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Vol. II No. 28

That Question is Here Again!

That Question is Here Again : What are we fighting for? Perhaps Harold Nicholson has struck it when he said ” a world without conceit or cruelty, without greed and lies.” In other words we are fighting primarily to rid the world of the German menace, and then to set up a decent reasonable world order, with sufficient statesmanship and vision to prevent the repetition of another world disaster. The obvious answer to this question is that we are fighting now in Europe and the Pacific because if we don’t the Germans and Japanese will eventually invade the U.S. and we would rather fight them where they are than in our own streets. That is an obvious and rather selfish answer. It disregards one bulwark of the truth – the character of the American people. In a recent editorial a prominent American newspaper made these observations: ” All races, all colors, make us up, and when wars like the present one engulf us, all races and all colors take up arms for America. When we strike back at our enemies, the American kin of those enemies do the striking, Americans of Italian extraction, of German extraction, even of Japanese extraction. We are of almost every extraction conceivable, black, white and yellow and red, and so we are tied together not by any mystical philosophy of blood or common ethnic traits, but solely and simply by an idea the idea of democracy, of individual freedom, of liberty under law, of a justice before which all of us stand equal.