ustxtxb_obs_1964_01_10_50_00013-00000_000.pdf

kind and stopping the madman Hitler from executing his mad designs. What kind of protest did he think wasn’t made in 1939 and 1940 which ought to have been made? Presumably, the kind of protest which ultimately we did make, when we pledged ourselves and all of our military resources to fighting a war that was just as devastating, I repeat the figure, ten times as more devastating for the residents of Cologne, for the residents of Essen, for the residents of Dresden, than any in which a nuclear bomb has taken part. I have to admit that I am and continue to be frightened by the easy emotional reaction to a man who says I refuse to touch . . . . and be defiled, I refuse to aim my rifle at the heart of a man irrespective of the case that you seem to make for the necessity of violence under certain circumstances. WHAT IN FACT is Mr. Dugger, and those others who feel like him, what in fact is he trying to say? What is the moral arithmetic involved? We know, as I say, that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were insignificant weapons in the last war by contrast with those other weapons that we had then dropped. We do know, do we not, that certainly even in the first World War, which was infinitely bloodier than its successor, the number of lives that were lost were, in proportion to the population, far fewer than were lost in the religious or the Thirty Years wars during the 16th and 17th century, which in turn did not compare with some of the carnages, that, for instance, wiped out all of Carthage, or the kind of casualties that were lost at Thermopylae. Does this mean that we ought to be unconcerned or be simply arithmetically concerned with the loss of mankind? No. Precisely not. Because involved as we are in mankind, every man’s death tolls a bell for all of us. But what is it that transmuted this arithmetic to a position where now we say in a sense, not only what we were not willing to say during the Nazi period, but that we were called upon by this same orator to say quite the contrary, that now we say the kind of threat that we are facing is not the kind of threat that justifies even under the serverest provocation, the use of nuclear weaponry. Is Winston Churchill, who did protest the Nazi atrocities, is he a morally blind man when he gets up and says in 1949 that those people who have freedom left in Western Europe owe that freedom to the existence of the nuclear bomb? Are we in fact emotionally mature enough to be able to face the fact that there has been a geometric growth in the concentration of lethality weapons? And does this growth in the weapons, does it in some way tend to diminish the rightness for which weapons under certain circumstances are used? Or what is the meaning of death in macrocosmic terms? In what sense can one die more completely or more hideously because he has been obliterated by an atomic bomb or by a single rifle? Do we, are we in fact challenged in the 20th Cen tury to go back and examine those animating assumptions of our own freedom, expressed by Patrick Henry when he said, “Give me liberty, or give me death.” Ladies and gentlemen, if there is a member of the so-called conservative group in America who is not in favor of reducing tensions, I disown him, myself, to the extent that I have any authority to do so. It is not a reduction of tensions that we are worried about. What we are worried about is what so often proceeds under the name of the reduction of tensions. It is quite true as Mr. Dugger points out that merely because Khrushchev comes out for peaceful co-existence does not mean that we ought to be against peaceful coexistence. Just as, for instance, it does not mean simply because Mr. Oswald elected to shoot Mr. Kennedy that we ought to support Mr. Kennedy’s programs which we had not therefore been prepared to support. We should not be prepared to give Mr. Khrushchev the right to determine our foreign policy any more than we are prepared to give Mr. Oswald the right to determine our domestic policy, as sometimes President Johnson seems to be suggesting. The point is that we are all in favor of the reduction of tensions, but the reduction of tensions we have known as a result of historical experience, and what else do we have to learn from, is a systematic artifice that is used by the enemy with Pavlovian regularity, aimed constantly at getting us to drop our guard. It is every time that Krushchev calls for a reduction of tensions that we ought especially to watch the silver, because we know that in between these spirits of Geneva and St. David, and Paris, and the rest of it, it when, in the intersticies of those cosy spirits, is when he tends to reach most aggressively against a fresh area of the world. We have as I understand it in some a responsibility in maturity to accept our role in history. Our role in history is to defend the West against its total barbarization. Our role in history is not to be cosseted by the phony arguments on behalf of the reduction of tensions during a period when the principal aggressor has not in fact renounced his claims over your throat and my throat, over your freedom and his freedom. Let us by all means reduce tensions, but reduce them only as we have concrete grounds to believe that the other man has renounced his claims against us. It would not be wise nor proper, nor would it conduce to the end of peace, nor would it conduce to the -end of freedom, if as an act of emotional faith we were to serve notice on the enemy that we will not under and circumstances defend ourselves with nuclear weapons because to do so is to do violence to refined judgment of such as Mr. Dugger. Make that decision, ladies and gentlemen, make that decision, renounce unilaterally the use of nuclear war or the possibility of nuclear war, and you will have more carnage, more bloodshed than was envisioned in the darkest nightmares of Mr. Dugger, and he and such as him would bear the moral responsibility for it. MMI EXTENDING OUR FREEDOM THROUGH THE ACLU “Our historic task in this embattled age is not merely to defend freedom. It is to extend its writ and strengthen its covenant.”John F. Kennedy No group or organization is as unswervingly on the job of defending, maintaining, and extending our constitutional freedoms free speech and association, due process, and equality before the lawas is the American Civil Liberties Union. Whether in the courts, in the legislatures, or in the arena of public opinion, the ACLU is constantly at workinterpreting, supporting, defending, studying, questioning, clarifying. With an impartial hand and with equal concern for the popular and the unpopular, the ACLU stands ready to assist wherever and whenever any person’s civil liberties are threatened. If you are interested in defending, extending, and strengthening freedom, then YOU need ACLU ACLU needs YOU Send dues of $6.00 or more for 1964 to: ACLU, 156 Fifth Ave., New York 10, N.Y. Or communicate with your nearest affiliate: AUSTINP. 0. Box 9184, Austin 17, Texas. DALLASP. 0. Box 2251, Dallas, Texas. HOUSTONP. 0. Box 52875, Houston 52, Texas.