In 1949, W.E.B. Du Bois testified before Congress to protest against a bill that would fund the new North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). His speech provides a clear framing of the central issues and contradictions involved in the original formation of NATO and its aims of establishing a grounds in Europe for war against the Soviet Union. The question of war and peace, in his mind, most starkly illustrated the divergence between the interests and aspirations of the American people and those of their true enemy–the ruling class. While the world has evolved in years since, Du Bois’s critique of the war agenda still serves as a guiding light for comprehending our own times, where NATO is portrayed as a bastion of democracy, dissent is cast as treason, and tens of billions of dollars are funneled to fuel the West’s unchecked proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and future war with China. Through mainstream media, the public is told to accept the costs of their government’s massive economic and military war-drive; no discussion is had about the origins of the present conflict and what it will mean for a global political and financial system that is on the brink of epoch-defining changes. For Du Bois in 1949, the possibility of a third world war placed a responsibility on the American people to struggle for truth, for democratic rule, and for profound moral courage in the fight for a genuine and just world peace.
I appear here at the request of the Continental Peace Congress to be held in Mexico next month and of the Council on African Affairs to protest against the proposal for the United States to arm Europe for war. The Congress is asked to vote down payment of $1.5 billion together with unspecified sums in the future to implement the Atlantic pact.
This huge sum is not for education, although our schools are in desperate need of help. It is not for infantile paralysis which is sweeping the land, nor for cancer which is killing thousands. It is not for curbing and putting to work the mad waters of those great rivers which annually kill men, women, and children and destroy their homes, stock, and property, leaving muddy and stinking disease behind. This rich country has not enough money to spend for fighting ignorance, disease, and waste, or for the old-age security of its workers, but nevertheless is asked to spend a vast treasure to murder men, women, and children; to blind and cripple them and drive them insane; to destroy property by fire and flood; and for the third time in 50 years to jeopardize the whole edifice of civilization.
We are assured that these arms are for peace, not war—just as we were promised that the pact was for peace, not arms. None but the stupid believe this assurance. Mr. Acheson’s logic is flawless for fools:
Gentlemen, this a pact for peace.
Thank you, gentlemen; now arms for the pact, not for war but for peace, war for peace. Russia? We do not mention Russia. We just must fight Russia.
It is simple, gentlemen.
We are led to believe that this country is in danger of attack from Russia or that Russia is ready to conquer the world. We did not believe this when we asked 10,000,000 Russians to die in order to save the world from Hitler. We did not believe it when we begged Russia to help conquer Japan. We only began to believe it when we realized that the Russian concept of a state was not going to collapse but was spreading.
Assuming that you do not like and even fear Russian communism, by what right do we assume that it can be stopped by force? One idea seems to be that we can conquer the world and make it do our bidding because we are rich and have the atom bomb. Even if this were true it begs the question of the right and justice of our rule.
Why in God’s name do we want to control the earth? Is it because of our success in ruling man? We want to rule Russia and we cannot rule Alabama.
We tried to rule Puerto Rico and gave it the highest suicide rate in the world.
We sought to rule China and have just confessed our failure.
We set out to rule Germany and apparently our only result is surrender to the very forces which we fought a world war to subdue.
How have we equipped ourselves to teach the world?
To teach the world democracy, we chose a Secretary of State trained in the democracy of South Carolina. When we wanted to unravel the worst economic snarl of the modern world, we chose a general trained in military tactics at West Point; and when we want to study race relations in our borders we summon a baseball player.
If we aim to rule the world we have got to learn to rule ourselves. We have got to free our science from the control of the Army and Navy. We have got to make our schools centers of real learning and not of propaganda and hysteria. We have got to clear our minds of unreasoning prejudices. We who hate niggers and darkies, propose to control a world full of colored people. Will they have no voice in the matter?
Original NATO headquarters in Paris (Source: U.S. National Archives)
Without exact and careful knowledge of this world, how can we guide it? Yet we know that our knowledge of the world today is fed to us by a press whose reporters say what the owners of the press order them to say. This is not the reporters’ fault. If they want to eat they will write as they are told. It is our fault, who are unwilling to pay even 5 cents for our morning news. Big business which pays millions for control of news gets what it wants printed. We naively assumed that what we read in our press is the whole truth, when a little reflection would convince us that we have in America no complete picture of what is transpiring behind the iron curtain. If we retort with the assertion that the Russians are equally deceived as to conditions here, that is no excuse for us. Two wrongs never made a right and two lies do not spell the truth.
