SCHOLAR ISLAND

"O youth, Youth of Italy, I fling you my call, which will resound

into the future. This call is but one word, a word which I have

never pronounced in time of order, but which I pronounce today,

boldly, without reservation, without irresolution, with clear

voice and strong faith: a word rebellious and terrifying: WAR!"

Mussolini

"Experience has convinced me that wars are as necessary and as inevitable in our system as hurricanes, earthquakes and volcanoes......Instead of discouraging a martial spirit, in my opinion it ought to be excited. We have not enough of it to defend us by sea or land. Universal and perpetual peace appears to me no more nor less than everlastingly passive obedience and non-resistance. The human flock would soon be fleeced and butchered by one or a few. I cannot therefore, Sir be a subscriber or a member of your society."

(ex-President John Adams reply upon being asked to join a Peace group)

"You are the soldiers and nurses of the next war. There will be another war. There always has been."

General George S. Patton (to a Sunday-school class of eight-year olds)

"Lasting peace not only leads to enervation; it permits the rise of a mass of precarious, fear-ridden, distressful lives which would not have survived without it and which nevertheless clamor for their "rights," cling somehow to existence, bar the way to genuine ability, thicken the air and as a whole degrade the nation's blood. War restores real ability to a place of honor. As for these precarious existences, war may at least reduce them to silence."

Jacob Burckhardt

(1818-1897)

"There are higher things in life than the soft and easy enjoyment of material comfort. It is through strife, or the readiness for strife, that a nation must win greatness.. .A rich nation which is slothful, timid, or unwieldy is an easy prey for any people which still retain those most valuable of qualities, the martial virtues."

Theodore Roosevelt

"We are now suffering the evils of a long peace. Luxury, more deadly than war, broods over the city, and avenges a conquered world. "

Juvenal

"Fascism...believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace. It thus repudiates the doctrine of pacifism. .. War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the people who have the courage to meet it. . .Thus a doctrine which is founded upon this harmful postulate of peace is harmful to fascism; and thus also harmful to the spirit of fascism."

Mussolini

(taken from the Carnegie Foundation

;magazine "International Conciliation")

"I have no life save when the swords clash.

But ah! when I see the standards gold, fair, purple, opposing,

and the broad fields beneath them turn crimson,

Then howl I my heart nigh mad with rejoicing."

Ezra Pound

(taken from his literary works

and not necessarily his opinion)

"There's no sound like to swords opposing

No cry like the battle's rejoicing

;when our elbows and swords drip the crimson

And our charges 'against' "The Leopards" rush clash.

May God damn for ever all who cry "Peace".

Ezra Pound

"Ye shall love peace as a means to a new war, and the short peace more than the long. You I advise not 'to work,.; .but to fight. You I advise not to peace but to victory...Ye say it is the good cause which halloweth war? I say unto you: it is the good war which halloweth every cause. War and courage have done more great things than charity. "

Nietzche

                                                   Thus Spake Zarathustra

"Finally, there is the suggestion which would probably be made by every other animal on the face of this earth,  except man, namely that war is an inestimable boon to creation as a whole, because it does offer some faint hope of exterminating the human race. "

T.H. White

The book of Merlyn

U of Texas Press

"War when you are at it, is horrible and dull, it is only when time has passed that you see that its message was divine. I hope it may be long before we are called again to sit at the master's feet. But some teacher of this kind we all need. In the smug, over-safe corner of the world we need it, that we,, may realize that our comfortable routine is no eternal necessity of things, but merely a little space of calm in the midst of a :tempestuous untamed streaming of the world, and in order that We may be ready for danger. "

Oliver Wendall Holmes, Jr

"War is an unmitigated evil. But it certainly does one good thing.

It drives away fear and brings bravery to the surface."

Gandhi

"Staying number one is a struggle for permanent victory....In the pursuit of permanent victory the United States has engaged in a form of permanent war. Since d1940 this country has mobilized and maintained the most powerful military force in the world. In this period American forces have waged a global war and two large land wars (Korea and Vietnam). Since 1945 the US has also conducted a major military campaign or a paramilitary CIA operation in a former colonial or dependent country on an average of once every 18 months-Greece(1948) Korea(1951-53), Iran(1953) Guatemala (1954), Indonesia(1958) Lebanon (1958) Laos (1960), Cuba (1961), Congo(1964), British Guiana (1964), Dominican Republic (1965), and of course Vietnam (1950-1972)

   An American flotilla dominates the Mediterranean and the Far Pacific. American bombers loaded with Hydrogen bombs and missiles concealed in concrete are poised to annihilate within minutes any society in the world. The American nuclear arsenal holds the equivalent of ten thousand tons of TNT for every man, woman, and child on earth. To pay for this the American economy has been on a war footing since 1940. Each year between fifty and seventy cents of every tax dollar goes to support this military establishment."

