The World in Chains | Page 7

presumptuous questioning, and know that these things are not revealed to the children of men.
The Bustan of Mahmud Aga el-Arnauty.
§ 1
The Armament Ring
What, in short, are the forces that make for the anachronistic survival of war--apart of course from the defect that it is always with us, the habit of inertia, sometimes called Conservatism?
The obvious answer is not, I think, the correct one. At least it is correct as far as it goes, but leaves us very far from a complete explanation of this unpleasant survival. So scandalous is the interrelation of the armament firms[11] which has developed the world's trade in munitions and explosives into one obscene cartel; so cynical is the avidity with which their agents exchange their trade secrets, sell ships and guns, often by means of diplomatic blackmail, to friend or foe alike, and follow those pioneers of civilisation the missionary, the gin merchant and the procurer,[12] into the wildest part of the earth; so absurd on the face of it is the practice of allowing the manufacture of armaments to remain in the hands of private companies; that it is very tempting to see in the great Armament Firms the principal if not the only cause of modern war. Examiners of German militarism, most of them stupid enough to quote Nietzsche, may be pardoned for emphasising the political influence of Krupp; and since every great Power has a more or less efficiently organised Krupp of its own, it would be permissible to suggest that war would be already obsolete but for the intensive cultivation it receives for the benefit of Krupp, Creusot, Elswick and the rest. But it would be wrong; our syllogism would have a badly undistributed middle. It is true that Krupp in particular, who is the actual owner of more than one popular German newspaper, and other armament firms in a smaller degree, exercise an enormous influence on national opinion, create their own markets by the threat of war, and would go bankrupt if wars should cease. You may also say that their shareholders live by prostituting the patriotism of their fellow-citizens: in short, you may denounce them with the most expensive rhetoric to be had without doing them any injustice. But the fact remains that their position with regard to war is exactly analogous to that of the great breweries with regard to drunkenness. They live by taking advantage of human weakness. It is quite accurate, therefore, to describe their earnings as immoral, but they are no more the cause of the immorality they exploit and undoubtedly encourage, than makers of seismological instruments are responsible for the occurrence of earthquakes. The interests of one trade alone, however powerful in itself, would never be strong enough to plunge a nation into war. They are, of course, accessories to the crime; but the militarism they are guilty of fostering has other primary explanations.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 11: Several books have been published giving details of the Armament Ring and international "Kruppism." I don't think that the language here used does any injustice to the facts.]
[Footnote 12: See below, § 7.]
§ 2
Eugenics?
In this brief investigation of the possible causes of war, it must be understood that what we want to find is what is called a "sufficient reason" for its continued existence. The armament trades may supply the means, the occasion, the stimulant, but their relation to it is not essentially causal. Many writers of another school have attempted to prove that the sufficient reason of war is a beneficent function of which they believe it to be capable. This imaginary function is none other than that of improving the race, and we may admit at once that, if there were the slightest scientific basis for such a belief, the bloodiest war would be morally justified, and it would be the religious duty of every individual to kill as many as possible of his fellows for the benefit of their descendants. But of course modern warfare so far from improving the race must sensibly exhaust it. In ancient Sparta, and generally whenever the conditions of warfare approximated to those of personal combat, courage and the allied characteristics of mental as well as of physical nobility must have had a survival value; whereas in modern warfare which makes for the indiscriminate extermination of all combatants, the result is exactly reversed. Our semi-scientific militarists forget that the "survival of the fittest"[13] is in nature essentially a process of selective elimination; and modern war is a process of inverted selection which eliminates the brave, the adventurous and the healthy; precisely those members of the community who are best fitted to survive, that is to propagate their kind, in the ordinary environment of political life. Conscription, indeed, spreading a wider net than the voluntary system, may be described as an institution