Some Notes from 1945
by Grace JamesEditor's note: This document from the estate of Grace James, a member of the Forum, was given to me in February of 2000 by a very trustworthy source. It was represented to me as a collection of notes made during a reading to the Forum (by Dr. Sadler), of a 1945 communication purportedly from the Midwayers. Scott Forsythe comments:
"Dave, I don't have all the details in mind but this paper has been around for years. Dr. Sadler published a book shortly after WWII that dealt with his perceptions on the condition of the world and where he thought it was going. Further the content of the James notes is related to a second work written by an individual not associated with the Urantia Papers. This second work, which Dr. Sadler seems to have utilized as a source, was published at the end of the WWII. Although Forum members seem to have assumed that the basis for the talk was from 'messages', others later recognized a relationship between Dr. Sadler's talk and this second work."
Scott's comment is important because it highlights difficulties which Forum members may have had in recalling the origin of particular "messages" -- distinguishing that which was of superhuman origin from that which was commentary by early leaders. This particular set of notes was reported to have been made by Grace at the time of the Forum meeting. When she returned home after the meeting, she put them in a drawer where they were found some ten years later.
The entire document is fully reproduced here for your consideration as given to me without correction of typos or grammar.
RESPONSIBILITY
Full responsibility for peace rests upon the English-speaking nations. They had the mastery after 1915, but didn't recognize and accept the call to duty. England and the United States turned their backs on the high privilege of planetary service. They wanted peace, prosperity, and national security; they got depression, unemployment, insecurity, and in 20 years another war. The United States increased its trials and tribulations a million-fold by trying to escape its responsibility.
Between the two wars nothing was done to prepare the children and the youth of the nation for their coming responsibility--their part to play in world progress--and many of them refused to grow up. Why did Democracy decline so rapidly between the two wars? The leaders in England, France and America were short-sighted. Many couldn't see beyond their own personal interests. These men sometimes performed against public sentiment; but even when replaced by others, the new ones behaved likewise.
There was paucity of leadership and indifference to liberty. They saw Mussolini, Hitler and Tojo arming, but didn't take it seriously. Democracy was not willing to fight. At various times an army of from 5,000 to 25,000 men could have prevented this war. The Democracies were unwilling and totally unorganized. They hated war and longed for peace--but could you run a business or even manage a home so shortsightedly? The cowardly leaders of Democracy have set the clock of civilization back 2000 years. But we have a chance to start afresh. Today there is little Democracy to defend, and we can build a new world order from the ground up; but we must reject the policy of non-resistance. You can't be as brotherly as you'd like to be with an unbrotherly brother.
FREEDOM
The real problem is: Man wants liberty, and liberty with equality; but equality never has existed. Freedom is an ideal. It doesn't exist.
Evolution can have freedom only with compulsion. We must restrain by compulsion This is true of the individual, community, state, nation, and in family life. There is no sense to the doctrine of freedom that gives citizens the right to combat and destroy the freedoms that Democracy gives. There is no peace on earth with the license to destroy the liberty and sovereignty of other peoples. No nation can exist on a level above law. Freedom is fostered by human liberalism and Christianity. What is liberalism in one generation is conservatism in the next. Liberalism has become dogmatic and Democracy has ceased to grow. Democracy ceased to keep pace with industrial progress. Self-government is slowly committing suicide.
Freedom must be ever militant and unhesitatingly destroy whatever assails freedom, and be intolerant concerning things undemocratic. There should be no liberty of speech for those who would destroy liberty of speech. The tools of freedom must not function in a suicidal capacity. There must be no liberty to vote in the freedoms of Democracy to destroy the right to vote.
DEMOCRACY
Democracy today is being destroyed by those who wish to use Democracy. Democracy is not a club to join and forever enjoy its protection. (Some club members are known to have looted the kitchen and cheated at the card games.) As long as Democracy's basic freedoms exist it is a Democracy. The right view of Democracy is a geographic group of people having a common ideal. To allow Germans to live here and retain their German citizenship is like letting the wolves live with the sheep. Offices must be held by citizens trained in schools of statesmanship. These schools must be established.
NATIONALISM
The nations are suffering from intense industrialism and augmented nationalism. In times past Nationalism was a good thing; it brought people together in common interest, within law and representative government. But when a social ideal becomes a political dogma, it becomes an obstacle to world progress. Nationalism becomes a relic of patriotism which no forward-looking prophet would dare touch.
Nationalism persists because it has not been attacked by modern and intelligent citizens who do not seek to disrupt, but to save it by intelligent control. Present-day Nationalism is akin to polytheism. Nation and race became the pagan god of many modern people. The time has come to give way before a monotheistic policy of Internationalism. The churches must divorce themselves from Nationalism.
