The shield and the void: When military calculation supersedes moral justice

“ Now, this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. ”

“ The red point that was Mars hung almost above them, it seemed, almost in the center of the vitrolite dome of the bridge. "We are not heading directly for the planet," Captain Brand told Bill. "Its orbital velocity must be considered. We are moving toward the point that it will occupy in twenty days."
"We can make it in twenty days? Three million miles a day?"
"Easily, if the vitalium holds out, and if we don't collide with a meteorite. There is no limit to speed in space, certainly no practical limit. Acceleration is the important question." ”

“ We might go on and enumerate many arts and sciences by which mankind are benefited, especially in machinery and the laws of evolution, explaining and defining what machinery will do and what it will not do.
How many hundred years have been spent by numerous individuals, in order to discover perpetual motion, whereas fifteen minutes labor, with a knowledge of the science of mathematics, would enable a man to demonstrate that it is an impossibility for us to form a machine that when set in motion will supply its own motive power, and not stop until it is worn out. ”

“ The free world, at least dimly aware of these facts, has naturally embarked on a large program of warning and defense systems. That program will be accelerated and expanded.
But let no one think that the expenditure of vast sums for weapons and systems of defense can guarantee absolute safety for the cities and citizens of any nation. The awful arithmetic of the atomic bomb does not permit any such easy solution. ”

“ If you fail in this mission, where failure seems all but inevitable, indeed, our Galaxy meets its doom, the countless trillions of our races their deaths, the civilizations we have built up in millions of years annihilation. But if you succeed, if you find what forces have caused the spinning of the mighty nebula and are able to halt that spin, then your names shall not die while any in the Galaxy live. For then you will have done what never before was done or dreamed of, will have stayed with your hands a colossal cosmic wreck, will have saved a universe itself from death! ”

“ We knew, even as we gazed, what great preparations were going on in that dying universe for the conquest of our own galaxy, what mighty efforts the serpent-races there were making, to complete their vast fleet and the strange, huge weapon which the records we had captured had mentioned, so that they could flash through the void to pour down on our galaxy. The knowledge held us wrapped in thought as our great ship raced on, still holding to its tremendous utmost velocity, rocking and swaying a little as it plunged through the vast ether-currents which swirled about us here in outer space. ”

“ Doom faces us, a fiery doom in which the dividing sun will annihilate Earth and most of its sister-planets! Panic even now grips all the peoples of Earth, such panic as has never been known before, as that doom marches inevitably toward them! Yet inevitable, inescapable as that doom seems, we of the World Congress, we who represent here all the gathered peoples of Earth, must endeavor to find even now some last chance of lifting this awful menace from us! ”

“ Behind and around us, now, flamed the great panorama of the Galaxy's blazing stars, but before us lay only darkness—darkness inconceivable, into which our ships were flashing out at greater and greater speed. Neptune had vanished, and far behind lay the single yellow spark that was all visible of our solar system as we fled out from it. Out—out—out—rocketing, racing on, out past the boundaries of the great Galaxy itself into the lightless void, out into the unplumbed depths of infinite space to save our threatened sun. ”

“ One of man's most grievous crimes is indifference, inattention to his neighbour's fate; this indifference is pre-eminently ours.
The situation of the Jews in Russia, which is a disgrace to Russian culture, is one of the results of our carelessness, of our indifference to the straight and just decrees of life.
In the interests of reason, justice, civilisation, we must not tolerate that people without rights should live among us; we would never have tolerated it, if we had a strong sense of self-respect. ”

“ But, since the State thrives on what it expropriates, the general decline in production which it induces by its avarice foretells its own doom. Its source of income dries up. Thus, in pulling Society down it pulls itself down. Its ultimate collapse is usually occasioned by a disastrous war, but preceding that event is a history of increasing and discouraging levies on the market place, causing a decline in the aspirations, hopes and self-esteem of its victims. ”

