Remembrance Day: 170 anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

Selection by Rick Rozoff, Stop NATO

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
 
Alain: Why is there war?
 
Richard Aldington: Pools and ponds of blood, the huge black dogs of hell
 
Yehuda Amichai: Knowledge of peace passes from country to country, like children’s games
 
Amiel on war
 
Leonid Andreyev: The Red Laugh
 
Louis Aragon: The peace that forces murder down to its knees for confession
 
Aristides on the two types of war: Bad and worse
 
Aristophanes: Rescuing Peace
 
Edwin Arnold: My chariot shall not roll with bloody wheels till earth wears the red record of my name
 
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
 
Boethius: Provoking death’s destined day by waging unjust and cruel wars
 
James Boswell: On War
 
Randolph Bourne: The War and the Intellectuals
 
Georg Brandes: An Appeal Against Wholesale Murder
 
Bertolt Brecht: German Miserere
 
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
 
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
 
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
 
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
 
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
 
Miguel Hernández: Wretched Wars
 
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
 
Andrew Marvell: When roses only arms might bear
 
Edgar Lee Masters: The Philippine Conquest
 
Edgar Lee Masters: “The honor of the flag must be upheld”
 
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
 
Milton: Men levy cruel wars, wasting the earth, each other to destroy
 
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
 
Friedrich Schiller: Oh, blessed peace, may the day of grim War’s ruthless crew never dawn
 
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
 
Taras Shevchenko: The civilizing mission…at sword’s point
 
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
 
Georg Trakl: Night beckons to dying soldiers, the ghosts of the killed are sighing
 
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
 
César Vallejo: So much love and yet so powerless against death
 
Paul Verlaine: The joy of sweet peace without victory
 
Virgil: Age of peace
 
Voltaire: War
 
Franz Werfel: To a Lark in War-Time
 
Oscar Wilde: Antidote to war
 
Oscar Wilde: Crimson seas of war, Great Game in Central and South Asia
 
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
 
Emile Zola on war mania: A blind and deaf beast let loose amid death and destruction, laden with cannon-fodder
 
Arnold Zweig: Education Before Verdun
 
Stefan Zweig: The fear of opposing military hysteria

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