War

May 01, 2005

History has observed that the top post that lies at the end of a greasy pole, is still straight away available for the strong. Caesar and Napoleon rose to eminence when they were 20. In spirit the top post is available straight away if he carries the Force. In politics too the principle is true, if he carries the evolutionary Force of the Society. More than in any other country we see this is true in America. It is true in all fields in America. The birth of intelligentia 300 years ago brought the truth of this principle out. Senior posts in government in UK is only for those who are above 60. No one will be considered for such a post before he is 60. Man acquires capacities by experience and it does need time. Not all the aristocrats in England were educated before the intelligentia came into its own. Education was superfluous, even frowned upon by the aristocrats. The aristocrat qualifies by virtue of being an aristocrat. Education later changed the rules. America threw all rules to the wind, along with that all tradition. It measured men by their achievement. Politics permitted that meteoric rise. In America money ruled over politics too.

All American politicians of that period swore by God. He earnestly believed that his own achievement was God's achievement in him. God lingered in his consciousness more out of habit, than out of faith. Men who achieve believe in their achievement and pay lip service to God. When the Americans say God ordained rather than government devised, they mean it was achieved by them. The World War arose out of the death Europe died as a living entity or society. War destroyed that old Europe forever. All parts of Europe are adopting American style of life now. This is a serious idea. The European peasant is a gardener. The European worker is a crafts man. The farmer in Europe is not concerned in the quantity of production. Mass production by standardisation is alien to Europe. In Europe people discuss ideas, not plans or merely the latest information. The European has a culture to preserve. The American is yet to create any culture of their own. The American house wife has a flood of articles and trains herself as an organiser of the house. The European housewife has a family to rear, children to educate. She does not give up her children to be trained in the school. The American kid is hyper sensitive. The European child is tender. War has swept all this and much more in one stroke. The old Europe did not survive the onslaught of the war.

Teddy Roosevelt believed more in executive action than in the constitution. Executive action is of the individual. Politics is to reflect the will of the people and enshrine it in the constitution. The step from the constitution to the Act of Legislature is a mature exercise of a nation that grows to be a society. We saw that distance and political labour in the abolition of slavery. Constitutionalism needs political heads who really know the will of the people about their long-term existence not the pulse of the people as to whom they will vote. He does not appear on the scene one day. It needs a movement of society, a movement of Thought about their social existence as a nation. Once that political basis is created and enshrined in laws of the land it has to be handed down to the executive for action. In the US the President is the chief Executive directly elected by the people. He combines the leadership of politics as well as the power of the head of the Executive. Teddy Roosevelt was anxious to exercise the muscle power of the Executive. He did so in handling the miners strike. He was tough and made them bend to his purpose.

- At Harvard Charles William Eliot entered his 40 - year tenure as President of the college in 1869.

Such long tenures are for the founders or those who form the organisation into an institution. An organisation is a systematic collection of acts and activities. An institution is a live organisation which imparts values to these activities. Energy becoming acts or activities is an organisation. The same activities working by the energy of values is an institution. Several lessons taught is an activity. It is done by the energy of the teacher or the school. The same lessons learnt or taught energised by the value of education makes the organisation into an institution. Today Harvard is a pre-eminent institution in the world. It is so because it stands for so many values. They are values of education - curiosity to collect facts, representation of them factually, arranging them into a system which is classified. All these educational values subserve a social value of evolution. They are unconscious of their mission, but are not uninformed of their duty. It was a period when America emerged from agriculture into manufacturing. Nation's manufacture not only required engineers and scientists but also needed information about her mineral and power resources. The minerals had to be smelted into metals. The resources of power must be gathered into usable power. It is an engineering feat in one part. That part to come to fruition the entrepreneur must be abroad. The spirit of adventure characteristic of the entrepreneur must pervade the nation in all fields, even in education. Harvard was a pioneer in that adventure. Therefore Eliot had a stint of 40 year tenure.

