Antonio Buero-Vallejo: We must live to abolish forty centuries of killing children

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

Antonio Buero-Vallejo
The Foundation
Translated by Marion Peter Holt

ASEL. …We live in civilized world that still finds the very old practice of killing the most intoxicating sport of all. They…let you starve to death if you’re a prisoner of war….Throughout time, river of blood. Millions of men and women….

THOMAS. Women?

ASEL. And children….The children pay too. We’ve burned them, suffocating their terrifying cries to their mothers, for forty centuries. Yesterday the god Moloch devoured them in a brazier in his belly; today napalm eats at their flesh. And the survivors can’t congratulate themselves either: children who are crippled or blind….Their parents have destined them for that. Because we are all their parents.

[Short silence]

ASEL. …This time it has been our turn to be victims, my poor Thomas. But I’m going to tell you something….I prefer it. If I saved my life, perhaps one day it would be my turn to play the role of executioner.

THOMAS. You no longer want to live?

ASEL. We must live! To put an end to all the atrocities and all the outrages against humanity. But…in so many terrible years, I’ve seen how difficult it is. It’s the hardest struggle: the struggle against oneself….The world is not the landscape you envision. It’s in the grip of plunder, of lies, of oppression. It’s one long calamity. But we must not resign ourselves to endless calamity, and we must abolish it.