WORLD SECURITY
J.C. Kumarappa
The much advertised San Francisco Conference has produced a scheme which it is claimed will make for peace and will guarantee the four freedoms for which it has been working. The method it has adopted is to entrust the policing functions to a group of “Big Powers” assisted by a few smaller ones. This group will wield the big stick and keep down the recalcitrant ones. In effect it is the old League of Nations with a few frills added, and we fear it will meet the same fate as its predecessor, as the basic evils in society which produce such holocausts as these World Wars, have not been tackled at all. The remedy sought is too superficial.
In the history of mankind these attempts at making the world safer from the onslaughts of greed and avarice are not novel. In Christendom the Church, not content with reserving for itself the moral power consequent on its spiritual leadership, but with the help and allegiance of other temporal States and with the sanction of physical force and violence, tried for centuries to play the role of arbiter and restore the rule of reason amongst nations; but the savage and barbaric hordes of Europe reduced its efforts to futility as these recurring World Wars have witnessed. The heart of man was not touched.
The attempt made by Islam was through ethnical means. They aimed at making humanity a brotherhood where all distinctions of caste, colour and economic inequalities would be abolished. This method was much more successful but as it confined itself only to the followers of the Prophet it did not naturally attain world-wide dimensions in practice. It has yet great unexplored possibilities.
In India, the Hindus of old launched on an elaborate plan to sterilise greed and avarice by setting up cultural standards of values, which will reduce the evils of economic competition and lay emphasis on the value of the development of personality. In the Varnashram Dharma the ones who exercised merely rights were put down as the lowest group. The profit seeking Vaisya had no high social status while the protector of the people, the Kshatriya, had a status all his own, independent of his wealth or material possessions. The dispossessed Brahmin, whose position of influence was based on the service of his fellowmen, occupied the pinnacle of respect. This system has also fallen short of its possibilities because, in the course of time, these distinguishing ideals were lost sight of and status was attached to birth rather than to the form of service rendered to society.
The San Francisco Conference granting the charter of World Security by the agreement and help of the “Big Powers” borders on the ludicrous. Whoever has heard of the small nations being a menace to World Security? It is the greed of the “Big Powers” that has plunged the world in streams of blood from time to time. For these very miscreants to be asked to guarantee World Security is like entrusting the safety of our banking houses to a team of gangsters. What is needed is the disintegration and liquidation of these very “Big Powers” and a fundamental change in the economic outlook and organisations.
We have to accept the fact that all modern wars are caused by economic competition for raw materials and markets. This competition is made keener still by a complex standard of living built up by a whole series of artificially created wants which do not satisfy any natural needs. This being so, there can be no world security until this malady is attacked. The remedy cannot be mere physical force and restraint caused by fear. The real cause has to be grappled with, and a solution found by means of cultural forces, which will counteract the acquisitive tendencies of man and crush his selfishness. This calls for the setting up of standards based on simplicity of life and building up of character and personality. Only by such means will it be possible to secure to the world composed of the weak and the strong, the simple and the sophisticated, a state of affairs where all can follow their several avocations free from fear, want and slavery and enjoy freedom of thought and speech. In practice, to achieve this in the economic sphere it would be necessary to curb the profit motive and control the centralized industries and at the same time regulate our consumption in the light of real needs.
(Source: Gram Udyog Patrika, July 1945)