• The founding of Harvard was organising the future of national education as the backbone of the national existence. We see here the parallel to Oxford and Cambridge who laid the foundation of religious education and thus created the class known as intelligentia. The Universities of Vienna and Paris created the European culture of today. It is an academic culture. Harvard similarly founded the basic reinforcements of national economy and national prosperity. What the 20th century directly needed was not aristocratic culture but the culture of a prosperous population. Paris and Vienna served the prewar period when man curled into the cosy comfort of cloistered culture confined to the upper classes. It was social culture. The world needed work culture, prosperity. It needed to flow outward to all mankind, not confined to a class or a country. So, the interdisciplinary studies came into existence as a first step. Spending a year in another continent, in another culture gained momentum. Mind was outgoing. Biology was studied from the point of view of chemistry. Attempts were made to study economics as if people mattered. Economics was mathematically interpreted. Physics and mathematics almost merged. Archeology drew upon chemistry. Economists viewed economics from the point of view of geography. Statistics became a science. It lent itself to mathematical formulations. A new science of demography was born. Every subject has developed its own bearing on the population content of it. The work of surveying reached its perfection and extended into the ocean. The relationship between cultural life and geology was explored. Biological forms lending themselves to mathematical equations were perceived. The era of patents gave way to the era of intellectual exploration.
• Mind expanded on all sides, entered into Life though through the postern began to forge a unity of sorts at some level.

• - Income tax came in 1913.

• Eight-hour day came in 1916.
• Income tax was 1%, Max was 7%.
• Randolph Bourne (1886-1918) saw War would enormously accelerate the already perceptible growth of Big Government: "War is the health of the State".

Atleast for 300 years the USA was in existence as a country before the income tax came to the scene. We would normally expect a wealthier population to be taxed more. Income was 10 times higher than in Europe, but there was no income tax. How did the government function without tax income? It is said the government existed on customs duties and prison penalties. Income tax was not levied even in Europe or India before this period. When tax was levied it was 1%. If incomes are 10 times higher 1% of tax in U.S.A would bring as much revenue as 10% of tax in Europe. Absence of income tax indicates the absence of the effective presence of the government in the daily lives of the people.

When Man worked for himself he was working all waking hours. By 1916 industries had sprung up and the labourer was no longer working for himself only. By 1916 Russian Revolution was in the offing. Every country in Europe was ready to do everything in its power to ward off a Revolution. Though that was not the climate in the U.S.A, the eight-hour day was on the agenda.

Wilson, the President, was a pacifist. In the World War I initially he declared American neutrality. He saw the reality of ruthless brutality in Man and warned war would bring it out in action. Randolph Bourne was a radical. He knew the economic truth of an active war. He could see the growth of American prosperity was perceptible. It was clear to him, as well as the left-wing Democrats that a war could enormously accelerate the growth of Big Government. He said, "War is the health of the State".

Man is basically brutal. He needs an outlet to his brutality at least his brutal strength. Unrefined raw strength of man fashions into an unformed instrument. To us it is crude in its functioning, brutal in its expression. It is a natural composition of Man; his strength in a civilised state is nascent. Civilised living offers no scope for the brute strength to express. War is the ideal condition for such an outlet. War activates the economy as well as the pugnacious potentials of the government. We are tempted to say a government is formed in the crucible of the battlefield. War directly activates the economy, but the government organises itself by waging a war. The administration during times of peace often rises to the war pitch. A government will be better qualified to govern and administer had it been through wars. To maintain the supply line of the army from the rear is the real training ground for the peacetime administrator.

• - The army grew from 200,000 to 4 million during the war

• The cost of WWI was ten times more than the cost of civil war.
• It was more than twice the cost of operating the federal government since 1789.
• It was $112 billion.
• IRS became a serious actor in the lives of ordinary citizens.
• In Europe most industries were taken over by the government, either for management or ownership.
• In Germany this method was most efficient and was called "War Socialism", Lenin admired it, made it standard in running the Soviets.
• Wilson who was neutral was dragged into war, by the German attack on US ships breaking earlier promises and to provoke a Mexican War.
• Wartime efforts remained later under a different name - E.G. Boards set up during the war remained to do other acts.
• About one-half of the American War personnel was conscript.
• The American delegation at Versailles was by far the best informed and documented.

