Executive justice, in fact, is simply an euphemism for the denial of justice; and the restoration of order at this cost involves dangers of which the price is costly indeed.
Harold J. Laski
The Public Record
Harold Joseph Laski was an English political theorist and economist. He was active in politics and served as the chairman of the British Labour Party from 1945 to 1946 and was a professor at the London School of Economics from 1926 to 1950. He first promoted pluralism by emphasising the importance of local voluntary communities such as trade unions. After 1930, he began to emphasize the need for a workers' revolution, which he hinted might be violent. Laski's position angered Labour leaders who promised a nonviolent democratic transformation. Laski's position on democracy-threatening violence came under further attack from Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the 1945 UK general election, and the Labour Party had to disavow Laski, its own chairman.
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Let me first of all make the point that if you are a citizen in a besieged town, you cannot expect a normal freedom of speech; to be within the area of actual military operations means that you must not hope to be regarded as an individual.
You become, from the nature of things, a unit of attack or defence whose personality is immaterial and insignificant.
The case, as elsewhere, merely affords proof that liberty and violence are antithetic terms.
I would begin by making the point that the fact of belligerency does not suspend his citizenship; he owes as much, perhaps more than ever, the contribution his instructed judgment can make, to the public good.
If I think the war a just one, it is my duty to support it, and if I think it unjust there is no alternative open to me except opposition to it.
No citizen can assume that his duty in wartime is so to abdicate the exercise of his judgment that the executive has a blank cheque to act as it pleases.
No government, therefore, is entitled to penalize opinion at a time when it is more than ever urgent to perform the task of citizenship.
If a man sincerely thinks, like James Russell Lowell, that war is merely an alias for murder, it is his duty to say so even if his pronouncement is inconvenient to the government of the day.
If a statesman not in office, Mr Roosevelt, for example, thinks the diplomatic policy of the executive likely to be attended by fatal results, must he confine himself to private representations, lest public utterance hinder the national…
If an Englishman like Lord Lansdowne believed, as President Wilson believed in 1916, that peace by negotiation is preferable to peace by victory in the field, because of the human cost that victory entails, has he no obligation to his…
It is evident from our experience that to limit the expression of opinion in wartime to opinion which does not hinder its prosecution is, in fact, to give the executive an entirely free hand, whatever its policy, and to assume that, while…
No one who has watched at all carefully the process of governance in time of war can doubt that criticism was never more necessary.
Its limitation is, in fact, an assurance that the unity of outlook is a guarantee that mistakes will be made and wrong done.
For once the right to criticize is withdrawn, the executive commits all the natural follies of dictatorship.
It deprives the people of information essential to a proper judgment of its policy.
It misrepresents the situation it confronts by that art of propaganda which, as Mr Cornford has happily said, enables it to deceive its friends without deceiving its enemies.
A people in wartime is always blind to the facts of its position and anxious to believe only agreeable news; the government takes care to provide it only with news that is pleasant.
Petty successes will be magnified into resounding victories; defeats will be minimized, wherever possible.
The agony of the troops will be obscured by the clouds of censorship.
A wartime government is always obtuse to suggestion, angry when inquiry is suggested, careless of truth.
It can, in fact, only be moralized to the degree to which it is subject to critical examination in every aspect of its policy.
And to penalize, therefore, the critic is not only to poison the moral foundations of the state, but to make it extremely difficult, when peace comes, for both government and the mass of citizens to resume the habits of normal decency.
Freedom of speech, therefore, in wartime seems to me broadly to involve the same rights as freedom of speech in peace.
It involves them, indeed, more fully because a period of national trial is one when, above all, it is the duty of citizens to hear their witness.
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