CHAPTER 6

Cancer Cell No. 1 in the Free Body Politic

              To thine own self be true,
And it must follow as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
                   -Shakespeare, Hamlet.

The Soviet leaders have also appeared in the role of the most
uncompromising defenders of national sovereignty known to modern times
** The defense of national sovereignty, far from contradicting the goal
of a Soviet world state, has actually become one of the most formidable
weapons in the struggle for its attainment. ** Soviet pre-occupation
with construction and indefinite expansion of an all-powerful,
all-embracing state authority, while originally justified as a
necessary, transitory means, has instead become the indestructible,
unwithering end of Soviet society. -- Elliot R. Goodman, The Soviet
Design for a World State.[1]

A far greater danger to freedom than the Russian and Chinese
dictatorships lies here at home. It is as invisible as cancer cell No.
1, and as virulent. Yet it remains as protected by tabu, as worshiped
as any Baal or Moloch ever was -- and capable of causing, and even
inspiring, much more human sacrifice. What is it? A concept of national
sovereignty that is demonstrably false to the fundamental nature of all
the free peoples whom it now confuses, deceives and betrays. It is true
only to the nature of dictatorship, whether Communist National Socialist
or Fascist, which alone it serves.

What is evil in one body politic may be good in another, much as what is
poison to one species feeds another. To Communism our current concept of
national sovereignty is natural and nourishing -- as vital as is venom
to a viper. Only to the free is it fatal.

THE CURRENT CONCEPT OF NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY

This concept, which the free now share with the dictatorships, makes the
nation supreme, above all law. It holds the nation's absolute
independence to be the highest good. It calls on the people to sacrifice
their individual liberties and lives to maintain their nation's freedom
to do as it pleases, insofar as other nations are concerned. In the
Congress of the United States, as in Cuba and the Congo, this concept
inflames fiery opposition to the "surrender" of an iota of the nation's
"right" to be a law unto itself, even where this "sacrifice" would
clearly extend the rights of the citizen, or secure him against needless
sacrifice of his or her liberty and life.

This concept of national sovereignty is, of course, part and parcel of
the ancient dogma that man is made for the State. We have seen how it
was once embodied in "divine right" sovereigns. Since they claimed
absolute power over their own people, these autocrats naturally had to
be, in their relations with each other, no less sovereign, no less a law
each unto himself. And since the Communist dictatorships are much more
totalitarian than the Czars in their enslavement of their people to the
authority of the State, it is all too natural that they should continue
to uphold between nations the same concept of sovereignty as did the
Czars. They are true to themselves, inside and out, in their adherence
to it.

Not so the other nations, which have overthrown this concept of
sovereignty at home, yet still permit it to rule all their foreign
relations. It is most alien to the peoples who have led the revolution
against such absolutism, reversed at home the dogma that man is made for
the State and replaced their unlimited Kings with themselves as the
sovereign people. To these peoples, the concept of national sovereignty
which they apply to one another is as unnatural a growth in the body
politic as is cancer in the human body. It is a disease as malignant and
fatal ... a far more widespread cause of suffering and grief to their
citizens than cancer ... a more massive killer even than the H-bomb,
which is but one of the myriad ways of destroying men that it now
commands.

TRUE DEMOCRATIC CONCEPT OF SOVEREIGNTY

One cannot too often repeat that the concept of national sovereignty
that is true to the nature of a free people holds that: (1) The State is
made of, by and for man; (2) the nation's sovereignty resides in its
citizens equally, (3) they delegate a part of their sovereignty to the
national government, and other parts to their state, county and
municipal governments; (4) they reserve to themselves the remainder,
including the right to re-delegate any of it (except the right to
delegate and re-delegate) when and as they please, provided this is
done by Law that they have consented to; (5) the purpose for which they
delegate any of it to any government is always and only to preserve and
advance equally the individual sovereignty of the citizens -- his or her
life, liberty and power to pursue happiness as he or she pleases (always
under the Rule of Law which these sovereigns have freely constituted).

This democratic concept of sovereignty is opposed to the totalitarian
concept no less completely in other respects. It admits of no absolute,
unlimited sovereignty even in its sovereigns-to say nothing of the
bodies politic they together create. It leaves no sovereign citizen a
law unto himself; holds no man or institution above the Law. Although
its sovereign citizens never alienate their sovereignty, they always
agree to limit even their own exercise of it. Such limitation is
inherent in their acceptance of the establishment of their constitution
by some degree of majority vote, and in their elimination, practically,
of the right of veto that is theoretically inherent in sovereignty.

Kings who maintained an absolute veto over their own people could reason
that such sovereignty required them to insist on an unlimited veto in
their affairs with other kings who claimed equal sovereignty. Such
sovereigns could fancy it to be practical, or possible, to get this
claim admitted. The great are subject, as Descartes said, to great
aberrations.

