Program 8: Glorifiying war

This episode contains poetry and speeches whose purpose is the adulation of the warrior class and the glorification of war.

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Ideas that have shaped human history as expressed in poetry, speeches, myth, and documents. A podcast by Alan Anforth. This particular program is about the human propensity to glorify violence and war. Recorded human history shows that it is one of continuous violence and warfare. The famous English historian and linguist Dr. Samuel Johnson once wrote a quote What are all the records of history but narratives of successive villainies, of treason and usurpation, massacres and wars? The glorification of war has taken many forms over recorded history and in most societies whose history remains available. They have in common the adulation of the martial strongman as a hero. One of the earliest forms was the epic poems that recorded the martial deeds of heroes such as Homer's Iliad concerning the Trojan War, written in the late 8th century BCE. The poem traces the anger of Achilles, a celebrated warrior and demigod. A second example is the Aeneid by the Roman poet Virgil. It's an epic poem that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who fled the fall of Troy and travelled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of the Romans. It was written between twenty-nine and nineteen BCE. A further example is Beowulf. It is an old English epic poem in the tradition of the Germanic heroic legends. The date of composition is a matter of contention among scholars. The only certain dating is for the manuscript which was produced between AD 975 and 1025. The story is said in pagan Scandinavia in the 5th and 6th century. Another example is the Mahabharata, which is one of two Sanskrit epics of ancient India, revered in Hinduism, the other being the Ramana. The Mahaparata narrates the events and the aftermath of a war of succession between two groups of princely cousins. It contains philosophical and devotional material, such as the discussion of the four goals of life. Among the principal works and stories in the Mahaparata is the Bhagavad Gita. Another example of these epic poems is the Epic of Gilgamesh, which was written in Arcadian during the late second millennium BCE. Gilgamesh was probably an historical king of the Sumerian city state of Urg, who was posthumously deified. In the tradition of these epics, Gilgamesh slays various monsters and becomes the king of his city state. Another example of the epics is the labours of Hercules. The current surviving form of this myth is attributed to Passander, written in the seventh to the sixth centuries BCE in Greece. Hercules had incurred the wrath of Hera, the wife of Zeus, who had attempted on a number of occasions to kill Hercules. Hera induced Hercules into a state of madness that caused Hercules to kill his own wife and children. Afterwards Hercules went to the oracle of Delphi to atone for his sin, where he prayed to the god Apollo for guidance. Hercules was told to serve the king of Mycenae for ten years. During this time he was sent to perform a series of twelve difficult feats called his labours. In the tradition of the epics, Hercules of course slays lots of monsters and returns to a hero's welcome. The Japanese have their epics, one of which is the tale of Heike. Other of the European countries have more recent epics, one, for example, being the Song of Roland. It's an 11th century poem based upon the deeds of the Frankish military leader Roland in battle in a war in AD seven hundred eight during the reign of King Charlemagne. There's the old English epic of the Battle of Malden, which is a battle that took place in 991 AD in Essex in England. There's the legend of Arthur, predominantly Welsh and Anglo Saxon legends. Each of these legends have the same theme of the warrior king or warrior hero who saves his people and is rewarded sometimes by deification and other times by being elevated to the kingship or at least being worshipped as a hero. In 1854, during the Crimean War between Britain and Russia, the British poet laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote what is arguably the most famous and defining poem that glorifies war. The charge of the Light Brigade is about a tragic failure in the British command by Lord Cardigan, leading to the needless slaughter of most of the Light Brigade, where the pathos is assumed to give rise to the glorification of war. The poem reads Half a league, half a league, half a league onwards. All in the valley of death rode the six hundred. Forward the light brigade. Charge for the guns, he said. Into the valley of death rode the six hundred. Forward the light brigade. Was there a man dismayed? Not though the soldier knew someone had blundered. There's not to make reply, there's not to reason why, there's but to do or die. Into the valley of death rode the six hundred, cannons to the right of them, cannons to the left of them, cannons in front of them, volleyed and thundered, stormed at with shot and shell, boldly they rode and well, into the jaws of death, into the mouth of hell rode the six hundred, flashed all their sabres bare, flashed as they turned in the air, sabreing the gunners there, charging an army while all the world wondered, plunged into the battery smoke, right through the line they broke, Cossack and Russian reeled from the sabre stroke, shattered and sundered, then they rode back, but not the six hundred, cannons to the right of them, cannons to the left, cannons behind them, volleyed and thundered, stormed at with shot and shell, while horse and hero fell. They that had fought so well came through the jaws of death, back from the mouth of hell, all that was left of the six hundred. When can their glory fade? Oh the wild charge they made, all the world wondered, honor the charge they made, honour the light brigade, noble six hundred. Tennyson's admiration for the martial mentality was further on display in his sycophantic ode on the death of the Duke of Wellington, written in eighteen fifty two. The Duke was England's national hero after his defeat of Napoleon in the Battle of Waterloo in eighteen fifteen and other battles against the Prussians. Tennyson praises Wellington not just as a wartime leader but for his own moral character. The poem is very long and is set out in full in the hard copy that people can obtain from the link on the program. I'll read only two stanzas, the first and the second last which is sufficient to give people the idea. The first stanza reads Bury the Great Duke with an empire's lamentation. Let us bury the great