Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Joseph Addison: Already have our quarrels fill’d the world with widows and with orphans
Aeschylus: Ares, father of tears, mows the field of man
Aesop: The lies of lupine liberators
Conrad Aiken: Vast symphonic dance of death
Richard Aldington: Pools and ponds of blood, the huge black dogs of hell
American writers on peace and against war
Yehuda Amichai: Knowledge of peace passes from country to country, like children’s games
Leonid Andreyev: The Red Laugh
Louis Aragon: The peace that forces murder down to its knees for confession
Arturo Arias: There were bodies everywhere. They didn’t move. They were called corpses.
Aristides on the two types of war: Bad and worse
Aristotle: Leader not praiseworthy in training citizens for conquest and dominion
Edwin Arnold: Heaven’s love descending in that loveliest word, PEACE!
Arrian: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and the fate of conquerors
W.H. Auden: A land laid waste, its towns in terror and all its young men slain
Henri Barbusse: Selections on war
Henri Barbusse: All battles spring from themselves and necessitate each other to infinity
Henri Barbusse: War, as hideous morally as physically
Henri Barbusse: “War must be killed; war itself”
Henri Barbusse: “That’s war. It’s not anything else.”
Henri Barbusse: Soldier’s glory is a lie, like every other fine-looking thing in war
Henri Barbusse: “Perhaps it is the last war of all”
Henri Barbusse: Butchery as far as the eye can see
Henri Barbusse: Jesus on the battlefield
Henri Barbusse: Sepulchral sculptor’s great sketch-model, the gate of hell
Henri Barbusse: War befouls the country as it does faces and hearts
Henri Barbusse: “You understand, I’m against all wars”
Thomas Lovell Beddoes: War’s harvest
Julien Benda: Military mysticism
Stephen Vincent Benét: The dead march from the last to the next blind war
Walter Benjamin: Self-alienated mankind experiences its own destruction as aesthetic pleasure
Georges Bernanos: Wars like epidemics, with neither beginning nor end
Ambrose Bierce: Warlike America
Ambrose Bierce: Killed At Resaca
Ambrose Bierce: An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson: All labor’s dread of war’s mad waste and murder
William Blake: O for a voice like thunder, and a tongue to drown the throat of war!
William Blake: O go not forth in Martyrdoms & Wars
William Blake: Groaning among the happier dead
William Blake: To peaceful arts shall envy bow
Alexander Blok: The kite, the mother and endless war
Robert Bly: War, writers and government money
Boethius: Provoking death’s destined day by waging unjust and cruel wars
Wolfgang Borchert: Only one thing to do, say No!
Randolph Bourne: Selections on war
Randolph Bourne: The War and the Intellectuals
Randolph Bourne: War and the State
Randolph Bourne: Willing war means willing all the evils that are organically bound up with it
Randolph Bourne: Conscience and Intelligence in War
Randolph Bourne: Twilight of Idols
Randolph Bourne: Below the Battle
Georg Brandes: Selections on war
Georg Brandes: An Appeal Against Wholesale Murder
Georg Brandes: War, uninterrupted series of horrors, atrocities, and slaughter
Georg Brandes: The World at War
Georg Brandes: The Praise of War
Georg Brandes: Only officers and ammunition-makers wish war
Georg Brandes: Two million men held in readiness to exterminate each other
Georg Brandes: Wars waged by governments fronting for financial oligarchies
Georg Brandes: Abrupt about-face, the glorification of war
Georg Brandes: Giants of bloodshed; military staffs foster war
Georg Brandes: The future will look on war as the present looks on witchcraft, the Inquisition
Georg Brandes: War not fight for ideals but fight for concessions
Bertolt Brecht: German Miserere
Louis Bromfield: NATO, Permanent War Panic and America’s Messiah Complex
Robert Browning: They sent a million fighters forth South and North
William Cullen Bryant: Christmas 1875
Byron: War cuts up not only branch, but root
Byron: War did glut himself again, all earth was but one thought – and that was death
Byron: War, banquet for wolf and worm
Thomas Campbell: The snow shall be their winding-sheet, every turf a soldier’s sepulchre
Thomas Campion: Then bloody swords and armour should not be
Albert Camus: Where war lives. The reign of beasts has begun.
