STOP NATO: Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

Stop NATO Editor Rick Rozoff has put together a compendium of  antiwar essays,  poems and literary excerpts.  

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

W.H. Auden: A land laid waste, its towns in terror and all its young men slain

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

Alexander Blok: The kite, the mother and endless war

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

Cervantes: Everything then was friendship, everything was harmony

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

Rubén Darío: You think the future is wherever your bullet strikes

John Davidson: Blood in torrents pour in vain, for war breeds war again

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

W.E.B. Du Bois: Work for Peace

Georges Duhamel: The Fleshmongers, War’s Winnowing Basket

Paul Laurence Dunbar: Birds of peace and deadened hearts

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?

Fénelon: War is the most dreadful of all evils by which heaven has afflicted man

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

Robert Herrick: The olive branch, the arch 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

Oliver Wendell Holmes: Hymn to Peace

William Dean Howells: Editha

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

Attila József: War stirs its withering alarms, I shudder to see hatred win

Juvenal: Mighty warriors and their tombs are circumscribed by Fate

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

La Fontaine: When shall Peace pack up these bloody darts?

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

Lamartine: The republic of peace

Sidney Lanier: Death in Eden

D.H. Lawrence: All modern militarism is foul

D.H. Lawrence: Future War, Murderous Weapons, Refinements of Evil

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

Federico García Lorca: War goes crying with a million gray rats

James Russell Lowell on Lamartine: Highest duty of man, to summon peace when vulture of war smells blood

Lu Hsün: Ballads among bushes of bayonets, hungry dove amid crumbling walls

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

Lucian: War propaganda and its hyperbole

Hugh MacDiarmid: A war to save civilization, you say?

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

Christopher Marlowe: Accurs’d be he that first invented 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

Adam Mickiewicz: The transient glory of military conquerors

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

Novalis: Celebrating a great banquet of love as a festival of peace

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

Petrarch: Wealth and power at a bloody rate is wicked, better bread and water eat with peace

Pindar: The arts versus war

Harold Pinter: Art, Truth and Politics

Plutarch: On war and its opponents

J.B. Priestley: Insane regress of ultimate weapons leads to radioactive cemetery

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

Rousseau: The State of War

Carl Sandburg: Ready to Kill

George Santayana on war and militarism

Friedrich Schiller: Oh, blessed peace, may the day of grim War’s ruthless crew never dawn

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

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

Dylan Thomas: The Hand That Signed the Paper

James Thomson: Peace is the natural state of man; war his corruption, his disgrace

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

John Greenleaf Whittier: The Peace Convention at Brussels

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

Zuhair: Accursed thing, war will grind you between millstones

Arnold Zweig: Education Before Verdun

Stefan Zweig: The fear of opposing military hysteria


Articles by: Rick Rozoff

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