Is that all I am allowed to say? The CHAIRMAN. We are glad to have you testify. The CHAIRMAN. No; you have already exhausted your time. STATEMENT BY JOHN T. FLYNN, ECONOMIST AND JOURNALIST, NEW YORK, N. Y. The CHAIRMAN. This is Mr. John T. Flynn, of New York, a very distinguished economist and journalist whom most of you know. Proceed, Mr. Flynn. Mr. FLYNN. Mr. Chairman, may I ask how much time I will have? The CHAIRMAN. You will have what you requested. Mr. FLYNN. Mr. Chairman, I do not represent any organization. I talk entirely for myself and nobody is responsible for what I say except myself. Mr. Stettinius, in presenting this Charter to this committee, said that it had been prepared to preserve peace and advance human progress; and the signers of the Charter, in the very pretentious preamble say: To reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small. No man can possibly disagree with an enterprise the purpose of which is to preserve the peace of the world and to advance human progress; and if I believed that this Charter had been framed for that purpose, or that it accomplished that purpose or was a forward step in the direction of that purpose, I would be for it regardless of all its defects. But I do not believe that it is a plan to prevent war or a plan to preserve human rights. I do not believe it will do any of these things. Now, first, on the question of preventing war, after all, reasonable men who set about so vast an undertaking as that will begin by inquiring what are the causes of war. I think that here the framers of this Charter have proceeded on a theory which is not rational and which cannot be supported by the facts of history, and that is that Germany and Japan are the causes of war, and that if you can put down Germany and Japan and keep them disarmed, you can prevent war. That theory will not stand the test of history. I am not defending Germany and Japan from the charge of being war makers. They are war makers, and the whole world knows it and knows of their guilt in this war. What are the causes of war? Until you deal with those causes you will never prevent war, no matter what you write in the preamble of your Charter. Prof. Quincy Wright has recently published a rather voluminous study of the origins of war, and in the first volume of that study he includes a group of tables prepared by the University of Chicago in a very extensive research into the number of wars fought in the last 400 years and the number of wars in which all of the nations of the world had been engaged. We need not worry about the old wars in the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, or eighteenth centuries, but we certainly must look at the wars of the nineteenth century, our own century, the century of enlightenment and of a modern world, and of the present century for the record of the war makers in the last 140 years of world history. Here is the record as summarized by me from these voluminous tables, which I shall be glad to include in the record for the information of anybody who wishes to pursue this subject further. In the nineteenth century, in 100 years Prussia was engaged in 5 wars; Austria in 9 wars; Russia in 10 wars; Spain in 13 wars; France in 23 wars, and Great Britain in 28 wars. In the present century, the first 41 years of it, the record is, Spain three wars; Austria three wars; Germany five wars; France six wars, and Great Britain seven wars. This does not acquit Germany. I am giving you the European record. It makes it perfectly clear that these great nations in Europe, the six of them which I have named, have been constantly engaged in wars, numerous wars, over and over again during the last 140 years. But suppose that you have dealt with the aggressor nations and brought an end to the causes of war by subjugating Germany and Japan and disarming them, and then presenting to the world a great confederation for peace and justice on the theory that you are now ending war or trying to end war. It seems to me that that is a very shallow and superficial approach to the whole subject of war. Why are these nations engaged in these wars? The causes of these wars have been pretty well classified in this study. The chief causes are put down as imperialism and balance of power, the latter arising out of the imperialistic ambitions of these nations. The fundamental cause of war is this: These big and powerful nations have economic and social troubles just as every other nation, racial, dynastie—all sorts of things that urge men to act; but because of their power they assert the right, when they have economic and social problems to be dealt with, to march across their frontiers and move into the lands of other peoples and seize their territory and exploit their resources and hold their bases and do whatever they believe to be necessary for safety or defense or for the solution of the economic problems of these aggressor nations. You are right when you say that wars come from these aggressor nations; but they come from all the aggressor nations, and you do not deal with the cause of war when you eliminate two aggressors and establish others of these aggressors in control of the world. You have not touched the cause of war. You will never touch the cause of war until you have gotten these nations, all of them, to renounce the right to solve their economic and other problems by attacking and holding, conquering