The US was isolationist. She was dragged into the War by the German callousness to their own promises. Even in the second war the US remained outside. This time it was Japan who compelled the US to enter the War. After 1945 the US was to be the natural leader of the world - in military, politics, economics, and every other field. But it never struck her to join the war on her own. Life compelled the US to assume the world leadership. For over 100 years she was preparing herself for this role. Nature had prepared her for this role. Still when the hour of action arrives she keeps away. She was to be provoked into it. This is because the world was physical. A physical person never responds to anything which does not TOUCH him physically. See the actual role she played. Her army increased 20 times costing 10 times more than the bloodiest of wars she fought on her soil. Her eminence was thrust on her. It fell plump into her lap as soon as the war was over. It happens to every physical man when Life has to make him wealthy or famous. Physicality is self-contained. Even when it loves, it prefers to receive in the beginning.

An act once done has a way of perpetuating it. And it grows. For Life acts are neutral. Good and bad are equally capable of this behaviour. An act is an initiation. It never vanishes, on the other hand it grows. IRS was there when the foreign loan of $10 billions were to be collected. Later it became permanent. Several Boards, Committees were formed to handle wartime works. They stayed on and did allied work.

• War and Peace are not opposite, separated, unrelated. Peace is a continuation of War. Life is common to both and that is why Boards take root in the national life.
• War is Power, naked power. War means delivering the nation's full power as a single blow at the adversary. Naturally her means will be of power.  Lenin saw this act before he got power. Once he got into using power, the USSR could not come out of it for 70 years. Power is virulent and issues out of consciousness at the earliest stage. Hence it is in a nascent condition. It is incapable of learning before very long periods.
• Germany made it 'War Socialism', a slogan that was internationally popular at the time of the First War. Man does what he wants or what he can and gives the most exalted name of the period.

What the running of the federal government over 100 years or even 120 years is less than what the War cost. One year of war is equal to 25 or even 50 years of peaceful life in terms of cost.

• Man lives routinely. Routine life maintains, neither learns nor creates.
• War is a vast destruction, clearing the path of social progress and offering opportunities to learn.
• An opportunity to build is really an opportunity to learn, but man does not learn through the opportunity. He accomplishes by the opportunity.
• In the process of learning positive results precede knowledge.
• Results are in the physical plane, knowledge in the subtle plane.
• One who accomplishes rightly several times is often seen doing the wrong thing when he thinks and acts.
• One accomplishes by virtue of circumstances, not necessarily by thought.
• Vast amount of barriers and anachronisms accumulate over the decades which are to be destroyed. Of the human mind that superstitiously believes in the past is the arch type. It has to be destroyed, cannot be educated. To destroy that mind, the body that houses its brain is to be demolished. Hence the war and the enormous cost of destruction and subsequent construction.
• War is a crisis on the physical plane which cannot be resolved or shelved by efforts in the other planes.
• The physical form is enduring. Therefore unwanted forms are to be demolished when they are no more than museum pieces.
• No progress can ever be made without their basis taking lasting forms in the concrete physical material plane.
• Opinions of the mind, and attitudes of the vital are more difficult to change because they are less material and for that reason is more powerful.
• The above quantification in terms of cost is more than proof for the character of War described here. Hence the value of the statement of Heraclitus. The Mahabharatha War could not be avoided by an Avatar physically present among the parties. Krishna is from the overmind. It can accomplish in Truth or Knowledge disregarding the presence of falsehood or ignorance, but Overmind is incapable of dissolving that falsehood or evil. Duryodhana's jealousy is evil. It issues from the physical blindness of his father which can be traced to the fear his mother had of the visage of Vyasa. Blindness and fear are no source of anything good. Going further back we find its origin in the greed of Satyavathi. And that issues out of the sentimental pining of Santanu and the Vow of Bhisma to fulfill his father's irrational urge. It was the war of Kurushetra that had to demolish all such obstructions to ordered civilisation. It fell to the lot of an Avatar to establish Yugadharma the law of ages through an internecine war.

War is a moment of life and death crisis for a nation. At moments of crisis, the form gives way to the content. The symbol has the capacity at those moments to become reality. A crisis is an occasion for an entity to render the symbol the whole. The government is the creation of the society. It is a symbolic representation of the collective functioning organisationally. The power of the symbol is limited. Crisis opens all the springs of the original energy. That energy energises. It seeks new forms. It seeks to saturate the existing forms. The government exercises the functions allotted to it by the social will. The society delegates its power, or part of its power, to the government through laws enacted. In a moment of confusion where crisis brews, the past expands to the whole either constitutionally or arbitrarily. The government extends its right over all the centres of production. It takes over the industry for management or ownership. This happened in Germany. Lenin who was observing such proceedings found in that process a valuable instrument for his ideal when he came to power.

