John Dewey
Birth 1859-10-20Death 1952-06-01
| Father | Unknown |
| Mother | Unknown |
unknown date
Some one remarked that the best way to unite all the nations on this globe would be an attack from some other planet. In the face of such an alien enemy, people would respond with a sense of their unity of interest and purpose.
John Dewey - Use WWI As Reason For World Government
In a speech given in New York City through the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace - John Dewey states that the best way to unite the world would be through a global attack from another (alien) planet. After this he goes on that since earth is under no such attack that Germany and World War I is the 2nd best scenario to setup world government. The ironic part is that this speech was addressed to the Japanese, which just 22 years later would join sides with Germany in World War II and be enemies of the United States. Then in 1945 the United States would drop two atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan - so much for Dewey’s international cooperation and peace.
Full Speech:
Some one remarked that the best way to unite all the nations on this globe would be an attack from some other planet. In the face of such an alien enemy, people would respond with a sense of their unity of interest and purpose. We have the next thing to that at the present time. Before a common menace, North and South America, the Occident and Orient have done an unheard of thing, a wonderful thing, a thing which, it may well be, future history will point to as the most significant thing in these days of wonderful happenings. They have joined forces amply and intimately in a common cause with one another and with the European nations which were most directly threatened. What a few dreamers hoped might happen in the course of some slow coming century has become and accomplished fact in a few swift years. In spite of geographical distance, unlike speech, diverse religion, and hitherto independent aims, nations from every continent have formed what for the time being is nothing less than a world state, an immense cooperative action in behalf of civilization.
It is safe to say that, with all its preparedness, Germany never anticipated this result. Even now the fact is so close to us that even we, who have been brought together, are too much engaged in the duties which the union imposes to realize the force of the new and unique creation of a union of peoples, yes, of continents. The imagination is not yet capable of taking it in.
It has been more than once noted that Germany has exhibited an extraordinary spectacle to the world. It has stood for organization at home and disorganization abroad, for cooperative effort among its own people and for division and hostility among all other peoples. All through the earlier years of the war the intellectuals of Germany appealed for sympathy in this country because of what Germany had done in the way of social legislation and administration to promote the unity of all classes, because of its efficiency in organization, because of the intelligent efforts it had made to secure domestic prosperity. but, at the same time, as events have since only too clearly demonstrated, it was bending every energy of corrupt and hateful intrigue to disunite the American people among themselves and to incite suspicion, jealousy, envy, and even active hostility between the American nation and other nations, like Mexico and Japan, with whom we had every reason to live in amity and no reasons of weight for anything but amity. In the light of this exhibition, German love of organization and cooperative unity at home gains a sinister meaning. It stands convicted of falsity because born of a malicious conspiracy against the rest of the world. It loved unity and harmony, not for themselves, but simply as a means of bringing about that dominion of Germany over the world of which its remorseless and treacherous efforts to divide other people are the other half.
The rest of the world, of the once neutral world, was, it must be confessed, slow to awake to Germany’s plots and purposes. They seemed fantastic, unreal, in their unbridled lust for power and their incredibly bad faith. It was especially hard for us in this country, who have never been trained to identify our loyalty to our own country with hatred of any other, to realize that Germany’s genius for efficiency and organization had become a menace to domestic union and international friendliness over the world. But finally in North America, as in South America, and in Asia, when the case became to clear for further doubt, Germany’s challenge was met. Against Germany’s efforts to disunite there arose a world united in endeavor and achievement on a scale unprecedented in the history of this globe, a scale too vast not to endure and in enduring to make the future history of international relationships something very different from their past history. In struggling by cunning and corruption to separate and divide other people, Germany has succeeded in drawing them together with a rapidity and an intimacy almost beyond belief. Nations thus brought together in community of feeling and action will not easily fall apart, even through the occasion which brought them together passes, as, pray God, it will soon pass. The Germany which seems finally to be breaking up within has furnished the rest of the world with a cement whose uses will not easily be forgotten.
Formal alliances, set treaties, legal arrangements for arbitration and conciliation, leagues and courts of nations, all have their importance. But, gentlemen, their importance is secondary. They are effects rather than causes, symptoms rather than forces. You may have them all, and if nations have not discovered that their permanent interests are in mutuality and interchange, they will be evaded or overridden. They may be lacking, but if the vital sap of reciprocal trust and friendly intercourse is flowing through the arteries of commerce and the public press, they will come in due season as naturally and inevitably as the trees put forth their leaves when their day of spring has come. It is our problem and our duty, I repeat, especially of you gentlemen of diplomacy and of what I shall venture to call the even more powerful instrument of good will and understanding, the public press, to turn our immediate and temporary relation for purposes of war into an enduring and solid connection for all the sweet and constructive offices of that peace which must some day again dawn upon a wracked and troubled world.
Where diversity if greatest, there is the greatest opportunity for a fruitful cooperatoin which will be magnificently helpful to those who cooperate. This meeting this evening is a signal evidence of the coming together of the portions of the earth which for countless centuries went their own way in isolation, developing great civilizations, each in their own way. Now in the fulness of days, the Orient and the Occident, the United States and Japan, have drawn together to engage in faith in themselves and in each other in the work of building up a society of nations each free to develop its own national life and each bound in helpful intercourse with every other. May every influence which would sow suspicion and misunderstanding be accursed, and every kindly power that furthers enduring understanding and reciprocal usefulness be blest. May this meeting stand not only as a passing symbol, but as a lasting landmark of the truth that among nations as among men of good will their shall be peace, not a peace of isolation or bare toleration which as become impossible in this round world of ours, not a peace based on mutual fear and mutual armament, but a virile peace in which emulation in commerce, science, and the arts bespeaks two great nations that respect each other because they respect themselves.
