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From Labor Action, Vol. 10 No. 34, 26 August 1946, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the ETOL.
We revolutionary socialists are often accused of being biased, of being unable to see the capitalist’s point of view. After all, we are often informed, the capitalists have their troubles too. And, really – they do.
If you are one of those soldiers or sailors who went through the recent war and, having seen what nightmarish cascades of rubble so much of Europe and the Far East were reduced to, break out in a sweat at night when you think of the horrors of an atomic war – don’t worry. The capitalists are sweating too.
Of course they are not worrying about quite the same thing as you are. They have accepted the war itself. What they are mulling over is another problem which the underwater atom bomb test at Bikini revealed.
What is worrying them is the deadly radioactivity which is induced
in the sea water, in the atomic cloud, and on the ships by the
explosion.
“... A new and difficult kind of morale must be built up to combat the invisible killer, radioactivity,” says Hanson W. Baldwin in the New York Times.
“Crews doomed to slow death from exposure to lethal radioactivity are nevertheless able the first few days after exposure to continue normal duties. The seamen of tomorrow must be prepared to accept radioactivity as part of the hazards of their living and be ready to work and fight and save their ship even though they know they are doomed to slow death.”
So you see it’s not all skittles and beer for the capitalists, either.
The interesting problem of the creation of “a new and difficult kind of morale” we leave to the generals, the admirals, and the Hanson W. Baldwins who have so cold-bloodedly revealed the type of world they are building for us and our children.
Our job is just as cold-bloodedly to create a socialist morale which will bring a final end to war and change radioactivity from an atomic pestilence devastating whole peoples to the greatest liberating force which mankind has yet been able to apply to nature.
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