• Government is part of the Society, not the entire society.
• In times of war government becomes the society by its own necessity and initiative. It is essential, right, but a dangerous moment.
• Power once tasted does not go back to the owner by itself, unless compelled by the weight of the formed public opinion that finds organised expression which occurs in a democracy.
• It is a test for a nation's political maturity.
• The fact that half the army personnel were conscripts shows the population did not enthusiastically enter the war effort. This is in tune with the governments declaration of neutrality.
• Germany is an immature nation. It is neither mystic like Russia on its East or intellectual like France on the West. Their forte is their method and its perfection. Industries taken over by the government cannot easily go back to its owners in an immature nation.

The American delegation to Versailles was briefed by a group of scholars commissioned to collect facts for the meeting. Normally the cabinet minister who attends the meetings gets his facts from his own office. When a group of scholars undertake to study that issue and other allied issues, it is natural that their labour will be more comprehensive. Thus the American delegation was posted with the greatest number of valid facts. Here we see the American efficiency and its method. The Americans value in a work.

1) Information is related to that and their education offers that information. Mother calls it the practical organisation of the Americans.

2) They give the form of an organisation to acquire that information thus empowering the individual. The individual in America is no mere individual. Always he is part of the whole - the whole of the organisation.

• - Walter Lippmann disapproved of the treaty of 1918 at Versailles.
• A British historian said that had the Treaty been drafted solely by the Americans, it would have been the most scientific document.
• Wilson's 14 points were set down in a hurry.
• There was anxiety to meet Lenin's position on self determination of the peoples. Lenin just then published all the secret treatises to the embarrassment of all.
• Interests of international trade, restoration of lost territories, redrawing of the national boundaries, are to be addressed.
• The French and British leaders had reservations about the Wilsonian code.
• A week after asking for armistice the Germans sank the Irish civilian ferry drowning 450 people. This disgusted Wilson.
• Wilson was a professor.
• The Germans felt it was a swindle, an outrageous injustice and an affront to their national dignity.
• America never joined it. From the start it was a covenant without a sword.

Germany's production was the third after America and Britain. America was involved in her own dynamic growth which was all engrossing as it drew inward all her energies. She had no problems of defence or internal disorder. The accumulating wealth constantly and continuously organising itself as higher ways of production and higher and better ways of living. She was in a self-absorbed self-contentment. Britain who was in the second place was engaged by the widening influence of the Empire which was her pride and hence contentment. France whose production was nearly equal to that of Germany or England found her economic energies well absorbed by her intellectual efflorescence. Paris was the world's fashion centre. Intellectually the French language was pre-eminent. French was poised to become the world  language. Even in distant Russia French was in fashion. Russia the strongest of the European powers was in a ferment where the first proletariat revolution was under way. Germany with her perfection in methods had developed a great economic merit which was an urge. She had no Empire, not intellectual fame nor was she self-absorbed as the USA. Her educational systems had created excellent higher educational institutions and the highest mass literacy. For all these reasons she was a potential dynamo. She needed an occasion to explode or an excuse to initiate a conflict. This view presents that each major nation is positively or  negatively self-poised for action in the international arena. A wider view, a view of the whole would have seen that the world was in the throes of emancipating itself from her physicality and emerging into vitality or mentality. That view is justified by the post war period and the post cold-war period. In the absence of the view of the whole, not to speak of an integrated outlook, each part puts up its own dynamism, thus creating a fertile field for confrontation. The treaty of Versailles came in the middle of it after the first phrase of this movement - the World War I - was over. Should this view be conceded now as a more comprehensive one, it is obvious that a dexterous handling was called for in 1918 to make the WW I the war to end all wars. The Theory would say such a delicate handling would not emerge out of that situation. A cautions and a calculated mishandling would emerge making ample room for WW II to take shape. It was right the Versailles Treaty was seen as the cause of WW II by many. Watter Lippmann was one of them. Wilson's academic background, his pacifism, UK's secret reservations, Germany's outrage, her sinking of the Irish ferry, breaking her promise are all in place if viewed from the stand point of the Theory. They are not fortuitous circumstances. They were there because it was the order of the day.