Common men have more common sense. Enough at any rate to realize that
there is a vital difference between their sovereignty and that of
autocrats.

Such kings could hope to survive amid the anarchy their sovereign claims
created. For they could send their subjects to get killed for them --
"for King and Country" -- in the wars to which their concept of
sovereignty inevitably led, and leads. But when each citizen is
sovereign, none can hope thus to escape. Each sovereign then has his own
life directly at stake. In such circumstances most men readily
understand that life is not possible if each citizen sovereign claims
that his sovereignty must be as unlimited in relation to his fellow
sovereigns as is his rule over his own body.

And so men, in making themselves each sovereign in their own nation,
never lay claim to such attributes of sovereignty as having a veto, and
being above the law. They readily accept the Rule of Law as made by a
freely formed majority of them, so long as the law and the majority are
also limited by enough individual liberty to keep each citizen
reasonably sovereign. For the democratic concept of sovereignty, which
always makes all citizens subject to the Law, also makes the law always
subject to the will of the citizens. Its Law is not absolute, as was the
law of the Medes and the Persians "which altereth not" -- even at the
instance of Darius, as he found when, against his own will, his own law
forced him to throw Daniel into the den of lions.

The democratic concept of sovereignty also keeps the citizen reasonably
sovereign in other ways. For example, by having the principal
representatives to whom he delegates part of his sovereignty elected by
equal vote of the citizens and periodically responsible to them, and by
establishing a Bill of Rights and judicial machinery, to assure that the
sovereign powers which the citizens reserve to themselves are not
infringed by their representatives, or by their fellow citizens.

Perhaps the most significant proof of the sovereignty of the citizens in
any nation is the degree to which it leaves the individual free to
follow his conscience -- where conscience is not a subterfuge -- as in
refusing to obey draft laws that require him to kill other men, or
otherwise violate what to his conscience is a moral Law, superior to any
law made by men. In last analysis, the sovereignty of the citizen, as we
have seen, is founded on the idea that the most sacred thing in every
man is the spark of God within him. The absolutist concept holds the
state sacred, deifies the nation, and denies -- today -- even the soul's
existence. Freedom's concept of sovereignty holds nothing human sacred
except the life, liberty and dignity of the individual, and recognizes
in him no unlimited divine right -- except that of his conscience. There
could be no sharper, deeper, soul-revealing contrast than that between
the concept of sovereignty we uphold at home and the one we uphold
abroad.

THE CANCEROUS CONCEPT THAT ENDANGERS FREEDOM

Would you not agree that the concept of sovereignty set forth in the
preceding section is the true democratic one? Must you not also agree
that in our foreign relations we reverse this concept -- even when we
deal with other peoples whose bodies politic were created by it, too?
Must you not further agree that the principle of national sovereignty we
and they apply to one another is part and parcel of the absolutist dogma
from which we and they recoil with instinctive horror when embodied in a
Hitler, a Stalin? Why do we not recoil at its presence in ourselves? The
reason is that we have not yet seen it there. And so this cancer has
become the deadliest danger we now face, and the hardest one to
extirpate.

To take half a loaf is usually better than to take none, but to take out
only half a cancer is better only if one seeks to kill the victim in the
cruellest way.

To understand how much more dangerous this invisible cancer in us is
than the dictatorships whose massive arms we see so well, let us suppose
that we remove their armaments, and even them, but not the cancer in us.
To thwart thus their aim of "burying us" would be far more dangerous now
than this operation proved to be in World War I and II. But let us
assume that it succeeds once again (in the sense of removing the
dictatorship) -- and that we survive. Even so, past experience proves it
only too probable that we would soon thereafter face the totalitarian
threat in even more fearful form.

World War I removed the Kaiser type of autocrat completely; none of the
deeply-rooted hereditary despots of Europe remained. The Romanoff,
Hapsburg, Hohenzollern and Ottoman dynasties went down for good. The
world lay as never before in the hands of the most democratic powers.
But the war left their relations with one another governed by the
concept of unlimited national sovereignty. Soon absolutism, in the more
virulent form of Hitler's National Socialism, regained control of
Germany.

To remove the Nazis proved much more dangerous than to remove Kaiser,
Czar and Sultan. Again the only thing removed was the monstrous visible
growth, not the hidden cancerous concept in the free bodies politic.
Result: Now again we face a still more formidable form of dictatorship.
Communism is more aggressively armed than were the Kaiser and the
Fuehrer; it holds a stronger defensive position, and it can win by other
means than war, -- by economic warfare, by depression, by subversion ...
and by the cancerous concept of national sovereignty that still devours
our vitals.