INTERNATIONALISM
Internationalism will not be created by pacts, treaties, appeasements, etc. It will be created by force of arms. It is the only way for the next 1000 years of civilizatian's evolution. International Legislatures must make the international laws, an International Court must interpret the laws, and an International Police must enforce the laws. Lesser nations must be forced into the international union. (Rhode Island was forced into the United States by her neighboring states, New York and Massachusetts. Soon she was proud to be one of us, and glad of the advantages and protection it gave her. The Civil War forced the Confederate States to stay in the Union; soon they became loyal members.)
Not in centuries has the Christian world had the opportunity to establish regional internationalism. Now, following total war, is the time to establish international government. Socialism, Communism, and other world movements have lost their influence. Now there must be coercive law with sure penalties attached to its violation. The god of Nationalism struck at the liberty of Democracy and at the Christian religion.
Nationalism reached the beginning of the end when you could cross the ocean in six hours and it took six weeks to get a visa. Recalcitrant and selfish Nationalism must be made to accept Internationalism (just as the Confederacy was forced to stay in the Union). It won't regret it 25 years from now.
There are only two realities in the world--the individual and the human race. The cosmos does not recognize caste, tribe, race, or nation. National wars will end when you recognize that nations is not the final goal of human evolution. (Religious wars ended when church and state were separated.)
SOVEREIGNTY
No single idea has wrought so much misery as that delusive concept of sovereignty. Sovereignty passed from King to nation; a political dogma, for soon the people wielded sovereignty much as Kings did. Today millions are dying and millions more will starve to the national idea of sovereignty. Sovereignty reached its height in the French revolution, and its deathbed in this war. Military victors have a chance to resurrect it in a modified form. May it be a democratic modification.
Enormous vested interests are involved in the worship of the Golden Calf of sovereignty (politicians, government employees, rulers, lobbyists, religions in some nations, etc.) which results in economic dislocation. What will be the effect upon our returning soldiers? National matters should be handled by national sovereignty and international affairs be handled by international sovereignty.
PEACE
Peace will become the watch care of international government. When lawless minorities learn that, then peace will prevail. Appeasement and moral compromise are the habits of peace-loving and self-loving Nationalists. The present conflict resulted when nations wanted peace at any price. The theory of Democracy validates the concept of equality--but the idea of equality produces conflicts which only courts can settle, unless the victors establish international overcontrol for those less peoples who are hungry for freedom and self-government. (Victory is a continuous proposition.)
The dream of equality is fiction. It is not nationally or individually true. Such a dream can only be realized before God or before a court (an altar and the law). Man acquires citizenship equality before the law; before a super-court all nations are equal. You cannot have equality among trends or creations without law; and law, without the coercive power of enforcement is a tragic farce. Equality without law means war. Without super-law you can only have peace when the weaker submit to the stronger.
Any hope for world peace without coercive international law is a furtive dream. Mandatory law is law enforced by unquestioned force. Peace is the reign of law. Law is the just use of force by unquestioned authority. There can't be lasting peace without force. To make peace we must wage legal war. There is a difference between the outlaw who kills a man and the sheriff who kills the outlaw for his crime. The sheriff is not a murderer--he is a peace officer.
Non-intervention and appeasements are like the old monarchs' "gentlemen's agreements." Each agrees to let the other carry out his nefarious schemes.
War is the major factor in the non-spiritual history of the human race. At the present time the most advanced peoples look upon it as an unnecessary evil. It is the first time in history that world-wide peace has been talked of. Wars have become increasingly more terrible in the last 150 years, and for the last 100 years no government has been able to get the full support of its people to a war policy. Leaders start wars on the theory that they are going to be, or have been, attacked. If the majority want to abolish war, why don't they do it? If war is an expression of human emotions like crime, it won't be abolished. But civilized people have abolished individual crime. Another view: in the case of a criminal committing murder, you quickly distinguish between the criminal and the sheriff who shoots him. Each from a biological viewpoint is guilty, but not from the social and moral viewpoints.
There are two kinds of war: (1) social criminal aggression, (2) legal group military sanctions. (Churches should deal with principles, not expediencies.) An International Government can (a) reduce war to a minimum just as courts function to minimize crime, (b) render war a legal action on the part of authorized groups for the peace, safety, and security of all mankind. War can be and must be legalized, minimized, and humanized. The use of poison gas, submarines, and aerial bombing of civilian populations can be prevented. The International Police will be known as Peace Armies. You cannot maintain rules of warfare when armies are conscripted and nations are fighting for sovereignty. You can't have international law without international power to enforce the law. (Professional armies have strong customs- Things are done such and such a way because it is the custom; with conscription you dilute tradition to the vanishing point.)
