Free The Generals by Per Wahlöö Page A

along peaceful lines?
    Because all power blocks at all times have believed or maintained that they were working for peace. The results speak for themselves.
    So you dissociate yourself from the third world as an idea?
    Yes. From the four and the fifth, too. For us, pacifism is a type of politics without any personal conception of life.
    Do you consider it compatible with the idea of pacifism that your own party as long as two years ago started an armed revolution and took power by force?
    The force that was used was extremely limited. The whole of the revolution cost fewer than ten lives. However, even that was deplorable, and I would be the first to admit it.
    But if the attempts to suppress the liberation movement had been more forceful, the number of victims would naturally have been much greater?
    Hardly. If anyone had attacked us with arms, we wouldn’t have been so foolish as to have tried to use the same primitive means.
    Do you mean that you wouldn’t have wanted to defend yourselves, or that you wouldn’t have been able to?
    We neither wanted to nor were able to. In our case, the latter is dependent on the former and vice versa.
    If you were attached from outside today, would you also refuse to defend yourselves?
    Who would want to attack us?
    (After that there was a brief silence. Finally someone said):
    That’s no answer to the question. Would you offer military resistance?
    Naturally not.
    I think I know that your army today has put in discreet but relatively large orders for arms and other equipment?
    What you think you know does not interest me very much, apart from the fact that it absolutely incorrect. First of all, we have no army. Secondly, we have neither bought nor ordered any military equipment.
    Do you deny that less than a month ago your gendarmerie, or militia as you call it, ordered a very large number of military vehicles from a certain place abroad?
    (Those damned jeeps!)
    There’s no reason to deny that. We have no car-factories and consequently have to import transport vehicles. Naturally we choose the type of vehicle that suits our terrain.
    (End of the pacifist section. A madwoman from Ireland began to talk about God.)
    I have, thank the Lord, never visited your country and neither shall I ever do so, but I have read and heard that you have no official religion
.
    Yes, that is correct.
    They say that on the whole island there is not a single church. Why?
    Presumably because there is no need for churches.
    Then your people are completely secularised?
    I don’t know. I can’t answer personally for every single individual.
    Can you truly demand that the poor souls you’ve forced to live in spiritual darkness can exist under your anti-religious tyranny?
    The question appears to me academic. If there are people who need a church, they will certainly build one themselves.
    Would you then maintain that there is freedom of religious belief in your country?
    Naturally.
    I have brought with me a novel written by one of your authors and printed in Oswaldsburg. A dreadful book, but nevertheless I wish to quote a piece from it. This is word for word
:
    They find a guy called God, then, and in his honour they build a special building, which they go into at definite times and kneel and mumble incantations. This may seem somewhat strange at a time when we’ve learnt to control and make use of all known forces of nature, when vehicles made by human hands land on the moon and when … I need read no further, I hope. Now I’m asking you: Does this author represent your country’s official standpoint?
    Our country has no official standpoints, either in matters of belief or any other matters.
    (End of discussion, thank goodness.)
    It seems to me that there are more interesting points in your speech than those concerning religion. Your country is, as jar as I know, the only one in the world that lacks a constitution?
    Yes. Neither are there any other laws or regulations.
    So you make no claim to being