“ Taking a logical point of departure, that is what I thought, but this same logic dictated to me an absolutely negative answer to all these questions: no one needs it, it brings good to no one: all these discriminations not only do not increase the sum of joy on this earth, but engender a multitude of wholly unnecessary, aimless sufferings; some they oppress, and others they badly corrupt. ”

“ Why has the Jewish question become so keen in time of war? For the same reason that the rest of the national problems have made themselves felt.
We have called the present struggle a war of liberation. We entered the war with the avowed purpose of liberating those who are situated at a distance from us. While liberating distant strangers, why then do we oppress those who live close by our side? We wage war against tyranny outside of Russia, and we allow oppression to reign within her. We pity everybody but the Jews. ”

“ It is ridiculous and utterly odd to think that our far-famed "barbarism" of which our enemies accuse us and which puts our friends out of countenance, is based wholly and exclusively on our Jewish question and its bloody excesses. Take away from Russia these excesses, leave, if you wish, the anti-Semitism, but in that externally decorous form in which it still exists in the backward portions of Europe,—and we shall become at once decent Europeans, and not Asiatics and barbarians, whose proper place is beyond the Ural. ”

“ Just as religion has fettered the human mind, and as property, or the monopoly of things, has subdued and stifled man's needs, so has the State enslaved his spirit, dictating every phase of conduct. "All government in essence," says Emerson, "is tyranny." It matters not whether it is government by divine right or majority rule. In every instance its aim is the absolute subordination of the individual. ”

“ What happens if stability fails to assert itself in the face of chaos and instability? If decency fails to call out indecency? Were the shoe on the other foot, would we Republicans meekly accept such behavior on display from dominant Democrats? Of course not, and we would be wrong if we did.
When we remain silent and fail to act when we know that that silence and inaction is the wrong thing to do — because of political considerations, because we might make enemies, because we might alienate the base, because we might provoke a primary challenge, because ad infinitum, ad nauseam — when we succumb to those considerations in spite of what should be greater considerations and imperatives in defense of the institutions of our liberty, then we dishonor our principles and forsake our obligations. ”

“ If the federal government should overpass the just bounds of its authority and make a tyrannical use of its powers, the people, whose creature it is, must appeal to the standard they have formed, and take such measures to redress the injury done to the Constitution as the exigency may suggest and prudence justify. ”

“ Owing its ratification to the law of a State, it has been contended that the same authority might repeal the law by which it was ratified. However gross a heresy it may be to maintain that a PARTY to a COMPACT has a right to revoke that COMPACT, the doctrine itself has had respectable advocates. The possibility of a question of this nature proves the necessity of laying the foundations of our national government deeper than in the mere sanction of delegated authority. The fabric of American empire ought to rest on the solid basis of THE CONSENT OF THE PEOPLE. ”

“ The concept that the Bill of Rights and other constitutional protections against arbitrary government are inoperative when they become inconvenient or when expediency dictates otherwise is a very dangerous doctrine and, if allowed to flourish, would destroy the benefit of a written Constitution and undermine the basis of our Government. ”

“ I have spoken hitherto of the possibility that democracy may be a self-limiting disease, like measles. It is, perhaps, something more: it is self-devouring. One cannot observe it objectively without being impressed by its curious distrust of itself—its apparently ineradicable tendency to abandon its whole philosophy at the first sign of strain. I need not point to what happens invariably in democratic states when the national safety is menaced. ”

“ Kellon felt a sharp relief when they cleared atmosphere and were out in the depthless, starry blackness. He knew where he was, in space. It was the place where a spaceman belonged. He'd get a stiff reprimand for this later, but he was not sorry.
They put the ship into a calculated orbit, and waited. Days, many of them, must pass before the end came to Earth. It seemed quite near the white sun now, and its Moon had slid away from it on a new distorted orbit, but even so it would be a while before they could broadcast to a watching galaxy the end of its ancestral world. ”