Karel Čapek: The War with the Newts
Ernesto Cardenal: They speak of peace and secretly prepare for war
Thomas Carlyle: What blood-filled trenches, and contentious centuries, may still divide us!
Catullus: Appalled by fratricide, gods turned from man
Cervantes: Everything then was friendship, everything was harmony
Chateaubriand: Would-be master of the world who knew only how to destroy
Coleridge: All our dainty terms for fratricide
Joseph Conrad: Men go mad in protest against “peculiar sanity” of war
Michel Corday: Selections from The Paris Front
Michel Corday: Blood! Blood! But there is still not enough.
Michel Corday: The everlasting glorification of murder
Michel Corday: War, the most brutal heritage of the past
Michel Corday: In war fathers bury their sons
Michel Corday: War sentiment is general dementia, barbarous and neolithic
Michel Corday: Millions of men killed to cure a single hypochondriac
Michel Corday: War – hell let loose, butchery, a return to barbarism
Michel Corday: War is irreparable loss for the earth and the human race
Michel Corday: The hideous futility of war in itself
Michel Corday: Future description of these horrors ought to make any return of war impossible
Michel Corday: Striking against war
Michel Corday: The Truth is the chief victim of war
Michel Corday: Glorification of slaughter is the beginning of future armaments
Michel Corday: The plague that comes in war’s train
Homo homini lupus: William Cowper on war and man’s inhumanity to man
Stephen Crane: There was crimson clash of war
Rubén Darío: You think the future is wherever your bullet strikes
John Davidson: Blood in torrents pour in vain, for war breeds war again
Daniel Defoe: Mammon and Mars, twin deities
Alfred Döblin: The old grim cry for war
John Donne: War and misery are one thing
John Dos Passos: Three Soldiers
John Dos Passos on Randolph Bourne: War is the health of the state
1862: Dostoevsky on the new world order
Fyodor Dostoevsky: Holy blood was shed, regular wars sprang up
Theodore Dreiser and Smedley Butler: War is a Racket
W.E.B. Du Bois: Work for Peace
Georges Duhamel: Selections on war
Georges Duhamel: The Fleshmongers, War’s Winnowing Basket
Georges Duhamel: Mosaic of pain stained with mud and blood, the colours of war
Georges Duhamel: No end to war without moral reeducation
Georges Duhamel: The stupid machine of war throws out, from minute to minute, bleeding men
Georges Duhamel: The Third Symphony, a slender bridge across the abyss
Georges Duhamel: War and civilization
Paul Laurence Dunbar: Birds of peace and deadened hearts
Eça de Queiroz: The English in Egypt, a case study
Havelock Ellis: War, a relapse from civilisation into barbarism, if not savagery
Paul Éluard: True law of men despite the misery and war
Erasmus: The Complaint of Peace
Euripides: The crown of War, the crown of Woe
Faiz Ahmed Faiz: Today, war means the annihilation of the human race itself
William Faulkner: There is only the question: When will I be blown up?
Fénelon: War is the most dreadful of all evils by which heaven has afflicted man
Lion Feuchtwanger: War to make the world safe for democracy
Johann Gottlieb Fichte: The inexorable law of universal peace
Henry Fielding: On the condign fate of Great Men and conquerors
Anatole France: Selections on war
Anatole France: Attack the monster that devours our race; make war on war, a war to the death
Anatole France: Barracks are a hideous invention of modern times
Anatole France: Country living under shadow of war is easy to govern
Anatole France: Education and War
Anatole France: Emerging painfully from primitive barbarism, war
Anatole France: The ethics of war
Anatole France: Financiers only wanted colonial wars and the people did not want any wars at all
Anatole France: “He left us impoverished and depopulated, but he gave us glory”
Anatole France: How the U.S. Congress deliberates on wars
Anatole France: In civilised nations the glory of massacre is the greatest glory known
Anatole France: Letter to an advocate of “peace with victory”
Anatole France: Military service the most terrible pest of civilised nations
Anatole France: Modern Romans, the Americanization of the world
Anatole France: No one has right to kill, just man will refuse to draw his number for war
Anatole France: Nobel Prize speech
Anatole France: Only two ways out of militarism – war and bankruptcy
Anatole France: Restoring order by means of theft, rape, pillage, murder and incendiarism
Anatole France: To avert the danger of peace breaking out…
Anatole France: The tutelary gods of world war
Anatole France: Wait till the warriors you make gods of swallow you all up
Anatole France: War, burlesque masquerade in which fatuous patriots sing stupid dithyrambs
Anatole France: War debases man beneath the level of ferocious beasts
Anatole France: War is the last redoubt of oligarchy, plutocracy
Anatole France: Wars fought over territorial acquisition, commercial rivalries
Anatole France: Whether civil or foreign, war is execrable
Anatole France: Why should not humanity abolish the law of murder?