HOW AND WHY COMMUNISM CHAMPIONS NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY

The Russian dictatorship has been the most ardent and extreme champion
of national sovereignty since World War II. As E. A. Korovin pointed
out, as early as 1924, in page 43 of the textbook on international law
he published then in Moscow:

"At a time when the general development of European international law
moves in the direction of draining sovereignty of its content in the
name of contemporary interdependence of states ... the Soviet government
is recognized as the champion of the doctrine of 'classical'
sovereignty."

Moscow champions it not to keep the world divided forever into many
sovereign nations, but to advance its ultimate goal -- the universal
Communist State that Marx and Lenin dreamed of. In that world there
would be only one sovereign nation in today's diplomatic sense, nor
would there be, within that Communist State, any sovereign states in the
sense in which they are called "sovereign" in such federal unions as the
United States and Switzerland. The world state that Marx and Lenin
envisioned is fantastically centralized, not federalized. Lenin
especially attacked federalism. True the problem of nationalities in
Russia forced a little federation on him, and the present Soviet
Constitution states that "the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is a
federal state." But when these concessions were first made, Lenin
himself explained on March 28, 1918 that: "Federation is only a
transitional step ... The federation we are now introducing and which
will develop in future, will serve as the surest step to the most solid
unification of the different nationalities of Russia into a unitary,
democratic, centralized Soviet state."

This policy has continued.[2] As it has evolved in Russia, Communism has
not only discarded the eventual "withering away" of the state into a
"stateless" world, envisioned in its early theory, but has developed to
an incredible degree Marx's highly centralized idea of the final world
state. It plans a world dictatorship in which all power on the planet
would be centered. Such is the appalling apotheosis of the principle
from which our current doctrine of national sovereignty springs. To
bring it about, the Soviet leaders have become -- to quote Dr. Goodman
again -- "the most uncompromising defenders of national sovereignty in
modern times." He continues:

There are three basic reasons which would seem to account for this
urgent Soviet defense of national sovereignty. The first is to
perpetuate the anarchy of the nation-state system in the non-Soviet
world. The Soviet leaders are aware of the fact that they would have
much to lose and the non-Soviet world much to gain if that anarchic
system were overhauled and strengthened ... Since the second World War,
the Soviet regime has tried to separate the United States from its
allies by posing as the defenders of the national sovereignty of
America's allies against the encroachments of "American imperialism."[3]

The other reasons for which Moscow exploits national sovereignty are 1)
to speed the breaking up of the empires of the West, 2) to keep the new
nations formed from them suspicious of Western offers of help in
developing themselves, and therefore weak and subject to Communist
influences, and above all, 3) to guarantee to the Soviet Union its
independence[4] until it can become strong enough to destroy the
independence of all other nations, and men. Just as it invokes the
democratic rights of free speech, free press, free assembly to protect
its efforts to destroy them, it invokes the rights of nations to
preserve and promote[5] its campaign to merge all nations into the
faceless, nation-less, single world sovereignty of the Communist World
Dictatorship.

THE COMMUNIST CONCEPT WE ACCEPT -- AND NURSE

Nonetheless, of all the false ideas Communism spreads, only its concept
of national sovereignty is widely accepted by Atlanticans in general,
and by Americans most of all. Moscow cannot take credit for this. This
concept is a homegrown fallacy in each Atlantic people. That is one
reason why it is so hard for them to rid themselves of it, and so easy
for Communism to exploit it. No deception is so persuasive and tenacious
as self-deception. Evil is most evil, and hardest to dislodge, when men
deem it good.

The current concept of national sovereignty, instead of being recognized
by its democratic victims as cancer, is tenderly nursed and carefully
protected by these people as vital to health. Most of the political
doctors they trust to cure their body politic of the resulting ills seem
no wiser. Their remedies are as wrong as those which physicians
prescribed prior to Pasteur. And in their attitude toward those who do
trace these ills to their true source, they also remind one of the
doctors who denounced the French chemist for daring to attack as false
the assumption that underlay their therapy.

True, I find an increasing number of political leaders who now agree, in
private, that the prevailing concept of national sovereignty endangers
the free peoples. Yet most of them still pay lip service to it in public
and thus help to maintain Baal's grip on the hearts of men. Few actively
attack it; still fewer, openly, or head on.

The braver political doctors tell the patient the cancer is a tumor, or
just a little cyst whose removal will involve the sacrifice of no vital
organ. Others say that the only "safe" way to remove it is not to let
the people know what the doctor is doing; their strategy is the
"gradualist" one: They seek to cut the cancer out in a long series of
operations, and so little at a time, that the patient will not realize
he is losing what he fondly believes to be his heart.[6] This strategy
is safe, but only for the surgeon.

