Edward Carpenter: Fears which inspire brutishness and cruelty of warfare

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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

British writers on peace and war

Edward Carpenter: After the nadir of war, the regeneration of man

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Edward Carpenter
Pagan and Christian Creeds: Their Origin and Meaning

..they mark the culmination of the Self-conscious Age – a culmination in War, Greed, Materialism, and the general principle of Devil-take-the-hindmost – and the clearing of the ground for the new order which is to come. So there is hope for the human race.

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Class rule has been the mark of that second period of human evolution, and has inevitably given birth during that period to wars and self-aggrandizements of classes and sections, and their consequent greeds and tyrannies over other classes and sections. It is not found in the primitive human tribes and societies, and will not be found in the final forms of human association.

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…a new general phase of consciousness, involving the mitigation of the struggle for existence, the growth of intuitional and psychical perception, the spread of amity and solidarity, the disappearance of War, and the realization (in degree) of the Cosmic life.

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The present world which we see around us, with its idiotic wars, its senseless jealousies of nations and classes, its fears and greeds and vanities and its futile endeavors – as of people struggling in a swamp – to find one’s own salvation by treading others underfoot, is a negative phenomenon.

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The dastardly Fears which inspire all brutishness and cruelty of warfare – whether of White against White or it may be of White against Yellow or Black – may be dismissed for good and all by that blest race which once shall have gained the shore….