If all this ended in opinion, that would be one thing and time would answer it. But it threatens to end in war. We are asked to begin a Third World War on the assumption that we are the possessors of truth and right and able to pound our beliefs into the world’s head by brute force. This is a crazy idea and it is worse folly to try it. If we have to answer to human wealth and happiness we do not have to force men to believe it by atom bombs.
Ideas are seldom changed by force.
I will not say that war has never advanced mankind, but I will aver that in modern times it would be hard to prove that of 1,000 wars, 100 had added to human progress.
What ever is true in the past, it is certain that today no world war can bring success to any nation.
Of course, we know this is true of war as usually fought, but we think that we can now fight by push-button and machine, that human beings will only be necessary in mopping up. We Americans will not fight, we will let John do it—John and Jacques and possibly Hans—while we pay the bill from such pockets as we can reach most easily.
This is crude self-deception and makes us today the most hated nation on earth. The world indulged in that dream when arrows were invented, when gunpowder was first used, when armored battleships and submarines appeared. It is a dream which never will be realized. No, the only cure for war is reason. We have got to know and study the facts and act so as to avoid force. Otherwise we are lost.
Let’s face it. We fight China. We fight Russia. We win or lose or stalemate. If we win, what can we do with 150,000,000 Russians and 450,000,000 Chinese? What would we know in their case more than we knew in Germany or Japan? What would convert them to our way of life except their eventual belief in it? And is not belief, fact and reason, and not guns, our real recourse?
What hinders us from beginning to reason now before we fight? Why are we afraid to reason and wait and persuade?
[Remarks interrupted by a recess]
We are afraid. For we stop logical thinking. We invent witch words. If in 1850 an American disliked slavery, the word of exorcism was “abolitionist.” He was a “nigger lover.” He believed in free love and murder of kind slave masters. He ought to be lynched and mobbed. Today the word is “Communist.” Never mind its meaning in a man’s mind. If anybody questions the power of wealth, wants to build more TVA’s, advocates civil rights for Negroes, he is a Communist, a revolutionist, a scoundrel, and is liable to lose his job or land in jail. And yet there is not today in this Nation an honest progressive citizen who does not share in his beliefs many of the basic ideas of communism.
I am a fellow traveler with Communists insofar as they believe the great ideals of socialism as laid down by the world’s great thinkers since the seventeenth century: I believe in the abolition of poverty. I believe in curbing the social and political power of wealth. I believe in planned industry and more just distribution of wealth. There is in this body of belief nothing revolutionary, unless human progress is revolutionary. There is nothing which has not been advocated by the best thinkers in three centuries.
But what we are being taught to believe today is that Russian communism is not socialism but something dishonest, misleading, and eventually evil while our capitalist system alone is light and truth.
Calling names does not settle this controversy. We call Russia an authoritarian state.
So are we. All states are and must be more or less slave states. They differ in degree of control over citizens and progressive states look forward to decrease of state control, and increase of individual freedom, but Russia, starting with 90 percent of illiteracy in 1917, could not start as a full, free democracy. Only educated people can rule successfully.
Russia showed her faith in democracy by promptly decreasing her illiteracy to less than 10 percent in 30 years.
We showed our belief in slavery by taking 86 years to reduce Negro illiteracy to 30 percent.
We rage at planned economy, but we have planned economy. It grows and sells our crops. It sets our wages and fixes our prices. It tells us what to manufacture and when, where to sell our goods, and where not.
But democracy has no part in it. Our planning is done by our plantation system, by the great trusts of steel, tin, and aluminum, by General Motors and the Du Pont empire, by Standard Oil, by railroads with their fraudulent bonded debt and watered stock, by Wall Street.
This planning is strictly in private hands until it breaks down. Then trust and railroad, bank, and big farm come crawling to the Government for relief.
That, we are told, is not socialism. It is patriotism.
Let us balance in a reasonable way the case of Russia and the United States. Russia has never attacked us. We not only have invaded Russia but have allowed our country to become the center of the most far-reaching verbal attacks on Russia. We are making the United States a refuge for every ousted landlord and exploiter, spy, and informer who hates Russia. We blame Russia for joining Germany in 1940. But we know that she did this only after the United States and Great Britain had refused her offers of alliance and she must join Germany or stand alone.
When Germany turned and treacherously attacked Russia, we awaited her annihilation with equanimity. When, to our surprise, Russia beat Hitler, we welcomed her help but took our own good time before easing her desperate struggle in the east by a western offensive.
We sought her alliance against Japan and courted her at Yalta because we did not dream Japan was so near collapse. And even then we yielded no more than Russia was able to take.