Anatole France on Victor Hugo: People to substitute justice and peace for war and bloodshed
Anatole France on Émile Zola, military terrorism and world peace
Anatole France and Michel Corday: The press fans the flames of war’s blast furnace
Anatole France and Michel Corday: Threat of annihilation in gigantic Armageddon
Anatole France and Michel Corday: War is a crime, for which victory brings no atonement
Ivan Franko: Even the dove has the blood of men on its snowy white wings
John Galsworthy, 1911: Air war last and worst hideous development of the black arts of warfare
Rasul Gamzatov: For women war is never over
Gabriel García Márquez: Five wars and seventeen military coups
Stefan George: Monsters of lead and iron, tubes and rods escape their maker’s hand and rage unruly
André Gide: Transformation of a war supporter
George Gissing: When the next great war comes, newspapers will be the chief cause of it
William Godwin: Inventions of a barbarous age, deluging provinces with blood
Oliver Goldsmith on war: Hundreds of thousands killed without consequence
Maxim Gorky on Romain Rolland, war and humanism
Maxim Gorky: Henri Barbusse and the mass of lies, hypocrisy, cruelty, dirt and blood called war
Maxim Gorky: The true motives of war
Remy de Gourmont: Getting drunk at the dirty cask of militarism
Robert Graves: Recalling the last war, preparing for the next
Thomas Gray: Clouds of carnage blot the sun; weave the crimson web of war
Greek and Roman writers on war and peace
Graham Greene: Letter On NATO Threat To Cuba
Nordahl Grieg: War is contempt for life
Jorge Guillén: The monsters have passed over
Nicolás Guillén: Come, dove, come tell me the tale of your woe
Thomas Hardy: All-Earth-gladdening Law of Peace, war’s apology wholly stultified
Frank Harris: Henri Barbusse and the war against war
Nathaniel Hawthorne on war: Drinking out of skulls till the Millennium
William Hazlitt: Systematic patrons of eternal war
Ernest Hemingway: All armies are the same
Ernest Hemingway: Combat the murder that is war
Johann Gottfried Herder: Hardly dare name or write the terrible word “war”
José-Maria de Heredia: Drunk with dreams that brutal conquests bring
Miguel Hernández: Wretched Wars
Herodotus: No one is fool enough to choose war instead of peace
Robert Herrick: The olive branch, the arch of peace
Alexander Herzen: War and “international law”
Hesiod: Lamentable works of Ares lead to dank house of Hades
Nazim Hikmet: Sad kind of freedom, free to be an American air base
Friedrich Hölderlin: Celebration of Peace
Oliver Wendell Holmes: Hymn to Peace
Julia Ward Howe: Mother’s Day Proclamation 1870
William Dean Howells: Spanish Prisoners of War
Victor Hugo: Selections on war
Victor Hugo: The black eagle waits with claws outspread
Victor Hugo: The face of Cain, hunters of men, sublime cutthroats
Victor Hugo: War, made by humanity against humanity, despite humanity
Victor Hugo: Glorious war does not exist; peace, that sublime, universal desire
Victor Hugo: Brute war, dire birth of hellish race
Victor Hugo: International Peace Congress 1851
Leigh Hunt: Captain Sword and Captain Pen
Leigh Hunt: Some Remarks On War And Military Statesmen
Aldous Huxley: Selections on war
Aldous Huxley: Absurdity of talking about the defence of democracy by war
Aldous Huxley: The first of the political causes of war is war itself
Aldous Huxley: Imposition of permanent military servitude upon the masses
Aldous Huxley: Manufacturing of arms, an intrinsically abominable practice
Aldous Huxley: Nuclear weapons, establishing world domination for one’s gang
