50 anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

Theme:

50 anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

Compiled and edited by Rick Rozoff

Aeschylus: Ares, father of tears, mows the field of man

Conrad Aiken: Vast symphonic dance of death

Alain: Why is there war?

Richard Aldington: Pools and ponds of blood, the huge black dogs of hell

Amiel on war

Leonid Andreyev: The Red Laugh

Aristides on the two types of war: Bad and worse

Aristophanes: Rescuing Peace

Arrian: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and the fate of conquerors

Henri Barbusse: Under Fire

Julien Benda: Military mysticism

Walter Benjamin: Self-alienated mankind experiences its own destruction as aesthetic pleasure

Ambrose Bierce: An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

James Boswell: On War

Randolph Bourne: The War and the Intellectuals

Georg Brandes: An Appeal Against Wholesale Murder

Bertolt Brecht: German Miserere

Karel Čapek: The War with the Newts

Thomas Carlyle: What blood-filled trenches, and contentious centuries, may still divide us!

Catullus: Appalled by fratricide, gods turned from man

Coleridge: All our dainty terms for fratricide

Joseph Conrad: Men go mad in protest against “peculiar sanity” of war

Homo homini lupus: William Cowper on war and man’s inhumanity to man

Stephen Crane: War Is Kind

Austin Dobson: Before Sedan

John Donne: War and misery are one thing

John Dos Passos: Three Soldiers

1862: Dostoevsky on the new world order

Theodore Dreiser and Smedley Butler: War is a Racket

Georges Duhamel: The Fleshmongers, War’s Winnowing Basket

Eça de Queiroz: Afghanistan

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

William Faulkner: There is only the question: When will I be blown up?

Fichte: The inexorable law of universal peace

Henry Fielding: On the condign fate of Great Men and conquerors

Gustave Flaubert and George Sand: Monstrous conflicts of which we have no idea; warfare suppressed or civilization perishes

Anatole France on war

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

Vsevolod Garshin: Four Days

André Gide: Transformation of a war supporter

William Godwin: Inventions of a barbarous age, deluging provinces with blood

Maxim Gorky on Romain Rolland, war and humanism

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

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: Combat the murder that is war

José-Maria de Heredia: Drunk with dreams that brutal conquests bring

Herodotus: No one is fool enough to choose war instead 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

William Dean Howells: Spanish Prisoners of War

Victor Hugo: The face of Cain, hunters of men, sublime cutthroats

Leigh Hunt: Captain Sword and Captain Pen

Leigh Hunt: Some Remarks On War And Military Statesmen

Aldous Huxley: Rhetorical devices used to conceal fundamental absurdity and monstrosity of war

Avetik Issahakian: Eternal fabricators of war, erecting pyramids with a myriad skulls

William James: The Moral Equivalent of War

Samuel Johnson on war

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

Karl Kraus: The Last Days of Mankind

La Bruyère on the lust for war

Selma Lagerlöf: The Fifth Commandment. The Great Beast is War.

Sidney Lanier: Death in Eden

D.H. Lawrence: All modern militarism is foul

Halldór Laxness: In war there is no cause except the cause of war. A bitter disappointment when it turned out they could defend themselves

Richard Le Gallienne: The Illusion of War

Stephen Leacock: The war mania of middle age and embonpoint

Sinclair Lewis: It Can(‘t) Happen Here

Li Bai: Nefarious War

Livy: On the political utility of starting unprovoked wars

Jack London: War

Lucan: Over all the world you are victorious and your soldiers die

Lucian: War propaganda and its hyperbole

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

José Martí: Oscar Wilde on war and aesthetics

Roger Martin du Gard: From Nobel Prize in Literature speech

Edgar Lee Masters: The Philippine Conquest

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

Eugenio Montale: Poetry in an era of nuclear weapons and Doomsday atmosphere

William Morris: Protecting the strong from the weak, selling each other weapons to kill their own countrymen

Nikolai Nekrasov: In War

Pablo Neruda: Bandits with planes, jackals that the jackals would despise

Alfred Noyes: The Wine Press

Vladimir Odoevsky: City without a name, system with one

Kenzaburō Ōe: Categorical imperative to renounce war forever

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

Charles Péguy: Cursed be war, cursed of God

Pindar: The arts versus war

Harold Pinter: Art, Truth and Politics

Plutarch: On war and its opponents

Propertius: Elegy on war

Marcel Proust: Every day war is declared anew

Salvatore Quasimodo: In every country a cultural tradition opposes war

Arthur Rimbaud: Evil

Yannis Ritsos: Peace

Romain Rolland: Above The Battle

Romain Rolland: Ara Pacis and Ave, Caesar, Morituri Te Salutant

Ronsard: Far away from Europe and far from its wars

Carl Sandburg: Ready to Kill

George Santayana on war and militarism

Albert Schweitzer: On nuclear weapons in NATO’s hands

Senancour: Lottery of war amid heaps of the dead

Seneca on war: Deeds punished by death when committed by individuals praised when carried out by generals

Militarist myopia: George Bernard Shaw’s Common Sense About the War

Juvenilia: Percy Bysshe Shelley on war

Sophocles: War the destroyer

Robert Southey: The Battle of Blenheim

Wole Soyinka: Africa victim, never perpetrator, of theo/ideological wars

Stephen Spender: Ultima Ratio Regum

Stendhal and Byron: Military leprosy; fronts of brass and feet of clay

Jonathan Swift on war

Theocritus: May spiders spin their slender webs over weapons of war

Thucydides: Admonitions against war

Tibullus: War is a crime perpetrated by hearts hardened like weapons

Alexei Tolstoy: The one incontestable result was dead bodies

Leo Tolstoy: Two Wars and Carthago Delenda Est

Kurt Tucholsky: The White Spots

Mark Twain: The War Prayer

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

Virgil: Age of peace

Voltaire: War

Franz Werfel: To a Lark in War-Time

Oscar Wilde: Antidote to war

Xenophon: Socrates’ war sophistry; civil crimes are martial virtues

Edward Young: Draw the murd’ring sword to give mankind a single lord

Arnold Zweig: Education Before Verdun

Stefan Zweig: The fear of opposing military hysteria


Articles by: Rick Rozoff

Disclaimer: The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). The Centre for Research on Globalization will not be responsible for any inaccurate or incorrect statement in this article. The Centre of Research on Globalization grants permission to cross-post Global Research articles on community internet sites as long the source and copyright are acknowledged together with a hyperlink to the original Global Research article. For publication of Global Research articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: [email protected]

www.globalresearch.ca contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of "fair use" in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than "fair use" you must request permission from the copyright owner.

For media inquiries: [email protected]