Among the political leaders who are widely trusted, very few indeed dare
to question, when seeking election to office of trust, the validity of
the prevailing concept of national sovereignty. I can recall no nominee
for President of the United States in my time who has ever denounced
this concept as false to freedom or sought openly to rid the people of
it. Nor have any American Presidents -- with a few truly great (and
distant) exceptions ... Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Jackson,
Lincoln.

This concept is indeed a fearfully difficult fallacy to overcome. That
is one reason why I am devoting so much attention to it now. Another
reason is that there is no other way to cure the ills it causes. From
this concept of sovereignty surges the opposition that has already
killed so many moves, however slight, to advance freedom's law and order
between nations, and has nipped in the bud so many others ... while it
goes blindly on producing policies that advance Communism by further
dividing the free. It arms not only those who oppose Atlantic Union, but
those who would protect this or that barrier to trade, or who defend the
Connally amendment against efforts to breathe a little life into the
World Court, or who seek to unite the scientific resources of Atlantica
-- to mention no more.

Hydra-headed, the prevailing concept of national sovereignty guards like
Cerberus the gates of Hell against all attack -- none too minor or too
wily to elude it. But Cerberus was once overcome; Hercules, unarmed,
seized and dragged him up to daylight, by greater strength, applied
directly. And to overcome our "monster" -- as Herculean George
Washington dared to call the current concept of sovereignty -- I find no
way as sure as this: Frontal attack with the superior power of truth.

A final and greater reason to continue this attack is that Washington
proved that by so doing we can hope not only to overcome the monster,
but achieve thereby good beyond measure. We can make the Communist
threat no more dangerous than Nazi-ism is now -- and do this without
world war, and much sooner than seems possible today. We can do far more
-- we can create the high civilization that physical science now puts
within the reach of free men, when effectively united and reinspired by
their most vital principles. Fear of catastrophe has now reduced hope to
talk of mere survival. Once we dreamed of the marvelous life our great
grand-children would know. Our own children, and even we ourselves, can
enjoy the advantages and challenges of that life -- if we renounce our
false concept of national sovereignty for the one that is true to
freedom's nature. No struggle is so worthy of another effort. Let us
make it now.

____

1. The three citations are from pages 114, 125 and 471. I warmly
recommend this entire volume (published by Columbia Press in 1960) as a
timely and fully documented reminder that Communism has a thoroughly
worked out and never neglected plan for a completely centralized world
government -- the antithesis of Atlantic Federal Union, and the real
alternative to it.

2. Professor Goodman points out on page 262 of Soviet Design for a World
State:

"Soviet leaders have contrived elaborate federalist-appearing devices
that have attempted to take advantage of and to give minimal play to
national sentiment not only for the nations under their control, but
also for those nations that they seek to attach to their self-proclaimed
embryo of a world federation. But using the vocabulary of federalism has
never touched the core of their political philosophy, which is
thoroughly centralist, nor would it seem to have altered their ultimate
aim of a unitary world state." This is the conclusion of his Chapter 7,
a 73-page discussion of "The Issue of Centralism versus Federalism in
the Leninist Era."

3. Ibid, p. 114.

4. When the United States offered to place atomic power, of which it
then had a monopoly, under international control, Mr. Gromyko rejected
this on March 5, 1947 as an intolerable threat to the "internal affairs
and internal life of states." Replying to Albert Einstein's plea of
Sept. 22, 1947 for "a world society based on law and order," four
distinguished Soviet scientists answered that the Soviet Union was a
radical break from the capitalist system, "and now the proponents of a
'world super-state' are asking us voluntarily to surrender this
independence." Einstein replied: "You are such passionate opponents of
anarchy in the economic sphere, and yet equally passionate advocates of
anarchy, e.g. unlimited national sovereignty, in the sphere of
international politics." This letter went unanswered. When the United
States proposed veto-free international control, Vyshinsky on Oct. 18,
1954 denounced this as a "world government" and emphasized that the
United Nations "is an assembly of sovereign states in which the will,
interests, desires and views of each must be respected."

On some earlier occasions -- as when Litvinoff sought collective
security at the League of Nations against Hitler -- Moscow has also
belittled national sovereignty but only to preserve itself and thus
advance its own scheme for world government.

5. Even Moscow's brutal suppression of the Hungarian revolutionary
government was defended by Izvestia on March 9, 1957, as based on the
Soviet principle guaranteeing "the strengthening of the sovereignty of
each socialist state."

6. These are the political doctors who keep telling us that we must
resign ourselves to "thirty years of tension" such as we have now -- or
prepare to live with it even longer, indefinitely. This is considered
"realistic" -- as if we could keep our freedom healthy by staying in the
hospital forever, being treated by defeatists whose diagnosis is wrong
and whose advice is dispiriting.

