Jews -- Periodicals; Jews -- United States -- Periodicals
And lastly, we must bear in mind that the Jews have been opposed from
of old to the rule and reign of might as represented by the God of
War. In a syllabus on the history of the Peace Movement just published
by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, it is passing
strange to find that the Old Testament is entirely overlooked and that
from the first point, "The Cosmopolitan Ideal among the Greek
Philosophers," the jump is made at once to the second, "Jesus Christ,
the Prince of Peace." And yet we know that in the outlook of our
greatest teachers and philosophers the vision of peace loomed large
and powerful. "Ye shall not teach war any more," said one of our
greatest. And for another the true sign of his prophetic mission is
that he preached peace. How sadly these teachings have been belied in
the present war we know only too well.
_Is War Necessary and Good?_
In many circles it has been held that development is possible for the
human race only with the concomitance of war. What wonder--when modern
teachers have preached just such a necessity? Even so great a
religious leader as Luther said, "War is a business divine in itself,
and is as necessary as eating or drinking or any other work." Should
we then wonder that a historian such as von Treitschke has added, "War
is the last revealer of power. God will see to it that war always
recurs as a drastic medicine for the human race,"--or that another
historian, Delbrueck, should have said, "What beauty was to the Greek,
holiness to the Hebrew, government to the Romans; what liberty is to
the Englishman, war is to the Prussian." Nietzsche, one of the
greatest of modern apostles, has based many of his theories upon "a
violent repudiation of any faith or tradition which recognizes a power
of right and justice lying beyond our impulsive nature; an
identification of self-restraint with degeneracy and of self-assertion
with health; a search for happiness in the conquest of others rather
than in self-conquest; a substitution of the Will to Power for the
Darwinian Will to Live, with the consequent intensification of the
unconscious and instinctive struggle for existence into a battle for
conscious mastery; and a sharpening of the competition of life, with
its self-observed rules of fair play or its traditionally imposed
limitations, into a glorification of war as the supreme test of
strength, obtaining its justification in success."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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