Aldous Huxley: One cannot be ruler of militaristic society without being militarist oneself
Aldous Huxley: Rhetorical devices used to conceal fundamental absurdity and monstrosity of war
Aldous Huxley: Science, technology harnessed to the chariot of war
Aldous Huxley: Scientific workers must take action against war
Aldous Huxley: Shifting people’s attention in world where war-making remains an almost sacred habit
Aldous Huxley: War is mass murder organized in cold blood
Aldous Huxley: War is not a law of nature, nor even of human nature
Aldous Huxley: War is now the affair of every man, woman and child in the community
Avetik Issahakian: Eternal fabricators of war, erecting pyramids with a myriad skulls
Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz: The word pax, pax, pax
William James: The Moral Equivalent of War
William James: The Philippine Tangle
Samuel Johnson: War is the extremity of evil
Joseph Joubert on war: All victors will be defeated
Attila József: War stirs its withering alarms, I shudder to see hatred win
Juvenal: Mighty warriors and their tombs are circumscribed by Fate
Immanuel Kant: Prescription for perpetual peace
Nikos Kazantzakis: Francis of Assisi
Keats: Days innocent of scathing war
Ellen Key: Overcoming the madness of a world at war
Hans Hellmut Kirst: Goose-Stepping for NATO
Karl Kraus: Aphorisms and obloquies on war
Karl Kraus: This is world war. This is my manifesto to mankind.
Karl Kraus: The evolution of humanitarian bombing
Karl Kraus: The Last Days of Mankind
Karl Kraus: War renders unto Caesar that which is God’s
Karl Kraus: In war, business is business
Karl Kraus: Wire dispatches are instruments of war
Karl Kraus: The vampire generation; prayer in wartime
Alexander Kuprin: Deciphering the military metaphysic
La Bruyère on the lust for war
La Fontaine: When shall Peace pack up these bloody darts?
Selma Lagerlöf: The Fifth Commandment. The Great Beast is War.
Lamartine: The republic of peace
Wilhelm Lamszus: The Human Slaughter-House
Sidney Lanier: War by other means
D.H. Lawrence: All modern militarism is foul
D.H. Lawrence: Future War, Murderous Weapons, Refinements of Evil
Richard Le Gallienne: The Illusion of War
Stephen Leacock: In The Good Time After The War
Stephen Leacock: The war mania of middle age and embonpoint
Marie Lenéru: War is not human fate
Mikhail Lermontov: Still you’re fighting: Why, what for?
Sinclair Lewis: It Can(‘t) Happen Here
Livy: On the political utility of starting unprovoked wars
Federico García Lorca: War goes crying with a million gray rats
Lu Hsün: Ballads among bushes of bayonets, hungry dove amid crumbling walls
Lucan: Over all the world you are victorious and your soldiers die
Lucian: War propaganda and its hyperbole
Hugh MacDiarmid: A war to save civilization, you say?
Bernard Mandeville: How to induce men to kill and die
Heinrich Mann: Mission of letters in a world in rubble with 10 million corpses underground
Thomas Mann: Dirge for a homeland wasted by war
Thomas Mann: William Faulkner’s love for man, protest against militarism and war
Christopher Marlowe: Accurs’d be he that first invented war!
José Martí: Oscar Wilde on war and aesthetics
Roger Martin du Gard: From Nobel Prize in Literature speech
Roger Martin du Gard: Be loyal to yourselves, reject war
Roger Martin du Gard: How make active war on war?
Roger Martin du Gard: Nothing worse than war and all it involves
Andrew Marvell: When roses only arms might bear
Edgar Lee Masters: “The honor of the flag must be upheld”
Edgar Lee Masters: The Philippine Conquest
Guy de Maupassant: Why does society not rise up bodily in rebellion at the word “war”?