“ In a few minutes, using the powerful inset glasses, we had discovered no less than thirteen worlds that spun about the sun beneath us and that accompanied it on its tremendous journey through space. Most seemed to revolve in orbits that were billions of miles from their parent sun, and none of the others was as large as that inmost planet which we had first discovered. It was toward this largest world that we finally decided to head first; so with Sarto Sen at the controls we slanted down again from our position over the great sun, arrowing down at reduced speed toward the inmost world. ”

“ What wonders, unknown to us, might not exist upon any of those worlds? But they were wonders barred to us for the time, since time was the one thing of which we had the least, in our great rush outward to the sun's outermost planet, in our desperate race outward to attempt to save our own Earth from the doom that hovered over it. For still that doom cast its shadowing wing darkly over Earth, still Whitely's instruments informed us that the giant force-ray from Neptune was stabbing back toward the sun, turning the sun ever faster at the same remorseless rate. ”

“ For seventeen days, now, even as Whitely had said, we had been racing inward from Neptune at utmost speed on our desperate journey back to our own world. The space-flier's great rear force-ray, pushing back against giant Neptune, had hurled the flier in through the outer reaches of our universe with an acceleration of velocity that was so great as to prove almost our undoing. For more than once that terrific pressure of that acceleration on us, despite our shock-absorbing apparatus, had so affected our bodies as to overcome us with successive fits of nausea and unconsciousness. ”

“ My cry brought Jhul Din back up into the pilot room, and standing together with eyes riveted upon the space-chart we saw clearly that with every moment, slowly but steadily, the serpent-ships behind were drawing nearer, though we were moving at our utmost speed. Our ship, battered and worn by its tremendous flight through the void from universe to universe, and by the space-fights it had come through, was a fraction slower than the new ships of our pursuers, and that fraction of difference in speed, we saw, was bringing them closer upon us with each passing minute. ”

“ Howard's suggested method of combatting the danger was stressed as the world's one chance. Thousands of air-mines must be made at once and continue to be turned out until the menace was repelled—scientists agreed, as one man, that it was the one possible way of fighting these grim visitors from space who were hovering in their enigmatic vessels at the surface of our atmosphere. ”

“ But until then the air-mines are our only protection.
"I want to see vast fields of them floating on the surface of earth's atmosphere, fields through which no invading space-ships from the void outside can make their way. For Providence may not again aid our efforts. Man is probably but one being among the universe's countless races of living creatures, and he can only hold his planet against others by his own wisdom and strength. Never again can he feel the false security that was ours before these space-visitors came." ”

“ As for theproblem of over-production, which has been latent in our society since the development of machine technique, it is solved by the device of continuous warfare (see Chapter III) , which is also useful in keying up public morale to the necessary pitch. From the point of view of our present rulers, therefore, the only genuine dangers are the splitting-off of a new group of able, under-employed, power-hungry people, and the growth of liberalism and scepticism in their own ranks. The problem, that is to say, is educational. ”

“ As war is the system of Government on the old construction, the animosity which Nations reciprocally entertain, is nothing more than what the policy of their Governments excites to keep up the spirit of the system. Each Government accuses the other of perfidy, intrigue, and ambition, as a means of heating the imagination of their respective Nations, and incensing them to hostilities. Man is not the enemy of man, but through the medium of a false system of Government. ”

“ The very possibility of the science of mathematics seems an insoluble contradiction. If this science is deductive only in appearance, whence does it derive that perfect rigor no one dreams of doubting? If, on the contrary, all the propositions it enunciates can be deduced one from another by the rules of formal logic, why is not mathematics reduced to an immense tautology? The syllogism can teach us nothing essentially new, and, if everything is to spring from the principle of identity, everything should be capable of being reduced to it. ”

“ No one will question that this power is the most dangerous one to free government in the whole catalogue of powers. It usually is invoked in haste and excitement when calm legislative consideration of constitutional limitation is difficult. It is executed in a time of patriotic fervor that makes moderation unpopular. And, worst of all, it is interpreted by the Judges under the influence of the same passions and pressures. ”

