Today marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of English writer, journalist, and thinker G. K. Chesterton, among other things, the author of the popular detective Father Brown stories and the brilliantly articulated Orthodoxy. His newspaper columns from over a hundred years ago, in which he commented on the Prussian aggression of the time, are painfully relevant for Europe.
“Something calling itself the Committee for Peace Negotiations sent a letter to the Illustrated London News regarding some memorial document that it is presenting to the government. (…) The memorial document urges the government to seize the first opportunity to secure a ‘just and lasting peace.’ In every other conceivable public or private conflict, we know well what we mean by a just settlement. We always mean a settlement by which the wrongdoer is punished and his victims are compensated at his expense. We also know what we mean by a lasting peace, such as the one we expect in a well-managed society. It means that its peace will likely be disrupted by very few, because everyone knows that its violation will be followed by punishment. In this case, therefore, a just peace will occur because the Prussian aggressor will be punished, and lasting peace will follow because potential imitators of the aggressor will be warned by his punishment. All this is very elementary, but it is worth repeating, and I gladly repeat it.
The Prussian offer of peace is a farce in one very specific sense: The enemy arrogantly claims that in war he is not only completely, but increasingly triumphant – and asks for peace. He says that his field marshal has achieved things previously thought impossible, he says that his field marshal is not resting but preparing to do even more – and asks for peace. He says that his hopes for total triumph are based on facts as solid as iron – and asks for peace. He is trampling on our heads – and asks for peace. If anyone who has even glanced at history or humanity, anyone who has read any book or spoken with a foreigner, can believe that the Prussian king is asking for peace at such a moment, let them believe it. He will not believe it for long. (…) Prussia has already decided to request peace, but first it decided to do something that would give it a transparent pretext to pretend that it is demanding or even dictating peace itself. It is no longer striving for a big war followed by triumph but for a small triumph followed by an armistice. It will be an armistice, not peace; it will be one of the other Prussian armistices in history, it will be a Prussian peace that has always meant rearmament for Prussia and false security for the world.
Among the firmly entrenched phrases of pacifists is the maxim about ‘overcoming evil with good.’ Apparently, pacifists intend to overcome aggression with cowardice, tyranny with slavery, the imposition of evil through abandonment of rights, and they intend to defeat Germany through the betrayal of France. However, since some of us do not think that cowardice, slavery, betrayal, and denial of rights are ‘good’ things, we respond that their usage is not the use of good against evil, but merely the piling of one evil upon another. But there is one moral matter in which we can truly respond to evil with good without merely reinforcing the bad. There is one weapon from the armory of saints that is, even in a secular sense, stronger than the world. That weapon is humility.
We must purify ourselves very much in order to be at least worthy of this war. This hell, as it is called, is so much closer to heaven than England has ever been during its hundred years of prosperity and peace, that we must be prepared for greater self-denials than merely renouncing all the comforts in which we have lived for so long. We must be content to humbly respond to the Prussian: ‘Yes, I too am evil, perhaps I am as evil as you claim – just not so evil that I would sell you the world.’
(Gilbert Keith Chesterton /May 29, 1874 – June 14, 1936/; newspaper columns for the Illustrated London News, September 1, 1917, December 23, 1916, and June 24, 1915)