Guy de Maupassant: How and why wars are plotted
Guy de Maupassant: I only pray that our sons may never see any wars again
Vladimir Mayakovsky: Hurl a question to their faces: Why are we fighting?
Herman Melville: Trophies of Peace
H.L. Mencken: New wars will bring about an unparalleled butchery of men
George Meredith: On the Danger of War
Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Arnold Schoenberg: Peace on Earth
Adam Mickiewicz: The transient glory of military conquerors
Milton: Men levy cruel wars, wasting the earth, each other to destroy
Milton: Without ambition, war, or violence
Eugenio Montale: Poetry in an era of nuclear weapons and Doomsday atmosphere
William Vaughn Moody: Bullet’s scream went wide of its mark to its homeland’s heart
George Moore: Murder pure and simple, impossible to revive the methods of Tamburlaine
William Morris: War abroad but no peace at home
Pablo Neruda: Bandits with planes, jackals that the jackals would despise
Novalis: Celebrating a great banquet of love as a festival of peace
Alfred Noyes: Out of the obscene seas of slaughter
Alfred Noyes: War they tell me is a noble thing
Vladimir Odoevsky: City without a name, system with one
Kenzaburō Ōe: Categorical imperative to renounce war forever
Eugene O’Neill: The hell that follows war
Wilfred Owen: Arms and the Boy and Disabled
Pascal on war: An assassin if he kills in his own country, a hero if in another
Cesare Pavese: Every war is a civil war
Cesare Pavese: A moment of peace, to be reborn into a bloodless world
Charles Péguy: Cursed be war, cursed of God
Petrarch: Wealth and power at a bloody rate is wicked, better bread and water eat with peace
Harold Pinter: Art, Truth and Politics
Plato: No true statesman looks only, or first of all, to external warfare
Plutarch: On war and its opponents
Edgar Allan Poe: The Valley of Unrest
Alexander Pope: Peace o’er the world her olive wand extend
J.B. Priestley: Insane regress of ultimate weapons leads to radioactive cemetery
Marcel Proust: Every day war is declared anew
Salvatore Quasimodo: In every country a cultural tradition opposes war
Herbert Read: Bombing Casualties
Romain Rolland: Selections on war
Romain Rolland: A father’s plea against war
Romain Rolland: The abominable war crimes of intellectuals
Romain Rolland: Above The Battle
Romain Rolland: America and the war against war
Romain Rolland: Ara Pacis and Ave, Caesar, Morituri Te Salutant
Romain Rolland: Centuries to recreate what war destroys in a day
Romain Rolland: The collective insanity, the terrible spirit of war
Romain Rolland: The enormous iniquity, the ignoble calculations of war
Romain Rolland: Hatred and holy butchery; the deadly sophistry, carnivorous poetry of war
Romain Rolland on Henri Barbusse: The isolated bleating of one of the beasts about to die
Romain Rolland: The life that would have been, the life that was not going to be
Romain Rolland: Message to America on the will to conquer the world
Romain Rolland: Our Neighbor the Enemy
Romain Rolland: To the Murdered Peoples
Romain Rolland: War, a divine monster; half-beast, half-god
Romain Rolland: War, a pathological fact, a plague of the soul
Romain Rolland: War enriches a few, and ruins the community
Romain Rolland: When we defend war, dare to admit we are defending slavery
Romain Rolland: Where to rebuild the world after war?
Romain Rolland: Youth delivered up to the sword of war
Romain Rolland: Content with having said “No!” to war
Romain Rolland: Reawakening of old instincts of national pride, lapping of blood
Romain Rolland: To the undying Antigone; waging war against war
Jules Romains: Fraternization versus fratricide, the forbidden subject of peace
Jules Romains: War means a golden age for the munitions makers
Ronsard: Far away from Europe and far from its wars
Saint-Exupéry: Charred flesh of children viewed with indifference
Sallust: Lust for dominion the reason for war
Carl Sandburg: What it costs to move two buttons one inch on the war map
George Santayana on war and militarism
Friedrich Schiller: Oh, blessed peace, may the day of grim War’s ruthless crew never dawn
Olive Schreiner: Give me back my dead!