She kept faith with us in every promise at a greater cost than any other country paid. Yet we peremptorily ended her absolutely essential lend-lease and since 1945 have apparently sought every excuse to make war upon her.
W.E.B. Du Bois and Shirley Graham Du Bois visit Leningrad (Source: Year of Du Bois)
Why do we want war with Russia and who leads this demand? We profess to want to protect western Europe against Russia. But it is western Europe which since 1917 has almost continuously attacked Russia. It was western Europe and the United States who after World War I seized countries long recognized as Russian and organized border nations like Poland for the expressed and declared purpose of using them eventually for conquering Russia. It was not imperialist expansion which led Russia to reannex the Baltic States and to secure by every means the close alliance of Poland and the Balkans.
The real reason for war on Russia is not her natural effort to protect her own borders but her effort to establish a Socialist state. Our country is ruled by incorporated wealth, incorporated so as to form a nonhuman person; protected by the fourteenth amendment, secure in organization and ownership of property and able to escape major taxation by hiring the best legal talent of the land. This wealth is forcing us into war. The people of the country do not want war. You do not want war. But somebody does want war, somebody with power and influence, who owns the press and controls radio, cinema, and theater. Somebody whose consequent ability to form public opinion has forced this country into hysteria and fear.
Who is this somebody? It is the group which controls the corporate wealth of this land. They have made money out of war. They are making money out of the fear of war. They demand a third world war to ward off the depression which threatens their business and their wild waste of public taxation. The enemy of this power is the plan of Russia to found a state where this power of wealth will be curbed and destroyed. It is not a question as to whether or not Russia can do this, as to whether or not the present Russian state is or is not succeeding. It is the determination to compel citizens to believe this can never be done and that any attempt to curb the anarchy of rule by wealth is of itself a crime to be suppressed and not even discussed.
Gentlemen, make no mistake. Russia and communism are not your enemies. Your enemy, ruthless and implacable, is the soulless and utterly selfish corporate wealth, organized for profit and willing to kill your sons in order to retain its present absolute power. It is not our sympathy for the Balkans that is leading us to war. What did we care about the Balkans so long as western capital was making 75-percent profit out of oil and slaves? We kowtowed to czars and splendid grand dukes so long as they held power. But when Russia drove out idle nobility and foreign exploitation and tried to build a state for the consumer and not the investor, then the world which lives on low wage and monopolized land and resources began to scream that this plan was impossible and criminal and must be stopped by force. But why? If communism cannot be made to work, it will fall of its own overweight. But it may succeed, and to stop any such chance you are asked to hurl the world into war.
The cost will be horrible. If we force Europe to a military race for arms her effort to recover will be nullified. Another war, even if victorious, will ruin Great Britain and France. And its eventual cost by increased taxation will throw the laboring classes of all the Americas into hopeless turmoil and despair. This is why we are calling next month a continental peace congress in Mexico.
The hope of America, the hope of the world, is no more war. We have the cure for disagreement and mistake in the United Nations.
Once we forced the League of Nations on an unwilling world, then we refused because of petty internal politics to support our own child. It failed and war and depression resulted. We planned a United Nations, including our own provision for unanimity without which we would not join. Now, when we cannot have our own way in everything, we are ready again to sabotage our own handiwork and substitute war for persuasion.
If you vote this blank check, gentlemen, do not assume that you will decide when and where to fight.
We fought Mexico before Congress declared war.
We fought Spain after Spain had yielded to our demands.
We were nearly thrust into war 2 years ago by an unexplained mistake. We can easily be in a third world war before you learn of it, if you vote these billions.
How does it happen that the United States today, reversing its traditional stand of centuries, is now siding with every reactionary movement in the world, with decadent Turkey, with royalist Greece, with land monopoly in Korea, with big business in Japan, with British Tories and Fascist Italy?
This is against our better impulses and saner judgment.
There is much in the Russian effort at social uplift, with which, if I knew it fully, I am sure I would not agree.
There is much in our own way of life with which I strongly disagree.
No nation is perfect, with a perfect program, but every people have a right to try their way and no nation has more clearly earned her right to test the doctrines of communism than the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Whether they accomplish their greater aims or whether a reformed capitalism, an American invention, will bring more human happiness, in either case, or in combination of both, socialism is the natural and inevitable aim of the modern world. It will grow out of the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century as flower from seed. Seeking to stop it by Red-baiting is stupid. Trying to stop it by war is crime.
Let the churches sit silent or yell for murder. Let the universities lead the witch hunt. Let the Government call every effort for social uplift subversive.
You and I, gentlemen, know the truth. God give us guts to follow it.
Source: W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader, edited by David Levering Lewis (1995)