by Harold S. BIDMEAD
In founding the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) on 5 July 1920, the eminent federalist Lionel Curtis C.H. (cf. page 4) did for world politics what was done for science when the Royal Society was established. The scientific method would thenceforth be applied to the study of international affairs, e.g.:
Physics: Hydrogen (H2) mixed, as in a league of nations, with oxygen (O2), is a lethal, highly explosive gas, needing no detonator but the tiniest static spark. Yet precisely the same two elements, associated in a completely different manner, result in peaceful benevolent union (compound), as the following chemistry lesson shows:
Chemistry: 2H2 combined, as in a federal union, with O2, forms a beneficent and beautiful liquid, water (2H2O) - the elixir of life, which is also used to extinguish conflagrations.
Many diplomats and self-styled statesmen are living in the stone age. They are alchemists who blind the world with the smoke screens they have concocted to hide their own incompetence.
Medicine: The science of medicine consists essentially in seeking to cure the disease, not merely to shave off the symptoms. The quacks who argue that all the "United" Nations needs is a bandage or hot poultice are professing to cure the disease of war without harming the germ that causes it - national sovereignty, the claim to act as judge and jury in ones own case.
Mechanics. Consider the UN. As an airplane it would never be able to take off. As a land vehicle its 185 h.p. pull in 185 different directions, connected to the wheels by paper chains inscribed « cooperation ». Its engine will not fire unless its five big cylinders are synchronized, but they are designed to function independently. Worse the engine is not integral with the body (a 1919 model with new paintwork) but follows reluctantly behind on a trailer. The fuel is hot air. UNSafe havens
Architecture: A building (or a political construction) must be designed on scientific principles if it is not to collapse under the first strain and bury beneath its ruins those whom it was intended to shelter. To Kurds and Moslems, UN "Safe" Areas and UN "Safe" Havens eventually turned out as deceptive as were the "showers" in the Nazi holocaust camps.
Men plan their buildings, their commercial ventures, their agriculture, their campaigns against pestilence, their wars, but - unless they are federalists - they abandon the dictates of good sense when they go in for politics, and ensure that the "art" is uncontaminated by scientific principles.
More than two centuries ago, the American colonists found the same "radical, material, intrinsic and fundamental vices" in their League of Friendship as we found in the League of Nations and in its mirror image the "United" Nations. They found sufficient vice in it to scrap it and replace it by a federal constitution. Have the defenders of the UN Charter, the advocates of a third world league, learned nothing from history? Not only is the UN built on quicksand; it is an arch without a keystone, its girders and main pillars fatally flawed with crystalline fractures.
In the words of that pioneer federalist Alexander Hamilton:
"The evils we experience do not proceed from minute or partial imperfections, but from fundamental errors in the structure of the building, which cannot be amended otherwise than by an alteration in the first principles and main pillars of the fabric." Independent Journal, New York (end 1787)
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