Olive Schreiner: The bestiality and insanity of war
Albert Schweitzer: On nuclear weapons in NATO’s hands
Senancour: Lottery of war amid heaps of the dead
George Bernard Shaw: War, governments and munitions manufacturers
George Bernard Shaw: The shallowness of the ideals of men ignorant of history is their destruction
George Bernard Shaw: The way of the soldier is the way of death
Militarist myopia: George Bernard Shaw’s Common Sense About the War
Mary Shelley: The fate of the world bound up with the death of a single man
Juvenilia: Percy Bysshe Shelley on war
Percy Bysshe Shelley: Man fabricates the sword which stabs his peace
Percy Bysshe Shelley: Earth cleansed of quivers, spears and gorgon-headed shields
Taras Shevchenko: The civilizing mission…at sword’s point
Victor Domingo Silva: Cain, the fratricide
Upton Sinclair: How wars start, how they can be prevented
Edith Sitwell: Dirge for the New Sunrise
Robert Southey: The Battle of Blenheim
Wole Soyinka: Africa victim, never perpetrator, of theo/ideological wars
Wole Soyinka: Civilian and Soldier
Stephen Spender: Ultima Ratio Regum
Stendhal and Byron: Military leprosy; fronts of brass and feet of clay
Jonathan Swift: Lemuel Gulliver on War
Tacitus: The robbery, slaughter and plunder that empire calls peace
Hippolyte Taine on the inhuman travesty of war
Tennyson: Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d
Theocritus: May spiders spin their slender webs over weapons of war
Dylan Thomas: The Hand That Signed the Paper
James Thomson: Peace is the natural state of man; war his corruption, his disgrace
Henry David Thoreau: Taxes enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood
Thucydides: Admonitions against war
Tibullus: War is a crime perpetrated by hearts hardened like weapons
Ernst Toller: Corpses In The Woods
Alexei Tolstoy: The one incontestable result was dead bodies
Leo Tolstoy: Selections on war
Leo Tolstoy: The Law of Love and the Law of Violence
Leo Tolstoy: Two Wars and Carthago Delenda Est
Leo Tolstoy: Patriotism or Peace
Leo Tolstoy: “Thou Shalt Not Kill”
Leo Tolstoy: Murder and vengeance are not the will of the people
Leo Tolstoy: The Beginning of the End
Leo Tolstoy: Christian cannot be a murderer and therefore cannot be a soldier
Leo Tolstoy: Letter on the Peace Conference
Georg Trakl: Night beckons to dying soldiers, the ghosts of the killed are sighing
Henri Troyat: Thoughts stop with a shock: War!
Kurt Tucholsky: The White Spots
Kurt Tucholsky: Murder in disguise
Mark Twain: Grotesque self-deception of war
Mark Twain: To the Person Sitting in Darkness
Mark Twain: An inglorious peace is better than a dishonorable war
Mark Twain: Only dead men dare tell the whole truth about war
Mark Twain: Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War
Mark Twain on Western military threat to China: I am a Boxer
Lesya Ukrainka: Do you understand that word called war?
Paul Vaillant-Couturier: The Song of Craonne
Paul Valéry on global conflicts, Europe governed by American commission
César Vallejo: So much love and yet so powerless against death
Jules Vallès: I hate war and its sinister glory
Thorstein Veblen: Habituation to war entails a body of predatory habits of thought
Émile Verhaeren: I hold war in execration; ashamed to be butchers of their fellows
Paul Verlaine: The joy of sweet peace without victory
H.G. Wells: The world is weary of this bloodshed, weary of all this weeping
H.G. Wells: Massacres of boys! That indeed is the essence of modern war.
H.G. Wells: Why did humanity gape at the guns and do nothing? War as business
H.G. Wells: War is a triumph of the exhausted and dying over the dead
H.G. Wells: War, road to complete extinction or to degradation beyond our present understanding
H.G. Wells: The progressive enslavement of the race to military tyranny
Franz Werfel: To a Lark in War-Time
John Greenleaf Whittier: If this be Peace, pray what is War?
