On Tuesday the Acting Prime Minister addressed a
| gathering of Tory ladies called the Australian Women's
| National League and said
|
We want to know with some
| degree of definiteness what these aims are. We feel the
| time has come for someone to tell us who it is that has
| assumed on our behalf the responsibility of drafting
| these aims. Most certainly the Parliament of the
| country has not so far done it. We, therefore, refuse
| to accept as Australia's war aims the jingo speeches of
| any man, or set of men, assuming self-constituted
| authority of interpretation for us in this vital matter.
| Until the legislature
How does a great nation evolve a national policy | towards war and peace? Is it by speech-making at | gatherings of Tory women or after-dinner orations at the | Millions Club? If it is not; then the time has come for | some more responsible method of formulation than the | preposterous arrangement which has done duty up to now. | Whatever be the proposals politicians have in mind, when | speaking in New York or London as in the case of Hughes, | or at Melbourne as in the case of Watt, it is nothing | short of gross presumption for it to be assumed that | when they open their mouths no other dog must bark. | Despite all the admiration the Acting Prime Minister may | feel for autocracies in war time, the Australian Labor | Party is not disposed to have rammed down its throat any | unspecified war projects as the reasoned and | constitutionally agreed on purposes of the nation.
|Strange as it may seem to certain people pacifism did | not originate at the Perth Interstate Labor Conference. | All that assemblage did was to set out the kind of war | aims and terms of peace which it believed were | essentials to an early and satisfactory cessation of the | most terrible tragedy in history, and at the same time, | were proposals offering the basis of a permanent | peoples' peace. Is it not every day asserted that the | sole object of the war, so far as the Allies is | concerned, is to secure a lasting peace? Do not the | most vocal of the bitter-enders vociferate as their | justification the desirability of making this the last | war? They do. In this sense they are pacifists also. | The difference between them and the resolutions of the | Labor conference is that the conference declares its | policy a more practicable and worth-while method of | accomplishing the object in view.
| And that contention is one which has to back it a
| wealth of fact and a prodigal abundance of logical
| deduction. Labor informs the world that the smashing of
| any great power does not ensure a permanent peace. It
| affirms that peace
There cannot be any confusion of objects in
| connection with the frightful conflict. If it is a war
| for liberation, it cannot be a war for conquest. If it
| is a war for right, then it cannot be one for territory.
| The men who speak of islands and colonies and
| monopolised trade are essentially apostles of all that
| is sordid in mammon. They are no interpreters of what
| is requisite to an emancipated humanity. It is because
| more often than not it is these men who are the alleged
| voices of the nation
To what part of the Perth resolutions can objection | be validly lodged? Viewed from the standpoint that the | aggrandisement of any belligerent is not sought, that no | set of publicists dare assail the formula of no | annexations and no indemnities without precipitating a | war slackness among the people of the country from whom | the annexations are sought, the Labor policy is in | keeping with every publicly stated object for which the | war was entered upon.
|It makes provision for the right of self-determination; | it declares for the evacuation of | occupied territory; there is an insistence on principles | of justice as between nations and the relegation to | oblivion of the right to rule by the sword. In what | respect is such a policy recreant to mankind? No one has | yet got to details by way of demonstration. Every | attack is made up of vague generalities and more or less | nebulous untruths. Mr Watt was guilty of one on Tuesday | when he said Australia must strenuously pursue its war | aims, when the fact persists that the Commonwealth | Parliament has not defined any clear cut declaration | which intelligent people can regard as aims upon which | to end the war.
|It is easy to shout "on with the dance". But it is | not quite so easy to dismiss with a few cheap platitudes | the right Labor has, equally with any other section of | the community, to make its mind up as to what kind of | objective it considers worth fighting for. Any | settlement which is made against the will of the peoples | concerned leaves the post-war international situation in | the same condition as that which gave birth to August, | 1914. And Mr Watt cannot start to find a peoples' peace | by stupid denunciation of Labor in Australia for having | formulated propositions which it submits to the nation | as property proposals for the nation to adopt. Its | title in this respect is assuredly as valid as that of | Mr Gompers, whom the Acting Prime Minister waxes so | enthusiastic about.
| The fact that the Labor Movement in the Commonwealth
| should not agree with the war aims of the Employers'
| Federation and its satellites is not strange. There is
| a root social antagonism between the two bodies. And
| let it be said once and for all that war is at bedrock a
| social problem. It comes from the pressure of
| politico-economic forces which are essentially expansions
| of the driving power of capitalism embracing the national
| polity. Had there not been a Balkan crucible the world
| would not be in the present convulsion. And there could
| not have been any Balkan situation but for the
| imperialist purposes of Germany, Russia, France and
| Britain. When M. Sazanoff told an interviewer the war
| was
he spoke with
| severe accuracy. Here is generated the German dream of
| Mittel Europa and the opposition of the Great Powers to
| a Balkan Confederation. A world organised on the
| principles of Labor would not have had the materials and
| the antagonisms of potential war in it. That is why
| Labor includes in its terms of peace far-reaching
| proposals of social reorganisation. The divergence
| between the war aims of the great capitalists and those
| promulgated by the parties of Labor is explained by the
| basic general hostility Labor has to capitalism simply
| because it is capitalism.
That the Acting Prime Minister should assail Labor in | war time is in keeping with his traditional hostility | towards it. Even if there was no war on the politicians | of reaction and their journalistic exponents would be | seeking ways of overcoming the development of the ideas | and principles making for the overthrow of the social | order based on the exploiting power of highly-organised | capital. That they persist in it is in accordance with | the fitness of things. It would be passing strange if | orators of the Millions Club and the Women's National | League did not find fault with everything decided on by | a Labor Congress which threatened the existing | establishment of mammon.
|