“ It has been the boast of our Government that it seeks to do justice in all things without regard to the strength or weakness of those with whom it deals. I mistake the American people if they favor the odious doctrine that there is no such thing as international morality; that there is one law for a strong nation and another for a weak one, and that even by indirection a strong power may with impunity despoil a weak one of its territory.
By an act of war, committed with the participation of a diplomatic representative of the United States and without authority of Congress, the Government of a feeble but friendly and confiding people has been overthrown. ”

“ Not an outsider, nor a congress of allies, nor some one social class shall regulate our affairs for the best of Poland, Finland, the Jews and the rest. Neither our allies, nor any one of our social classes, nor the wisest and strongest among us,—but all of us Russian citizens, all of us who joyously and willingly bear the burden of statehood, are called upon to settle in conscience and reason, the fundamental problems of our great home-building. ”

“ The principle of self-government and the spirit of independence are so deep rooted in the American mind that our people would illy brook the enforcement of law by any extraneous power, and it is to be hoped we never will see a case in which the people of a State will not be able to maintain the civil authority, and vindicate offended law against all opposers whomsoever. To give energy and activity to such popular action the organization of the militia will be most convenient whenever force shall be needful. ”

“ These prospects are to be realized if we are only wise and true to the obligations of the compact of our fathers. For all which can sow dissension can stop the progress of the American people, can endanger the achievement of the high prospects we have before us is that miserable spirit, which, disregarding duty and honor, makes war upon the Constitution. ”

“ From the seeds of narrow sectionality and purblind fanaticism, have sprung the tares which threaten the principles of that declaration which made the Colonies independent States, and of that compact by which the States were united by a bond to-day far more valuable than when it was signed. You have among you politicians of a philosophic turn, who preach a high morality; a system of which they are the discoverers, and it is to be hoped will long remain the exclusive possessors. They say, it is true the Constitution dictates this, the Bible inculcates that ”

“ It is the continual and stupendous dead pressure of this inhuman upon the living human under which the modern world is groaning. Not merely the subject races, but you who live under the delusion that you are free, are every day sacrificing your freedom and humanity to this fetich of nationalism, living in the dense poisonous atmosphere of world-wide suspicion and greed and panic.
I have seen in Japan the voluntary submission of the whole people to the trimming of their minds and clipping of their freedom by their government, which through various educational agencies regulates their thoughts, manufactures their feelings, becomes suspiciously watchful when they show signs of inclining toward the spiritual, leading them through a narrow path not toward what is true but what is necessary for the complete welding of them into one uniform mass according to its own recipe. ”

“ I am afraid the remark is too honest, and comes from the same origin as the maxim of the tyrant, "If you would rule the world quietly, you must keep it amused." I notice too that the ground on which eminent public servants urge the claims of popular education is fear; 'This country is filling up with thousands and millions of voters, and you must educate them to keep them from our throats.' We do not believe that any education, any system of philosophy, any influence of genius, will ever give depth of insight to a superficial mind. ”

“ The security of society lies in custom and unconscious instinct, and the basis of the stability of society, as a healthy organism, is the complete absence of any intelligence amongst its members. The great majority of people being fully aware of this, rank themselves naturally on the side of that splendid system that elevates them to the dignity of machines, and rage so wildly against the intrusion of the intellectual faculty into any question that concerns life, that one is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason. ”

“ If they will not understand that we are bringing them a mathematically faultless happiness, our duty will be to force them to be happy. But before we take up arms, we shall try the power of words. ”

“ When ideology has become total through its possession of total power, and has changed from partial truth to totalitarian falsehood, historical thought has been so totally annihilated that history itself, even at the level of the most empirical knowledge, can no longer exist. Totalitarian bureaucratic society lives in a perpetual present in which whatever has previously happened is determined solely by its police. ”

“ There is, in the institutions of this country, one principle, which, had they no other excellence, would secure to them the preference over those of all other countries. I mean — and some devout patriots will start — I mean the principle of change.
I have used a word to which is attached an obnoxious meaning. Speak of change, and the world is in alarm. And yet where do we not see change? What is there in the physical world but change? And what would there be in the moral world without change? ”

“ I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power. ”