Disarmament on the part of great nations such as the peace-loving people of the United States is a direct contribution to war. If the English-speaking peoples remain intelligent and fully armed, they will constitute the Peace Army until the regional and international courts can be established. Equal quality of arms is a delusion. What mayor of a great city would allow criminals to carry guns? Arm well the police but prevent the criminal element from getting arms. Long have wellmeaning but short-sighted pacifists proclaimed, "You can't have peace by waging war." That is exactly what you can do, and will have to do for the next millenium.
Legal war is the act of the legal authority of the International Government--action in response to law. Legal war is designed to maintain peace, not to take loot or seek revenge. It is waged by order of the legal authority of International Government for safe-guarding the peace of nations. There are two kinds of fighting, and any nation that fights an illegal war will fight a hopeless one. The time has come for nations to be governed by law and not by political ambition, personal whims and directives, rampant nationalism, fanatical dictators, or the delusion of sovereignty. Modern science has ended the day of the international frontiersman. The forces of civilization have arrived on the international frontier. (Being exposed to this doesn't mean a thing unless we have "the ear to hear.")
The dogma of non-intervention is the most uncivilized and inconsistent ever held by modern nations. What would you think of a policeman who would refuse to help a fellow officer who was engaged in a struggle with a thug? And it is just such strange and inhuman conduct on the part of America and other world powers which enables unscrupulous dictators to become rulers in other parts of the world. Non-intervention is the remnant of the "gentlemen's agreement" of the olden rulers which was just an agreement between monarchs not to interfere in each others' wars.
Today's advances in science, industry, commerce, communication, etc. render the dogma of neutrality inconsistent. This neutrality makes possible (1) inconsistency of policies, (2) corrupt press, (3) fomenting of strikes, disorganization, disunity, divide and conquer.
Six or eight years ago the American nation began to watch a European nation stop making automobiles and turn to making airplanes, conscript its citizens, make over its schools, ration its food, tax and limit incomes. They were 2000 miles away so America refused to be concerned. Now we're doing those same things whether we like it or not. The world can't go on half free and half slave; it must be either all free or all slave. There are still thousands of Americans who don't see things as they really are. They long for the day when it will be over and they can return to their old ways. They are Isolationists at heart, ready to disarm and sink their navy again. They learned very little from the last world war (World War I) wherein the naval disaster (disarming) was far more costly than the loss at Pearl Harbor.
If one great nation allows treaties to be counted as scraps of paper, then all great nations are invalidated. Today if one goes off the gold standard, they all go off, because each is so interdependent. (All nations sneeze when one of the great powers takes snuff.) The world is so economically interdependent that the price of commodities must be determined by the producer operating under the least favorable conditions. Which means, in competition, the standard of living, depth of culture, extent of education, labor conditions, personal liberty, taxation tariff, exports and imports, defense policies, and moral standards. The nation living under the least favorable condition and lowest cultural standard will become the determining influence over all other peoples.
The only hope of the survival of the American standards of living is to share them as far as possible with other peoples. If one powerful nation is deficient in morality, it costs us much more to keep ours up. (Our tax money has to go into restraining N. Clark St., not into enlarging Northwestern University campus. We have to become Christians or pay the price. We're up against the buzz saw of circumstances.) The nation that would selfishly save its own high standards will be destined to lose them. In any circumscribed area of the world it will be discovered, in the long run, that the existing government will be compelled to gravitate gradually down to the level of the lowest and most primitive that is allowed to exist. (You can enhance the possibilities of the lowest, and the highest can also be lowered.) One criminal and inferior abroad in a community can corrupt a score of well-meaning youths. In self-defense the Democracies must export life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Whoever heard of neutrality between right and wrong? How can you be neutral in the struggle between good and evil? In any ideal struggle neutrality is suicidal. Neutrality means the enemy is free to pick you off one at a time. (Just what happened in Europe.) In local government a sheriff when hard-pressed by lawlessness can deputize any number of citizens, but such a plan won't work on a national scale. Such results can only be gotten by internationalism.
Honest men cannot have confidential dealings with rascals. Honest nations keep their word and live up to their treaties. (The dishonest use a treaty to gain time for their further depredations.) The honest administration does not make treaties with a dishonest neighbor. If war is to be outlawed, the farce of neutrality must end. It is immoral and cowardly for a group of law-abiding citizens to stand idly by and see a fellow citizen being held up, beaten and robbed; and such moral indifference is suicidal to a nation. What can be said of Christian nations that stand by complacently while world gangsters strafe and plunder the civilized world, murdering and starving little children? May it never happen again.