John Greenleaf Whittier: The Peace Convention at Brussels
John Greenleaf Whittier: Nobler than the sword’s shall be the sickle’s accolade
Oscar Wilde: Crimson seas of war, Great Game in Central and South Asia
Thomas Wolfe: Santimony and cant of war
Wordsworth: We felt as men should feel at vast carnage
Xenophon: Socrates’ war sophistry; civil crimes are martial virtues
Edward Young: Draw the murd’ring sword to give mankind a single lord
Marguerite Yourcenar: Fruits of war are food for new wars
Émile Zola: One sole city of peace and truth and justice
Zuhair: Accursed thing, war will grind you between millstones
Arnold Zweig: Conducting the business of murder with embittered reluctance
Arnold Zweig: Education Before Verdun
Arnold Zweig: No joy to be born into world of war
Arnold Zweig: War’s hecatomb from the air, on land and at sea
Stefan Zweig: The fear of opposing military hysteria
Stefan Zweig: Romain Rolland and the campaign against hatred
MIssing Smedley Butler, there. But congrats, great list and great unflinching work.
Nice. Will bookmark.
we will not join your army and we will not fight your war
——————————————————————–
well i may be from the back streets on the wrong side of the tracks,
and i didn’t go to prep school and i don’t read latin books,
and i may have run a little wild and even robbed a store,
but i will not join your army and i will not fight your war.
through your secretive societies and underhanded plans,
you have hijacked our democracies and usurped all our lands,
you have consorted with criminals and helped spread drugs and vice,
and you’ve backed and armed dictators to repress their people’s voice.
and you trample rights and commit torture when it suits your plans,
and you’ve rigged the world economy to feed wealth to your hands.
but right now you claim you want to spread democracy and peace
and to guarantee prosperity through global enterprise.
but the truth of what you’re up to now is sinister and plain
- you want tens of thousands like me to be soldiers and marines
so that you can build your empire, bring your plunder back to rome,
to achieve world domination and extend your power at home,
and your motives are just selfishness and avarice, it’s sure,
and you’re misusing our taxes which should go to help the poor.
so send your own sons and daughters out to do your dirty work
and spend your own wealth on guns and bombs to launch your sneak attack,
then we’ll treat you like the evil vicious terrorists you are
- but we will not join your army and we will not fight your war.
(c) gildas sapiens, 2004
Sapient indeed. Bravo.
“To those of us who still retain an irreconcilable animus against war….”
Whatever sickening justification may be advanced.
David Peterson
Chicago, USA
Right, David. There is always an excuse for war in the minds of sociopaths – there is never an excuse for war in the minds of moral beings.
Randolph Bourne may have been the last prophet vouchsafed the United States (after Mark Twain, William James and other founders of the Anti-Imperialist League). Providence may have then thrown in the towel in disgust. See the entry by Catullus.
This is moving and relevant material – from start to ‘finish’. But that’s the trouble, isn’t, it? There is no finish.
Poetry list is excellent.
This is a three-credit course. Maybe I can get credit for it at BC as a independently directed reading.
Russia keeps threatening and threatening the “West” for their arrogant behaviour and increasing wars in Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa in favor of the Zionist Israel.
Has Russia done something any way? Where were Russia when Libya needed help?, now that Syria needs help, are the Russians doing something?
Lift up your hearts! An extraordinary work, which is as beautiful as NATO is not.
The compilation has pages from over 150 writers from almost 40 nations and 27 centuries to establish that war, far from being an intrinsic, much less natural characteristic of humanity, is a monstrous aberration.
I’m going to see if I can adapt some of this material for my international students who I’ll be teaching in November at Level 6. Thanks for sharing. I passed your last compilation on to my mother, who found some common ground in a passage about mothers not wanting to surrender their sons to be killed in war (and she’s been a strong supporter of U.S. attacks on other countries!). It’s a freaky kind of mind control that’s got Americans supporting aggressive wars against other countries. Anything that can break through that is much appreciated.
As you might imagine, much of this material is not on the Internet and I have had to pore through my bookshelves to locate it.
Last week one of my brothers sent me the link for the following, which was, at hard as it may be to believe, a fairly popular recording three years before U.S. troops, including one of my grandfathers, were sent to the trenches in France.