Arbeit macht frei: - Fredrick Töben

Danzig, 1939, an Incident Escalated into World War by Anglo-French
Dr. Robert A. Millikan
California Institute of Technology
Pasadena, California
April 13, 1943
My dear Dr. Millikan:
It greatly pleased me to read in an Ap report that you had punctured the
fallacy that war stimulates scientific research.
It only remained that you should have insisted that all nations, all large
nations, because they reject Christ’s turn-the-other-cheeck and sheathethe-sword
philosophy, are responsible for world wars. I am sorry you
spoke of ‘bandit nations’ running amuck.
Who are the bandit nations you would have us police this time?
Germany, Italy, and Japan. And who are they? Well, they happen to be
largely, that is, two out of three, our former sweet and precious allies of
1918. Now we advocate policing them.
If our allies of 1918 now need to be policed by us, how can you be sure
that our allies of today, dear and sweet Soviet Russia and China, and India
and South Africa and Britain itself will not have to be policed by us a few
years hence? Russia, for example, surely doesn’t look a bit more sweet
and gentle now than Italy and Japan looked to us in 1918.
I trust you see what I am driving at. Germany did not start the world war.
It created an incident at Danzig, just as some years before Poland crated
an incident at Vilna. One led to a world war, the other did not. Why?
Because of Germany. No, surely not. Because of England and France and
us – we lifted that incident into a world war, just as we did not lift the Vilna
incident into a world war. In 1914 Germany played the precise part in the
world conflagration that England and France played this time. Austria and
Serbia had an incident, Russia proceeded against Austria, and then
Germany, bound by treaty to protect Austria against Russia, as Britain
bound itself to protect Poland against Germany, got into the war. Yet, as
Versailles we attributed sole war guilt to Germany. Logically, therefore, we
should now have to attribute sole war guilt to Britain. Or considering
Roosevelt’s Quarantine speech of October 5, 1937, which in a way put an
end to the pe4aceful vision of the Versailles treaty, to America.
To speak of bandit nations solely responsible for the war is to make a just
peace virtually impossible. It prepares the way for a biggher and smellier
Versailles. And the fruit will be that some years from now we will have to
call some of our dear sweet blue-eyed allies of today the bandit nations,
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