MORAL RE-ARMAMENT GOES PUBLIC

From Visby Buchman moved on to Interlaken in Switzerland, where he had called an international assembly for Moral Re-Armament. Oxford was now not only too small but also too far away from the centre of events. The assembly covered the first twelve days of September 1938, when Europe seemed to be on the edge of war following Hitler's threats to Czechoslovakia. 'We have set ourselves the difficult task of trying to liquidate the cost of bitterness and fear, which mounts daily,' said Buchman at the outset. 'The odds are seemingly against us, but just as individuals are delivered from their prison cells of doubt and defeat, so it is possible for nations to be delivered from their prison cells of fear, resentment, jealousy and depression. . .'1

At every meeting he strove to demonstrate this through living examples. One day Japanese and Chinese spoke side by side; on another French and German, or Sudeten and Czech, Conservative and Marxist, black and white. All described, from their own experience, how fear and greed could be overcome or the gulfs of national and racial hatred bridged. Buchman himself, contrary to his custom, spoke day after day. Whereas normally he had made only one or two major speeches a year, in mid-1938 he delivered twelve in six months.

The most controversial and long-quoted - or misquoted - among them was entitled 'Guidance or Guns'.* 'The world is at the crossroads,' he began. 'The choice is guidance or guns. We must listen to guidance or we shall listen to guns.

(* Certain critics misquoted the title as 'Guidance not guns', implying that Buchman was against the democracies rearming; cf. heading to Chapter 5 of Driberg's The Mystery of Moral Re-Armament.)

'Every man in every land should listen to guidance. In industry, in the workshop, in the nation's life, in Parliament, the normal thing is to listen to God. Each nation expresses it in its own way - but all God-controlled and God-led. Thus, with God leading, all will understand each other. Here in this philosophy is lasting peace, and only here.'2

A young Swiss asked him if it would be possible to stop war breaking out. ‘I don't know,' he replied. 'But if there are fifty men in every country who give themselves wholly, we shall pull through.'3

273