Archbishop Tutu:--
I got the original of this in the mail after i sent the December 16, 1987 registered letter to P.W. Botha and John J. Phelan, Jr., CHAIRMAN OF THE NEW YORK STOCK EXCHANGE.
I gave her a copy of my Christmas, 1987 statement to you because i needed to explain to Prime Minister Mulroney that i had lost my copy of the October 9, 1987 statement to SPEAKER OF THE U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES Jim Wright--and there would be no better way than to show how i explained it to you.
One other thing i must add that wasn't included in the things sent to Botha. Looking through my files last night for something for the submission to the Vancouver Stock Exchange's S.J. Hudson, i found i'd made a mistake in the form of the 'AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION' sent to Botha and Mr. Phelan. The statement : 'History teaches' attributed in it to Barbara Tuchman wasn't said by her. In a March 14, 1984 statement to Gerald Emmett Cardinal Carter, Roman Catholic Christian Archbishop of Toronto, i told him that it was used by David W. McCullough, "in summing up his analysis of Ms. Tuchman's book," and it originates from this statement by Gertrude Stein:
'Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches.'
I'll revise the "AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION" to note this and will send you a copy of it in future. (I'll send copies of the revised form to Botha and Mr. Phelan if they respond to my submissions to them.)
I wanted to add a dedication in it anyway, Archbishop Tutu.
One to the late Harry Chapin, who did so much during his brief lifetime to help end world hunger and who was the major example for me in 1978 when i did the groundwork for the efforts by the popular entertainers we planned.
I already included a dedication to him in my book of poetry yet to be published.
Armaments are not the cause of war: they are the instrument. The intentions behind them are the cause. Those may be expansion--territorial or ideological or both--paranoia, master-race delusions, fear, old rivalries and hatreds, or any combination of the above, but some human mental-cum-emotional process must take place. Armaments, whether nuclear or conventional, do not trigger themselves nor (contrary to popular fears) go off by accident. Active intent must be present.
Recognition of that if sometimes overlooked fact suggests that if we are to prevent war we must find or develop some form of political accommodation with the nation we perceive as the major threat. Or, failing that, some firm, consistent national policy, steadily pursued, that can endow us with the steadfastness to wait out in nonbelligerence the paranoid phase in the Soviet Union's history, no matter how long it takes. It may take decades or half a century, or more.
Accommodation has now been made infinitely more difficult by the affair of the Korean airliner, both by revealing the extremes of the United States and raising the doubts of even reasonable people. How deep the effect will be or how long it will last one cannot know, but whatever the case, the necessity remains of some minimum basis for nonbelligerent coexistence, for without it any meaningful arms control or reduction will be unachievable.
While nations are mutually hostile and distrustful, they are not going to disarm or seriously reduce their arsenals. Throughout the 20th century's many efforts since the first Hague Disarmament Conference of 1899, control of war in the form of disarmament or limitation of arms has been a fruitless effort.
The League of Nations' efforts during the 1920's and '30's repeatedly foundered on the issue of security before disarmament. No nation was prepared to sacrifice a weapon without the assurance of "security." Even the Encyclopedia Britannica in its last edition was shaken out of its usual composure to the outspoken admission that the effort for disarmament in our time has been "spectacularly unsuccessful."
The failure suggests that we should try another way. Control of nuclear war is too serious a matter to be left any longer to governments. They are not going to get it for us; in fact they are the obstacle. As the late President Eisenhower recognized in that oft-quoted and very revealing remark, "People want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it."
Today the widespread fear of nuclear war may be a new element that will make the difference. It is the only motive power. I believe, that could compel us toward the control of war that all the efforts of the last 80-odd years have not secured. It is an instrument, moreover, in the hands of the public.
Governments are, of course, made up of human beings who know fear no less than ordinary mortals. But the trouble with governments is that they are moved by too many other considerations. Policymakers become trapped in illusions of power, individual status-seeking and self-image, vested interests, ideologies, ambitions of continuance in office. As a result, fear has no room to energize common sense. Governments, I have concluded, cannot be looked to for genuine disarmament or meaningful arms control.
Let us acknowledge it: the American and Soviet governments have no real desire to limit nuclear arms. They go on talking about it, as they are now talking at Geneva, and that is useful up to a point because it keeps the dialogue going, but the intention behind the talks is questionable.
The obstacle to progress is that they have got themselves into such a bind of mutual suspicion that they cannot divest themselves of a single missile. That will take a revolutionary change of attitude.
The principle necessary for such a change was stated by Salvador de Madariaga y Rojo, chairman of the League of Nations Disarmament Conference of the 1930s. Summing up his experience, the Spanish writer and diplomat said in his memoirs that the causes of quarrel must be eliminated first before disarmament can take place.
"The trouble with disarmament," he wrote in 1973, "was (and still is) that the problem of war is is tackled upside down and at the wrong end....Nations don't distrust each other because they are armed; they are armed because they distrust each other. And therefore to want disarmament before a minimum of common agreement on fundamentals is as absurd as to want people to go undressed in winter. Let the weather be warm, and people will discard their clothes readily and without committees to tell them how to undress."
Madariaga's metaphoric warm weather is now further off than ever. For that reason nuclear freeze proponents and other arms control movements must maintain their conviction and their impetus as a means of keeping pressure on government.
Regardless of all the arguments for and against freeze and this or that range and kind of deployment and decoupling and counting warheads or missiles, those complexities are essentially immaterial. The ultimate objective must be kept in view: not to control weapons per se, but to control war.
Through existing anti-war organizations, national and local, statewide and town-based, myriad in variety and membership, the public voice must continue to make itself heard. Throughout Europe and the United States in the last few years it has been growing and must not now falter or fade. It is not united or a consensus (the only consensus in a democracy would be that of the grave) but it is the only check we have on the imbecility of governments.
One lesson has been learned, at least in the U.S. since Vietnam: the executive cannot conduct a war without public support or against the national wish. The course we take rests with the people and their votes.
(text of September 30, 1983 Vancouver Sun article)
TO RETURN TO THE LIST OF CONTENTS FOR MY CHRISTMAS, 1987 REGISTERED LETTER TO MY FRIEND, DESMOND TUTU, I URGE YOU TO TAKE YOUR NEXT FOOTSTEP HERE.