Full Speech:
Some one remarked that the best way to unite all the nations on this globe would be an attack from some other planet. In the face of such an alien enemy, people would respond with a sense of their unity of interest and purpose. We have the next thing to that at the present time. Before a common menace, North and South America, the Occident and Orient have done an unheard of thing, a wonderful thing, a thing which, it may well be, future history will point to as the most significant thing in these days of wonderful happenings. They have joined forces amply and intimately in a common cause with one another and with the European nations which were most directly threatened. What a few dreamers hoped might happen in the course of some slow coming century has become and accomplished fact in a few swift years. In spite of geographical distance, unlike speech, diverse religion, and hitherto independent aims, nations from every continent have formed what for the time being is nothing less than a world state, an immense cooperative action in behalf of civilization.
It is safe to say that, with all its preparedness, Germany never anticipated this result. Even now the fact is so close to us that even we, who have been brought together, are too much engaged in the duties which the union imposes to realize the force of the new and unique creation of a union of peoples, yes, of continents. The imagination is not yet capable of taking it in.
It has been more than once noted that Germany has exhibited an extraordinary spectacle to the world. It has stood for organization at home and disorganization abroad, for cooperative effort among its own people and for division and hostility among all other peoples. All through the earlier years of the war the intellectuals of Germany appealed for sympathy in this country because of what Germany had done in the way of social legislation and administration to promote the unity of all classes, because of its efficiency in organization, because of the intelligent efforts it had made to secure domestic prosperity. but, at the same time, as events have since only too clearly demonstrated, it was bending every energy of corrupt and hateful intrigue to disunite the American people among themselves and to incite suspicion, jealousy, envy, and even active hostility between the American nation and other nations, like Mexico and Japan, with whom we had every reason to live in amity and no reasons of weight for anything but amity. In the light of this exhibition, German love of organization and cooperative unity at home gains a sinister meaning. It stands convicted of falsity because born of a malicious conspiracy against the rest of the world. It loved unity and harmony, not for themselves, but simply as a means of bringing about that dominion of Germany over the world of which its remorseless and treacherous efforts to divide other people are the other half.
The rest of the world, of the once neutral world, was, it must be confessed, slow to awake to Germany’s plots and purposes. They seemed fantastic, unreal, in their unbridled lust for power and their incredibly bad faith. It was especially hard for us in this country, who have never been trained to identify our loyalty to our own country with hatred of any other, to realize that Germany’s genius for efficiency and organization had become a menace to domestic union and international friendliness over the world. But finally in North America, as in South America, and in Asia, when the case became to clear for further doubt, Germany’s challenge was met. Against Germany’s efforts to disunite there arose a world united in endeavor and achievement on a scale unprecedented in the history of this globe, a scale too vast not to endure and in enduring to make the future history of international relationships something very different from their past history. In struggling by cunning and corruption to separate and divide other people, Germany has succeeded in drawing them together with a rapidity and an intimacy almost beyond belief. Nations thus brought together in community of feeling and action will not easily fall apart, even through the occasion which brought them together passes, as, pray God, it will soon pass. The Germany which seems finally to be breaking up within has furnished the rest of the world with a cement whose uses will not easily be forgotten.
Formal alliances, set treaties, legal arrangements for arbitration and conciliation, leagues and courts of nations, all have their importance. But, gentlemen, their importance is secondary. They are effects rather than causes, symptoms rather than forces. You may have them all, and if nations have not discovered that their permanent interests are in mutuality and interchange, they will be evaded or overridden. They may be lacking, but if the vital sap of reciprocal trust and friendly intercourse is flowing through the arteries of commerce and the public press, they will come in due season as naturally and inevitably as the trees put forth their leaves when their day of spring has come. It is our problem and our duty, I repeat, especially of you gentlemen of diplomacy and of what I shall venture to call the even more powerful instrument of good will and understanding, the public press, to turn our immediate and temporary relation for purposes of war into an enduring and solid connection for all the sweet and constructive offices of that peace which must some day again dawn upon a wracked and troubled world.
Where diversity if greatest, there is the greatest opportunity for a fruitful cooperatoin which will be magnificently helpful to those who cooperate. This meeting this evening is a signal evidence of the coming together of the portions of the earth which for countless centuries went their own way in isolation, developing great civilizations, each in their own way. Now in the fulness of days, the Orient and the Occident, the United States and Japan, have drawn together to engage in faith in themselves and in each other in the work of building up a society of nations each free to develop its own national life and each bound in helpful intercourse with every other. May every influence which would sow suspicion and misunderstanding be accursed, and every kindly power that furthers enduring understanding and reciprocal usefulness be blest. May this meeting stand not only as a passing symbol, but as a lasting landmark of the truth that among nations as among men of good will their shall be peace, not a peace of isolation or bare toleration which as become impossible in this round world of ours, not a peace based on mutual fear and mutual armament, but a virile peace in which emulation in commerce, science, and the arts bespeaks two great nations that respect each other because they respect themselves.