and exploiting other countries, whether those attacks and conquests are recent or old, as long as the lands and territories of these other peoples are being held against their will. You have a Council which is going to be in complete domination of this organization, so far as preserving the peace of the world is concerned, and it is in the complete control of four great nations. I eliminate China, because China is a poor and powerless nation at the moment. But the four great nations, the United States, Great Britain, France, and Russia-every one of them, with the exception of our own country-must be numbered amongst the greatest aggressors in the history of mankind, and the recent history of mankind. I am not going to make any point of the present guilt of these aggressors, of England and her Empire, of France and her Empire. They are indefensible, in my humble opinion. I am not talking about the British Commonwealth of Nations. I know it would be a difficult thing to ask those countries to demobilize those empires right away; but until they are willing to say before the world that they have no such rights as they are now asserting you cannot put them in control of a world organization and call it an organization for peace, except in the preamble for sales purposes. How are you going to stop war with this Charter? Suppose this Charter had been in existence before the first World War. How did that war begin? It began with an attack by Austria on little Serbia. If your Charter had been in existence then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was one of the great powers of the world, and one of the greatest war-making powers of the world, would most certainly have been a member of the Council; and when Austria undertook to take Serbia, what would have been the procedure? Serbia could have appealed to the Council, and when the matter came before the Council, Austria, as one of the great powers in the Council, would have vetoed any attempt to pronounce her an aggressor. Then, if you wanted to stop the aggression by Austria, the first thing would have been to correct and destroy the Charter-the Charter which is organized for the purpose of restraining aggressors. The only way in which you could restrain this aggressor would be to go outside the Charter and correct the Charter. And the same thing is true now. Who are going to make wars in the future? The wars in the future are going to be made by these same aggressor states. They are not going to be made by little, bloodthirsty Finland or little Denmark or Belgium. They are going to be made by these great aggressor powers. How these wars will arise, no man can foresee. One thing is certain: We know that there are hundreds of millions of people now held under the dominion of these powers; and I do not believe, and I am sure you gentlemen do not believe, that these hundreds of millions of people in Europe, 115,000,000 people that Russia has seized directly or indirectly in the last few years, or the hundreds of millions of people in Asia, are going to cease to dream of this great objective of freedom which you are now holding up to the world as the object of this Charter. They are going to find ways to intrigue and to work and to struggle for their release from these powers, and they will find allies amongst these great powers whose imperialistic systems are hostile, very often, and contradictory, and presently the friends of the two aggressors you have now put down will turn up amongst some of the present allies and you will have another war in another generation or less, out of the aspirations of the 500,000,000 or 600,000,000 or 700,000,000 people of the world who are held in subjection by these aggressors. If any attempt is made to stop any of these aggressor nations taking whatever measures are necessary to protect their conquests and their imperialisms, there is nothing you can do about it. You cannot stop them. Practically everybody is restrained from making war, by this Charter, except the war makers; and if you try to stop them, they will veto your effort, and then the next thing you have to do is what you would have had to do in the first World War correct the Charter as a means of getting the peace. There is another aspect of this matter which I think cannot possibly be ignored. When does war begin? As soon as Germany crossed the borders of Poland, Russia went in with her. Now you have these two powerful dictatorships launching upon conquest in Europe. They are both dictatorships. During the war in Europe our psychological warfare necessities required us to soft pedal any discussion of the character of our great ally in Europe, Russia. I am no Red baiter. I favored years ago the recognition of Russia, and a great many people who now want to take Russia to their bosoms, were denouncing her. I think the Russian people have a right to run their own affairs. They have lived under dictators and oppressors for centuries; they know no other form of life. The dictatorship they have now is not new; it is merely more complete than any they have ever had, for you have in Russia the most complete tyranny that the world has ever known, for the Russian Government is not only a state with totalitarian political powers to rule every human being within its borders, without limitation, but it is also the employer of every man, woman, and child within its borders; and a greater