• - The enfranchisement of woman.

• The real American will be a fusion of all races.
• Cola drinks grew popular fighting hard liquor.
• Women entered politics through the movements of temperance and abolition of slavery.
• The Supreme Court said, "The constitution does not confer the right of suffrage on anyone".
• American women got the vote in 1870, 1883, 1893, 1896, and 1920, two years behind Britain.
• American wives preferred control over their husbands to the selection of a President.
• Johnson says they would have had their rights by 1850 had they exerted themselves.

Social evolution is a process, a process of society continuously rising to greater heights. This it does by moving from a subconscious existence to conscious existence. Once it becomes conscious, it continues its movement of development by organising itself in successive higher levels of complexity till it reaches integrality in its functioning.

• It divides into routine and crisis each leading to the other.
• A long phase of routine existence culminates in a revolutionary crisis which initiates another long phase of routine existence at a higher level.
• Wars are moments of such crisis when man moves from the physical to the vital plane.
• Today the world has essentially outgrown the need of wars in the future but as these are not abrupt points of turn around, the remnants of war linger as border conflict, civil disorder, racial confrontation and finally expresses itself into hardened terrorist movements.
• Society initiates not one movement at a time, but it unleashes all the movements simultaneously and fosters their development along its lines of growth.
• The emancipation of slaves, the enfranchisement of women, shifting from hard liquor from soft drinks are topics here.
• Presently the world is in the process of promoting one government known as World Union through creating one single economic market all over the world called Globalisation. This of course needs the cessation of all military conflicts by establishing a single World Army. To discuss the realities of such an institution from the points of view of Jallian Wallah Bagh, Partition, W.W.II and illustrate the several stages through which it is moving from another movement such as woman's suffrage or abolition of slavery can throw full light on the process of the Society becoming self-conscious.
• The American is not the White protestant nor the Black American but he is in the process of making, a fusion of all the races. If this is true, the future citizen will be one who has transcended the racial identity not merely the religious conviction.
• Abolition of slavery passed through many stages. Still it is only half way through. After the Civil War they were accorded equality before the Law, but only after the Civil Rights Movement they received social recognition. Still, it is not psychological equality. Civil War itself was preceded by a couple of centuries of slave labour.

Civil War - emancipation - movement to North - Well paid jobs during the war    period - Ku klux Khan - Segregation - Voting rights - Civil Rights Movement - Inferiority complex.

• These phases are not particular or peculiar to slavery. They are common to all other social phenomena. The world has seen the birth of several such phases that have come to stay. Agriculture, manufacturing, service are movements of economic production. Physical, vital, mental, spiritual are more basic phases of man's spiritual composition. Domination, submission, co-existence, co-operation, co-ordination, destruction, protection, support are expressions of the growth of power in its various stages of play. Production, trade, commerce, transport, communication, distribution, consumption are economic movements organising themselves in the social life. Life expands. The selfish individual becomes the social collective individual, he loses and gains his individuality in the collective in the process of moving from the vital to the mental plane. Skill, capacity, talent, ability are stages in his energy organising itself for action at the individual as well as social dimensions. Duties and rights are values that emanate in this process

- Each plane matures and moves on to the next plane when it rises in its functions to the spiritual plane and expresses its skills as values of its own plane. Honour is the spiritual value for the physical man for which he fought duels for over 1000 years. Then duels were abolished by law and was replaced by debating societies in the shape of Parliaments.

- People of Rome enjoying the gladiators being torn to pieces by hungry lions showed the intensity in Man enjoying cruelty. Executions were public. It was to the taste of the masses. These were sure signs of War as an institution surviving for the next 2000 years. This was the psychological base of wars.

