By Paul Angel
On April 16, 1953, President Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower gave his “Chance for Peace” speech before a gathering of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Some have called it the greatest anti-war speech by any president since George Washington’s “Farewell Address.”
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I think it is time to revisit that speech as it is so applicable to our world today, and even more so to the eternal conflict in the Mideast.
While Eisenhower’s comments were then directed at the deeds of the Soviet Union, I am afraid to say that today they seem more applicable to the actions of Israeli and U.S. leaders. What follows are some of the highlights that I think are most pertinent to our predicament, and, where appropriate, I have changed “Soviet Union” to either “Israel” or the “United States,” or both.
First off, Ike insisted:
No people on Earth can be held, as a people, to be an enemy, for all humanity shares the common hunger for peace and fellowship and justice. …
Any nation’s right to a form of government and an economic system of its own choosing is inalienable. Any nation’s attempt to dictate to other nations their form of government is indefensible.
A nation’s hope of lasting peace cannot be firmly based upon any race in armaments but rather upon just relations and honest understanding with all other nations.
As I discussed in my last “Personal,” many Jews consider Iran (Persia) to be an eternal enemy, based upon ancient biblical accounts. Yet Iran’s beef with the Zionist state centers more on Israel’s unending abuse of the people of Palestine—the Holy Land to us Christians. Had Israel conducted itself as a civilized nation since its inception in 1948, perhaps Iran and Israel could have existed in peace.
But Israel’s quest to dominate the region, steal the ancestral lands of the people of Palestine, deny their historical existence, cleanse the region of people they see as no better than parasites infecting the Jewish body politic, and to pursue the fanatical goal of establishing a “Greater Israel” without regard for the millions of people in the lands that surround the state of Israel has made this impossible.
Israel will not stop until it is the undisputed hegemon of the Mideast.
Unfortunately, the Zionist state has had the U.S. as an all-too-willing partner in this most recent genocide of Israel’s neighbors (which actually stretches back to ancient times). Portions of Jewish holy texts (and the Christian Old Testament) are often recountings of the genocides of goyim peoples who “threatened” Judeans, Hebrews, or Jews, whatever they called themselves during those various historical eras.
So how did Eisenhower suggest we might ease tensions and bring peace to the world? By making one nation the ruler of the world by arming itself to the point where its arsenals of destructive weapons could easily overwhelm its enemies—and its friends? Quite the opposite. Ike said:
In the world of [Israeli and American] design, security is to be found not in mutual trust and mutual aid but in force: huge armies, subversion, rule of neighbor nations. Security is to be sought by denying it to all others. The goal is power superiority at all cost.
And what is that cost? Ike said, reflecting the prices of things in 1953:
… Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed 8,000 people.
In 1953, a bushel of wheat sold for about $2.20. Today it sells for $5. In 1953, an aircraft carrier cost $200 million. Today it costs $120 billion. Certainly we can find better things on which to spend our tax dollars.
And what about the cost of fear?
And so it has come to pass that [Israel] itself has shared and suffered the very fears it has fostered in the rest of the world. This has been the way of life forged by years of fear and force. What can the world … hope for if no turning is found on this dread road? … The worst is atomic war.
This infatuation with machines of war, Ike said, offers us little and threatens much:
The best would be this: a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the wealth and the labor of all peoples; a wasting of strength that defies … any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the people of Earth.
… This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
This is one of those times in the affairs of nations when the gravest choices must be made, if there is to be a turning toward a just and lasting peace.
It calls upon [the governments of the world] to answer the question that stirs the hearts of all sane men: Is there no other way the world may live?
I encourage Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump to read Ike’s entire speech, and wherever the Soviet Union is mentioned to insert either Israel or the United States in its place. Today, more than any other nations, it is they who have pushed the world to about 85 seconds before midnight on the “Atomic Clock.”