The French Revolution reached the highest point in the struggle for personal liberty; the American Revolution in the struggle for national independence. A grave mistake was made when the spirit of independence was concocted into a formula of self-determination; and it was an American president who perpetrated this blunder when only fifty years previously a Civil Was was fought to prevent the right of self-determination. (If the South had been allowed to secede, any misled group of states could secede and set up its own government, and the result would soon be fragmentation of the Federal Union. By giving up the strenggh they had in the Union they'd expose themselves to the intrigues and aggressiveness of some more powerful nation. Fragmentation is what happened to the Roman Empire.) Little nations can no more have self-determination than each State of the Union can have complete sovereignty. (When Texas separated from Mexico and sought to join with the U.S., England recognized her independence before we did -- International intrigue at work!)
Each State is sovereign in all matters of State, but in national affairs the Federal Government is sovereign, and you can only have peace predicated on law. The idea of every little nation having the right of self-determination only spells industrial paralysis and social hell. Internationalism is detrimental to national intrigue.
You can't postulate independence without encountering interdependence, and nine out of ten nations can't have economic independence without enormously lowering their standard of living. The United States and Russia -- the two most powerful nations in the world--are not economically independent. Humans are born wholly dependent. Each child seeks independence but he learns as he grows older, that he is interdependent. The concept of complete independence is falacious. In life there is dependence, independence, and then intelligent interdependence.
The complete independence of self-determination which was accorded small nations after the last world war (World War I) did not afford this security. They were uneasy, suspicious, and tormented by feelings of insecurity. Both individuals and nations must learn the lessons of interdependence. (Liberty and license are in a confused state in this world.) The attempt at complete economic independence leads to over-production, disorderly distribution, unemployment, economic depression, Neither a nation nor a small group of nations can hope to enjoy complete and independent economic freedom.
In the spiritual world "no man liveth unto himself alone." Neither can a nation continue to live to itself. A state that strives for economic freedom will gravitate certainly and swiftly to a totalitarian state. Fascism and Naziism is the result of striving for economic freedom -- freedom without restraint, liberty without compulsion. (Gen. Chiang Kai Chek regards power as responsibility. He says that none of China's strength after the war will be used to offset the strength of her neighbors.) Honesty in business and altruism in government pays high dividends. If we fail England she will find an ally in Russia strong enough to maintain peace. If we fail China, how long will it be before the Communists in China will combine with the Communists in Russia?There's plenty of Communism in China and Russia if we default. If that happens where will we be? Always on the defensive pursuing isolation. (It would cost more than Internationalism.)
We must relinquish national sovereignty and enter into international sovereignty. Think how much states are free when they don't have to concern themselves with things Federal. So would nations be more free with an International Government to attend to global affairs. It will be too late to undertake it after the war is over. Says the Declaration of Independence, "Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it is the right of the people to alter, abolish, or institute new government, laying its foundations on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness."
Today the nations of the earth are most unsafe and most unhappy. Nationalism is on its deathbed. Unlimited sovereignty is moribund. The time has come for the birth of Internationalism. Let the sick nations follow the wise counsel of the fathers of American independence. Will you humble your nationalism enough to adopt a sane internationalism?
Dictators proclaim "Might is Right." Democracies believe Right is Might. The world is suffering from these errors or relative truths. Spiritual causes cannot employ physical force in their interests, but material causes depend on physical force for their survival. It is perfectly proper to found a church on the ideas of the League of Nations of World War I. How could you run a family with each child having equal vote? You'd eat candy, ice cream, and strawberry shortcake most of the time. When the League of Nations didn't apply force it committed suicide. War is a legal reality. When not used in the support of law, it will be used in the contravention of law and against economic justice. How silly to let international gangsters and criminals dominate the world!
Divorce force from the service of aggression and attach it to the law of justice. Our slogan should be "Right predicated on Might." Educate zealous crusaders to toil for the new order. Democracy has too many apostles and not enough crusaders. When two nations are in trouble with each other, neither one can judge their aggressions. That is the job of an International Court. Aggression is good when directed against injustice. Hitler made his first aggression when he proclaimed, "Right is whatever is in the interest of the German folk." That's the time we should have struck. Judgment is the function of a group.
Democracy cannot be static. Peace is dynamic. When the law-abiding citizen is static then the outlaw is dynamic. As we exist today we can only exist by waging war -- war that is waged in the interest of International Law. War can only be prevented by the action of International Police ready to act instantly. Failure to provide for International Police provides for international banditry. When the first international military force moves against the first one who dares to go against international law, then we'll have peace.
Democracies were used to seeing local gangsters committing crime. But they were shocked to see them at the heads of governments. We dreaded law with force. Now we have a world with force without law.
God is the same being under whatever name. But to have the same God does not insure sameness of worship. Emotional unity does not come about by agreement of beliefs about the good. Just as in aesthetic matters, understanding comes about by agreement on particular objects of art, so in moral matters it comes about by agreement on particular objects of esteem and reverence. For the deeper stages of emotional understanding, men have need of a common and concrete symbol of regard and faith. This need grows as the arrival of a world culture calls for increasing co-operation across racial and temperamental lines.