- Jallian Wallah Bagh massacre where 389 people were killed and over 1000 wounded followed the ending of the First World War. War was an arena of physical cruelty and torture. When it was over on a global scale its itch in the individual General expressed in Punjab, the most martial of states in India. The Britisher never interfered with the Indian religion or customs. He was a man of character and was extremely fair in his duties of administration. But he was a conqueror. Jallian Wallah Bagh was life's reminder to Gandhiji who was toying with the idea of satyagraha from 1915 that without armed uprising the Britisher would not leave. India's spiritual support to the British in the Second War neutralised that need for bloodshed. But the Britisher was the second conqueror. The Muslims preceded them. An armed uprising would have united the Hindus and Muslims against a common enemy and there would be left no Muslim intransigence. That was not to be -Gandhiji tries to win the Muslim heart by prayer. It succeeded in the Calcutta communal riots but failed in All-India politics. Hence Pakistan and partition became realities.

- Japan's insularity and backward physicality was one major reason for the WW II. Germany was to outgrow her smallness which attained PERFECTION of physical methods. Not even Luther's freedom was enough to accomplish it. They had to kill Jews in millions to overcome the rigidity made possible by perfecting their methods.

• T.E.Lawrance, known as Lawrance of Arabia, espoused the cause of Arabs. In the battle ground he had an occasion to sympathise with an Arab victim of injustice. He exercised himself to save his life. A little later the saved victim was guilty of another crime and was to be shot by Lawrance himself. Lawrance was sorry to see how trigger happy he was in shooting the Arab. Lawrance was a legend, fair minded, supporter of Arabs. The joy of wielding a revolver in him indicates that 'War is alive'.
• Man is physical and brutal. He enjoys indiscriminate destruction for destruction sake. Pugnacity is inborn. Instead of two groups annihilating each other , killing women and children, a civilised arrangement is made that the groups would fight by their representatives - army. Thus war was a civilised, symbolic, structured arrangement. War develops leadership, heroism, submission, loyalty, discipline order, patriotism. The highest value that emerges out of war is not so much courage as honour. Organisation develops in the army and is passed on to the civil administration from there. Most of the innovations of the society are from the military.
• Army looting the territory of the enemy even when it is not necessary is common. An army that does not loot announces that it has outgrown that brutal instinct. It is one symptom that army psychologically outlived itself.
• The American women would have had their voting rights even in 1850 had they organised and agitated for it. They had it finally 70 years after in 1920. Can we say War could have been abolished anytime after 1950, had humanity awakened to that necessity? To enjoy the rights, facilities a society has developed in potential takes sometime. Once the potentials are there all that is required is awakening and organisation. League of Nations could have had a clearer document before it, had the Americans been allowed to draft it. The potential was there, but not the awareness.
• Marshall, Eisenhower were Generals but never commanded an army in the battle field. Surely this is a symptom of the Army moving to the Mind. At the level of the Mind No army exists.
• Paul Kennedy speaks of the Empire crashing if the economy of the mother country cannot sustain the expansion. The outgoing force needs the nourishment of the internal resources. This is more true of the existence of the army economically and more so psychologically. Conscription is the danger signal for the psychological existence of the Army. In the First WW England actively considered conscription, but volunteers met the personnel needs of the military. As long as volunteers fill up the army, the army has a psychological existence in the subtle plane. Conscription announces the death of the army in the subtle plane.
• Trade led Britain to found an empire. Excessive productive capacity gave the USA world leadership. Both were in the line of social evolution. As 18th and 19th century needed trade and the 20th needed mass production, the 21st century needs rise in the standard of living. The existence of national armies will not serve that purpose while abolishing them will bring the skill and discipline of the Army into civilian life which is in the line of social progress.
• Shaw said flogging could not be abolished as long as men are available for that. Even in the Vietnam War US citizens protested against their children dying on alien soil, for an alien cause. Let us study the extent of the willingness of the population to send their children for the army. In the Catholic Church, young men do not opt for priesthood. The average age of priests is 80, a clear signal of the church's natural death.
• King Asoka renounced war 2500 years ago. That was the first sounding of the death knell to Wars. No law and order maintenance was necessary in such a country. If Asoka renounced wars, these kings dispensed with police or removed the basis for the existence of police. Our present endeavour has its subtle origins thousands of years ago.
• Srinivasa Ramanujam was a genius. For lack of outer content of a degree which is really a disqualification he met with mortifying humiliation for long. World Army has content not form.
• Baldwin and chamberlain suffered from perverse superstition. They believed they should build prosperity. Perverse or superstitious, they anticipated the abolition of wars.
• The holocaust conclusively removes any argument in favour of War or national armies. The holocaust was the expression of the desire to destroy human beings physically for the joy of destruction as if the deaths in the war front were not enough. Once the overdoing arises, it is the final phase.
• After Hitler, Stalin stood for expansionism. The Soviet system was destroyed from within, a unique event in history. The sources of war impulse committed suicide. Their one demand is higher standard of living. War is abolished in its origins.
• War symbolises rigidity. It expresses in the smallness of the mind. Smallness of the mind insists on its petty desires refusing the wider ideal. Instances of MAN choosing the ideal is one more argument for us. In India a job is favoured, entrepreneurship is eschewed. Recent IT surverys say there is an exodus of IT professionals in USA returning to India for a venture of their own. This is the reversal of that trend. A thaw is seen at the roots of rigidity.
• September 11 attack is the negative symbol of terrorism announcing its death, compelling the world to abolish it.
• Nations should be shy of selling arms to terrorists and governments at war. As long as France, U.S.A, UK do that - as long as that greed for profit is there - war will survive.
• Abolition of slavery had several stages. Every possibility undergoes those stages.
• Civil War - emancipation - segregation - mass migration - race riots - Blacks took the offensive - hippie movement - Civil Rights Movement - Psychological arrears.

