The interdependence of mankind was not understood through the logic of philosophic reflection, so it had to be understood through the logic of terrible calamities. Thus Soviet Russia and conservative England were forced by bitter necessity to make a military alliance. And what began as a war in one continent, Europe, ended by having repercussions on the whole world. For more than two hundred million people in a highly civilized continent like Europe could not proceed along a road without the rest of mankind having to follow in the same direction to some extent. This is a lesson in human interdependence which history has never before given. Thus the need of a long interlude of peace will enable the leading states to modify their self-sufficiency and take to some form of world-union and thus to become eventually a single unit.
The Belgians, who brutally enslaved the unhappy inhabitants of the Congo, were themselves twice enslaved by the Germans. Can nobody see the hand of Karma here? Life has taught us severe lessons by the sheer compulsion of events. The first and foremost of such lessons is that no race, no country, no class, and no individual can afford to stand aside in callous indifference to the welfare of other races, countries, classes, and individuals or in narrow nationalist isolation. The war showed up the interdependence of peoples as nothing else did. The British failure to respond to India's natural need of liberty sent thousands of Indian soldiers to death through the temptation thus given to Japan to pretend to "liberate" India, while the Indian failure to respond to the Cripps offer sent thousands of British and American soldiers to their graves. The truth is that humanity is even now secretly becoming, and must one day openly become, a great family. Such are the sufferings and upheavals of this unique period that men have been compelled under their duress to look the real issues at last in the eye. And those issues are primarily moral and mental ones. We may see in the miseries of today a powerful testimony to the moral degradation of yesterday. The tragic misunderstandings of mankind which fail to recognize this are deplorable but repairable.
-- Notebooks Category 13: Human Experience > Chapter 4 : World Crisis > # 268
