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14 C H A P T E R 2 The Cost of Conscience in America in the fall of 1934, a book appeared in England and America titled Peace with Honour. Essentially an appeal to reason, it sets out a case for the renunciation of modern war—the industrial, massive destruction committed by humans and their machines. Political leaders declare that they do not want war, the author says, yet they apparently do not want to avoid it enough to keep it from breaking the peace. They gather their commissions and committees, they sign treaties and agreements, they speak of honor, prestige, and patriotism—and they, and the people of their nations, succumb again and again to the romantic view of war as “an affair of flashing swords and charging cavalry.”1 It doesn’t have to be this way, the author argues, offering case after case, historical and hypothetical, of the madness exhibited by otherwise reasonable human beings in the name of honor, prestige, and patriotism . For instance, he says, if our neighbor trampled our garden flowers, we would never throw a bomb to punish him, obliterating not only the offender but his wife and children—and perhaps other neighbors’ wives and children. Yet we routinely bomb cities and villages, which may kill ten times the number of people we call enemy. Defenders of this practice say that until humans become saints, war will be inevitable. Rubbish, the author asserts. “We need not be saints. It will be enough if we stop being criminal lunatics.”2 The book covers two hundred pages of point, counterpoint, analysis , and conclusion. This thing we call war is no longer war, the author says, but a monstrous activity of destruction and degradation. He makes his expected appeal to the political leaders, those who decide how and when a nation goes to war. But then he adds an appeal for “true peace,” which will require not only an alternative choice, but an alternative way of thinking. “If you want Peace,” he concludes, “then you must renounce the idea of War. If you do this, then the way to Peace is easy, and the vast majority of your people will follow you along it with thankfulness.”3 The message struck a chord with the reading the cost of conscience in america 15 public, enough so that the book went into multiple printings on both sides of the Atlantic and within a year was issued in a revised edition with a new preface by the author: A. A. Milne, the man who had given the world Winnie-the-Pooh. History is full of artists’ commentaries on war, so much so that one critic opined of Milne’s book, “Here is another best-selling author writing a book to declaim against war.”4 But history has also shown that we need our artists and writers to bear proper witness to what repeatedly comes off as an appalling and ridiculous activity. From Francisco Goya’s horrific The Disasters of War etchings of the early 1800s to Mark Twain’s “The War Prayer,” so provocative that it wasn’t published until after his death, the artist’s eye provides us a necessary reminder of human nature’s capacity for cruelty and willful ignorance. Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Picasso’s Guernica, Pete Seeger’s “The Big Muddy,” and thousands more paintings, photographs, plays, songs, novels, poems, and all manner of art serve as the conscience of the people. And that theatrical masterpiece of protest, Lysistrata, in which the women of ancient Greece refuse to sleep with their men until they put an end to the long-running Peloponnesian War, thoroughly delineates the humorous and tragic elements of human folly. The aftermath of World War I produced a number of novels realistically depicting the brutal industrial slaughter of that conflict. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, Three Soldiers by John Dos Passos, and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front saw their share of critical and public acclaim. Perhaps this time, so the thinking went, the cycle might be broken. But an alternative way of acting requires more than imagination; it requires an environment that allows people to do more than respond to the immediate need at hand. As the 1930s ground its way through the poverty and despair of the Great Depression, societies worldwide teetered between unstable democracy and belligerent totalitarianism. The fascist dictatorships in Germany and Italy were making clear their...

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