Let us trace the sequence of the concept and reality of War and examine    whether the movement is backward or forward.

Race riots died down largely after 1919. First WW removed the best part of      that impulse. In 1943 Blacks were on the offensive. Recently in LA the whites were so. The impulse alternates, the penultimate stage of a vibration.

• Army loots. Supplies maintain it. Population sustains the army. These are stages of the nation overcoming War.
• Released energy cannot contain itself. Genghis Khan did not stop on his own. The atom bombs were mentally controlled by the nuclear nations, a sign of Mind controlling the vital. Emergence of Mind is the end of wars
• Poverty and privation is a reminder to stop wars.
• To foster the poor man's greed is to defuse the war vibration. Rajaji did it with the DMK.
• Indian independence dissolved War and its violence in the subtle plane
• Aid perpetuates the roots of War.
• Many looked forward to WW I anxiously to burn off the tension of 40 years of peace.
• Tension is the intense negative enjoyment of living fully in the vital, perhaps in No.6 drawing upon the whole value of physicality. Sri Aurobindo examined the situation before the War and found a dark being rising. He understood War was inevitable. Whether it was before the First or Second war is not known. Therefore he decided to win the war. He was not able to avoid it. After the death of Hitler, He was able to avoid the war which brought the World to the brink of catastrophe in Vietnam, Korea and Cuba. Now the Lord of Nations that started the wars and fought them was no more alive. It was the unformed, unorganised forces of darkness without a central thrust which He was able to ward off.
• In the issue of women's suffrage we see several stages and several events.

- Protesting women outside the white hall were pardoned. The women refused to accept the pardon.

- Only 35 out of the required 38 states ratified the Bill. Even among them 5 rescinded.

- A top law graduate was refused position in any law firm. She was refused a clerkship of the Supreme Court. Later she became a Judge of the Supreme Court.

- States were forbidden from disenfranchising the blacks, but were given the discretionary power. Political exclusion was reinforced by terror.

The defying spirit is not yet in the collective. It is in the individual spirited women who refuses to be pardoned. It means the time has not yet come for their rights to be won. When the general opinion is favourable the particular exercise of it may be vague and unformed. That is why 5 states that originally endorsed rescinded their endorsement. To shout on the street is the first outburst. The respect the woman in heart is the final desideratum. Legal sanction is in between. The collective had not matured in their opinion even to endorse legally. Top student being refused for the lowest position shows that the transition from a wide positive atmosphere of a sense of equality to a particular event of granting a job, the sociological distance is great. It is well to trace each step meticulously and see how it expresses the Theory. In a violently hostile atmosphere legal compliance is not enough as the emotions have not changed. One little chink in the armour is enough to undo the whole effort. In the regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Duryodhana these principles are well brought out. The chink not only cancels the legal intention but allows scope for the intensified opposite effort of terror and torture. One incident of the opposite category will show the subtle plane is ready for the abolition of war.