and more complete totalitarian tyranny you cannot possibly imagine. That is what it is; and it is a brutal tyranny, no less brutal than the one that we have just defeated. I do not say this now for the purpose of baiting Russians, but because we have a decision to make about our own future, and we are bound to be realistic about it. And let me quote to you what someone else has said about Russia: The Soviet Union, as a matter of practical fact, known to you and known to all the world, is a dictatorship as absolute as any other dictatorship in the world. That was said by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, before Germany crossed the borders of Russia. But she is still the same ruthless dictatorship. We are supposed to have liberated the little countries that were seized by Hitler. We have liberated a great many of them from under the heel of Hitler and transferred them to the heel of Stalin and Russia; and if you take Latvia, Esthonia, Lithuania, and half of Poland and, now, eastern Germany, Yugoslavia, and practically all the Balkans, you have got over 115,000,000 of Europeans who are living now within the orbit of the authority of communism. Nothing in the world can stop them from being organized as communist states. I do not know what we can do about that. I do not want to go to war with Russia to transfer Poland from under the heel of the Russian dictatorship, after having assisted in holding her there. But I do not want this nation to collaborate in this infamy. That is what we are doing here, because this Charter that we are talking about now is not the whole of this foreign policy with which we are dealing. It is only a part, one section of the foreign policy. Other sections are to be found in the policies and in the commitments which we have made or are asked to make. Thus, for instance, we are asked to put $2,500,000,000 into the International Fund of the Bretton Woods Agreement. We are asked to put $3,175,000,000 into the International Bank of that agreement. That is nearly $6,000,000,000. We have at present in lend-lease about $21,000,000,000 unexpended, and we have made agreements for post-war uses of this fund under section 3 (c) of the Lend-Lease Act which permits the President to make advances of funds out of Lend-lease after the war is over, on a credit basis. England wants $5,000,000,000 in the next year. I do not know how large a commitment she has. Russia wants $6,000,000,000. We have got some kind of an arrangement with Belgium under lendlease. Every country in South America wants billions, and every country in Europe and Asia wants billions. Without undertaking to add up all the hopes and expectations of all the world as to the billions they are to get, there is about $33,000,000,000 already more or less committed or in process of commitment, to be paid out to those foreign nations at the expiration of the war, and billions of it to Russia. Now, to come back to my point, I say I do not want to go to war with Russia about these countries, and I do not want to refuse to recognize Russia or trade with her. But I do not want to pay the bills for Russia, for two purposes: one, to make her economic existence successful, and the other to enable her to hold faster and stronger upon the 115,000,000 people of Europe that she has taken under her heel. That is what we will be doing. We are at the present moment in the midst of a great ideological struggle in this world. I do not see how any man can doubt that all of continental Europe has literally washed out of its life that system of economic life to which we are committed. Two-thirds of the populations of Europe and threefourths of the land mass of Europe are under the dominion of Soviet Russia and communism. And what is left? France and Spain and Portugal. Spain is already fascist. France is going to be fascist. Who can stop it? She is on the road now to communism, and the only thing that will stop that will be a fascist movement. Italy will probably continue to be fascist, minus Mussolini. Fascism is only a vestibule or prologue to communism. We have made Russia a successful military power. I am not detracting from her great courage and the magnificent fighting of her armies; but it was with American armament and American guns, American ammunition, planes and tanks, that she was enabled to defeat Hitler. But today she stands between the free capitalism and fascism and communism in Europe, the only great, successful combatant; and she has become that successful combatant with the power of her internal communist energies and with the supplementary power which came to her out of our capitalistic system. She enjoys this prestige of success, and if she can succeed, I am not willing to do anything to stop her. I do not consider myself wise enough to say that communism cannot be made to work if it is given a long enough time. I do not believe it can, but maybe it can; but I cannot see into the future far enough to know what will be the end of this. I do not want to go into Russia and starve her or attack her. If that experiment is to succeed I want it to succeed on its own energy, and not on the energy of the capitalistic system which she is trying to destroy. I am not an apologist for the capitalistic system, with all of its shortcomings and faults and inconsistencies. I think it is the only system of life that has yet been devised by man under which he |