Of Men and Women by Pearl S. Buck

Author:Pearl S. Buck
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504045117
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2017-04-05T04:00:00+00:00

7. WOMEN AND WAR

Women have for too long left men to struggle alone with the problem of evil in the world. And what is the problem of evil except the problem of wicked and ruthless individuals, the gangsters in a community, whether that community be a town, a nation, or a world? Protected by the walls of her home, busied in the peaceful pursuits of cooking and caring for children, woman has taken no responsibility for the control of wicked men, with the result that we see in the world today. In her security she has been too sentimental even to her own children. Women’s sons stand at this very moment behind the machines of aggressive war and kill millions of innocent people. Women’s sons are murdering and looting on a scale never before known in history. Is this not colossal proof of the failure of women to create moral character in her sons while they are in the home? If woman cannot create moral character in her sons while they are in the home, then she must help man to control evil character outside. For clearly it is beyond man alone to cope with evil, now that the will to evil of even a single man can be so magnified by modern weapons of war.

If we are ever to have peace, it will be accomplished not by vaguely organized individuals passing resolutions. It will be accomplished only by bitterly determined men and women who will study and use every means in their power to enforce and indoctrinate the ideas and performance of peace. But the first step toward peace as the foundation of human relations will be a complete knowledge of what war is. We shall all have the knowledge of how war works when it breaks and what its effects are—that will be enforced upon us. But we need to know how it begins and who begins it and where and when.

War is, of course, endemic as yet in human society; and, like all endemic diseases, given certain conditions, it becomes epidemic at regular or perhaps irregular intervals. Those conditions are, if one reads the history of wars, two: first, discontent in a human group, that discontent being in the main economic; and, second, the rise to power of a certain type of mind. That type of mind is endemic, too. It is atavistic, cruel, simple, or cunning. But whatever it is, it is basically uncivilized. Thousands of years hence, unless such minds have destroyed us all, the creatures of a wiser age than ours will look back and recognize them for what they are—the persistent traces of our beginnings in the animal world from which we have so newly sprung. We are not free yet of the wild; the love of blood and the kill is still in us. Here is our true enemy, the enemy of us all, whatever our race and nation. These atavistic minds, hostile to kindness, resentful of slights which anyone must accept

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