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OpEdNews Op Eds    H4'ed 9/4/11

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


Rick Rozoff
Message Rick Rozoff
120 anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

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

 

Conrad Aiken: Vast symphonic dance of death

 

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

 

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 Ä'apek: The War with the Newts

 

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

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 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

 

EÃ a de Queiroz: Afghanistan

 

Paul Ã"degreesluard: True law of men despite the misery and war

 

Erasmus: The Complaint of Peace

 

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

 

Fichte: The inexorable law of universal peace

 

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

 

Vsevolod Garshin: Four Days

 

Andrà 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

 

Robert Graves: Recalling the last war, preparing for the next

 

Thomas Gray: Clouds of carnage blot the sun; weave the crimson web of war

 

Thomas Hardy: All-Earth-gladdening Law of Peace, war's apology wholly stultified

 

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

 

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 HÃ lderlin: Celebration of Peace

 

William Dean Howells: Spanish Prisoners of War

 

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

 

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

 

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 Bruyà re on the lust for war

 

Selma Lagerlà f: The Fifth Commandment. The Great Beast is War.

 

Sidney Lanier: Death in Eden

 

D.H. Lawrence: All modern militarism is foul

 

Halldà r 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

 

Sinclair Lewis: It Can("t) Happen Here

 

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

 

Josà Martà : 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

 

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

 

Nikolai Nekrasov: In War

 

Alfred Noyes: The Wine Press

 

Vladimir Odoevsky: City without a name, system with one

 

Kenzabur... ...'e: 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 PÃ guy: Cursed be war, cursed of God

 

Harold Pinter: Art, Truth and Politics

 

Plutarch: On war and its opponents

 

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

 

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

 

Stephen Spender: Ultima Ratio Regum

 

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

 

Jonathan Swift on war

 

Thucydides: Admonitions against war

 

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 Valà ry on global conflicts, Europe governed by American commission

 

Voltaire: War

 

Franz Werfel: To a Lark in War-Time

 

Oscar Wilde: Antidote to war

 

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

 

Arnold Zweig: Education Before Verdun

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Rick Rozoff has been involved in anti-war and anti-interventionist work in various capacities for forty years. He lives in Chicago, Illinois. Is the manager of the Stop NATO international email list at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/
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