WAR
individual criminal is radically different from action by a
nation or group of nations against a national criminal.
The police act with the maximum of precision; they go J
out and arrest the guilty person. Nations and groups of
nations act through their armed forces, which can only act
with the maximum of imprecision, killing, maiming, starving
and ruining millions of human beings, the overwhelming
majority of whom have committed no crime of any sort.
The process, which all self-righteous militarists, from plain
jingo to sanctionist and international policemen, describe
as 'punishing a guilty nation,* consists in mangling and
murdering innumerable innocent individuals. To draw
analogies between an army and a police force, between war
(however crighteous* its aim) and the prevention of crime,
is utterly misleading. An * international police force* is
not a police force and those who call it by that name are
trying, consciously or unconsciously, to deceive the public.
What they assimilate to the, on the whole, beneficent
policeman is in fact an army and air force, equipped to
slaughter and destroy. We shall never learn to think
correctly unless we caU things by their proper names.
The international police force, if it were ever constituted,
would *not be a police force; it would be a force for
perpetrating indiscriminate massacres. If you approve of
indiscriminate massacres, then you must say so. You have
no right to deceive the unwary by calling your massacre-
force by the same name as the force which controls traffic
and arrests burglars.
This International Massacre-Force does not yet exist and,
quite apart from any question of desirability, it seems almost
infinitely improbable that it ever will exist. How is such
a force to be recruited? how officered? how armed?
where located? Who is to decide when it is to be used
and against whom? To whom will it owe allegiance and
how is its loyalty to be guaranteed? Is it likely that the
IT3