised in this "New World," who hopes that the contributions the true democracies of it can make now will be made--and soon enough to honestly help--with the kind permission of the copyright holder, i would like to supplement my introduction to my book by including the foreword to Alice Felt Tyler's classic book on the development of American freedom and democracy...which aren't necessarily synonamous...'Freedom's Ferment'.
In the book itself, Ms. Tyler noted a moral dilemma that confronted the pacifist members of the American peace movement at the time of the Nineteenth Century civil war in the United States.
It was prophetically relevant to the world at war while she was preparing her book in 1944.
I believe it remains relevant today, in a world that is dividing on sides against South Africa's apartheid and those who can 'live with it continuing.'
In 1944, Ms. Tyler wrote, near the end of her chapter titled, 'The Crusade For Peace', that:
"Horace Greeley, who attended a few sessions of the London conference (on international peace), probably expressed a common sentiment when he wrote that, although he did not see how anyone who did not live by injustice, oppression, or murder could disapprove the idea of universal peace, yet he found the atmosphere of the conference intolerable and unreal, for, he said,
...suppose there is a portion of the human family who won't have Peace, nor let others have it, what then? If you say 'Let us have it as soon as we can,' I respond with all my heart. I would tolerate war, even against pirates and murderers, no longer than is absolutely necessary to inspire them with a love of Peace, or put them where they can no longer invade the peace of others.
But so long as Tyrannies and Aristocracies shall say--as they now practically do say all over Europe--'Yes, we too are for Peace, but it must be Peace with absolute submission to our good pleasure--Peace with two thirds of the fruits of Human Labor devoted to the pampering of our luxurious appetites, the maintenance of our pomp, the indulgence of our unbounded desires--it must be a Peace which leaves the Millions in darkness, in hopeless degradation, the slaves of superstition, and the hopeless victims of our lusts.' I answer, 'No, Sirs! On your conditions no Peace is possible, but everlasting War rather, until your unjust pretensions are abandoned or until your power of enforcing them is destroyed.'