Richard J. Barnet

"War is the great purifier. The ethical health of peoples corrupted by a long peace, as the blowing of the winds preserves the sea from the foulness which would be the result of a prolonged calm."

Hegel

"I understand well the respect of mankind for war, because war breaks up the Chinese stagnation of society, and demonstrates the personal merits of all men."

Emerson

"I don't believe that the big men, the politicians and the capitalists alone are guilty of the war. Oh, no, the little man is just as keen, otherwise the people of the world would have risen in revolt long ago! There is an urge and rage in people to destroy, to kill, to murder, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, wars will be waged, everything that has been built up, cultivated and grown, will be destroyed and disfigured, after which mankind will have to begin all over again."

Anne Frank

diary of a young girl

"Weakness breeds war. Wars come when an aggressor perceives his potential enemy as psychologically and militarily weak."

General Lewis Walt USMC (ret)

"Dulce bellum inexpertis-(War is delightful to the inexperienced)

War is beautiful because it establishes man's dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas, masks, terrifying megaphones, dreamt-of-metalization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from the burning villages, and many others. "

Fillippo Marinetti

(one of the founders of Italian

Futurism)

"Three cheers for war! May I be permitted to raise this cry Three cheers for Italy's war, noble ,, and beautiful above all, with its 500,000 dead who are our surest wealth. And three cheers for war in general."

Mussolini

'War is the most natural, the most ordinary thing. War is constant; war is everywhere. There is no beginning, there is no conclusion of peace. War is life. All struggle ,is war. War is the primal condition."

' Hitler (Hitler's table talk)

Raushning

"War seems to be one of the most salutary phenomena for the culture of human nature; and it is not without regret that I see it disappearing more and more from the scene."

Karl Wilhelm Von Humboldt

Limits of State Action

"War is the great scavenger of thought. It is the sovereign disinfectant, and its red stream of blood is the Condy's Fluid that cleans out the stagnant pools and clotted channels of the intellect.....We have awakened from an opium-dream of comfort, of ease, of that miserable poltroonery of "the sheltered life." Our wish for indulgence of every sort, our laxity of manners, our wretched sensitiveness to personal inconvenience, these are suddenly lifted before us in their true guise as the specters of national decay; and we have risen from the lethargy of our dilettantism to lay them, before it is too late, by the flashing of the unsheathed sword."

Sir Edmund Gosse

War and Literature

"May peace be with you," said the prince of apostles on entering. "We have nothing to do with your peace," answered Simon, "It is by war that truth is discovered. Peace between adversaries is the victory of one and the defeat of the other." St. Peter answered: 'Why do you reject peace?" The vices of men have created war, but peace ever abides with virtue." Virtue is in power and skill," said Simon. "For I face the fire, I rise in the air, I restore plants, I change stones into bread, and you, what do you do?' "I pray for you," said St. Peter, "that you may not perish the victim of your enchantments. " "Keep your prayers; they will not ascend to heaven as quickly as myself."

Eliphas Levi

The History of Magic

"To maintain a great cause by heroic combat in which the honour of the belligerents and the conviction of righteousness are equal on both sides, and to do so at the risk of giving and receiving death- What is so terrible about that? And where, above all, is the immorality? Death is the crown of life: how can man, being a creature moral, intelligent and free, find a nobler end?"

Proudhon

"History shows that wars are divided into two kinds, just and unjust. All wars that are progressive are just, and all wars that impede progress are unjust. As Communists oppose all unjust Wars that impede progress, but we do not oppose progressive just wars. Not only do we Communists not oppose just wars, we actively participate in them."

Mao TSE TUNG

"Some people ridicule us as advocates of the "omnipotence of war". Yes, we are advocates of the omnipotence of revolutionary War; that is good, not bad, it is Marxist."

Mao Tse Tung

'We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want War; but war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun."

Mao Tse Tung

 

 

 

 

"Our country and all the other socialist countries want peace; so do the people of all the countries of the world. The only ones who crave war and do not want peace are certain monopoly capitalist groups in a handful of imperialist countries which depend on aggression for their profits."

Mao TSE Tung

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Book: "A Terrible Love Of War" by James Hillman