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We Can Have Peace, If We Want It Norman Thomas july 9, 1945 This article is begun the day before the San Francisco Charter is to be oªcially launched as the bearer of the world’s sure hope of lasting peace. It is not that. I shall favor its ratiWcation because I am convinced that practically and psychologically we shall be in a better position to work for genuine security and peace. But basically, the new charter is a device by which the Big 3 can easily and somewhat amiably maintain their collective power over the world, and adjust their own rivalries with a minimum of friction. This is not the basis for peace. That requires a deWnite and conscious progress towards a federation of free peoples who will seek to use our marvelous machinery for the good of all. Wars spring from group prejudices and group passions for proWt and power. There are in the Charter no adequate provisions to make possible the rule of the sort of a law between nations which by orderly processes can be made to approximate justice. The amoral idea of sovereignty remains, and neither the unreal metaphysical idea of equality of sovereignty of weak nations and strong, nor the grim reality of the imperialism of the strong, is greatly a¤ected by the San Francisco Charter. The business of removing the political and economic causes of war, and organizing the world, regardless of racial and national prejudice, on a basis Wt for peace is completely unWnished. —Norman Thomas, socialist and paciWst, ran six times for president on the Socialist Party ticket. Anniversary Elaine Holstein may 1988 At a few minutes past noon on May 4, I will once again observe an anniversary—an anniversary that marks not only the most tragic event of my life but also one of the most disgraceful episodes in American history. This May 4 will be the eighteenth anniversary of the shootings on the campus of Kent State University and the death of my son, Je¤ Miller, by Ohio National Guard riXe Wre. Eighteen years! That’s almost as long a time as Je¤’s entire life. He had turned twenty just a month before he decided to attend the protest rally that ended in his death and the deaths of Allison Krause, Sandy Scheuer, and Bill Schroeder, and the wounding of nine of their fellow students. One of them, Dean Kahler, will spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down. Holstein / Anniversary 253 ...

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