Duke to the noise of mourning of a mighty nation, mourning when their leaders fall, warriors carry the warrior's paw, and sorrow darkens Hamlet and Hall. The second last stanza reads On God and God like men we build our trust. Hush, the dead march wails in people's ears, the dark crowd moves, and there are sobs and tears. The black earth yawns, the mortal disappears, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, he is gone who'd seem so great, gone. It is not just that human history is one of continuous war. It goes further in that some humans think that war is a good thing, and this is not just the military strongmen of history, by way of example only, and in chronological sequence. The Catholic monk Honore Bonnet once wrote War is not an evil thing, but good and virtuous, for war by its very nature, seeks nothing other than to set wrongs right and turn dissension to peace in accordance with the scriptures, and if in war many evil things are done, they never come from the nature of war, but from false usage, which bearing in mind this is coming from a Catholic monk. Another example John Stuart Mills eighteen oh six to eighteen seventy three was one of the principal proponents of the philosophy of utilitarianism, characterized by the greatest good for the greatest number, who logically might have been expected to be opposed to war. He wrote that whilst war was ugly, it was sometimes a necessity, and in this sense was a virtue for those who fought for a good cause by their free choice. He wrote, and I quote war is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings, which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse. When people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannons or thrusting bayonets in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice, a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice, is often the means of regeneration. A man who has nothing he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his own personal safety is a miserable creature, who has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, humans must be willing when needed to do battle for the one against the other. An obvious problem for the Mills argument is this. He assumes that there is some objective justice or rightness in a particular cause, whereas experience shows us that men go to war in firm belief of the rightness of their mutually inconsistent and opposed senses of justice and rightness. That's the first thing. The second thing he says he requires that men freely choose to go to war. Experience again shows that this is often not the case. What generates wars is at a higher political level, followed by sustained campaigns of propaganda using naive nationalism and other such techniques to guilt trip men into going to war. There is no free choice in this. Thomas Jefferson, seventeen forty three to eighteen twenty six, was the United States president and one of the founding fathers of that country, who largely wrote the American Declaration of Independence. In 1787 he wrote in his letter entitled The Tree of Liberty about the need for armed rebellion. In that letter he wrote, and I quote God forgive that we should ever be twenty years without a rebellion. If the people remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to public liberty. The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure. Two things to note about this. Firstly, Jefferson was a slave owner and a supporter of slavery in the United States. Secondly, the terms patriot and tyrant depend upon who's making the judgment. One person's patriot is another person's tyrant and vice versa. Notwithstanding the wars in the nineteenth century, barely a decade after the Boer War, so eighteen ninety nine to nineteen oh one in South Africa and before the start of the First World War in nineteen fourteen. The Prussian general and military historian Friedrich von Bernhardy wrote, and I quote War is a biological necessity of the first importance, a regulative element in the life of mankind which cannot be dispensed with, but it is not a biological law but a moral obligation and as such an indispensable factor in civilisation. This same attitude was echoed by Sir Ian Hamilton, 1853 to 1947, who was the British commander of the Australian and New Zealand troops that suffered the unmitigated disaster at Gallipoli in 1915, which is now celebrated on Anzac Day in Australia. Gallipoli involved an attempted invasion of Turkey by an ill-conceived and poorly executed plan by the British aristocrat Winston Churchill, 1874 to 1975, who was then First Lord of the Admiralty. The Turkish forces were of course defending their homeland from that invasion. Tens of thousands of men and boys were ordered ashore to charge up hills and cliffs at Gallipoli against entrenched machine gun fire and shelling, whilst Hamilton remained safely distant on his ship in the Mediterranean and Churchill was safe in London. Gallipoli is the battle that the Australian poet A. B. Patterson wrote about in such glowing nationalistic terms as representing the coming of age of the nation of Australia. Patterson's poetry was the subject of its own program. Hamilton wrote at the time There are poets and writers who see naught in war but carrion, filth, savagery, and horror. They refuse war the credit of being the only exercise in devotion on the large scale existing in this world. The superb moral victor over death leaves them cold, each one to his own taste. To me this is no valley of death, it is a valley brim full of life at its highest power. For Hamilton, life at its highest came down to the prospect of dying in the cause of king and country. Dulce et decorumest as the Roman poet Horace put it, which translates It is sweet and proper to die for one's country. The World War I English poet Wilfred Owens took issue with the concept of Dolce et decorumist in his poem of the same name which reads Bent double like old beggars under sacks, knock need. Coughing like hags we cursed through sludge, till on the haunting flares we turned our back, and towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched to sleep, many had lost their boots, but limped on, bloodshot, all went lame, all blind, drunk with fatigue, deaf even to the hoots of gas shells dropping softly behind. Gas, gas, quick boys, an ecstasy of fumbling, fitting the clumsy helmet just in time. But someone still was yelling out and stumbling and floundering like a man in fire or lime. Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, as under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, he plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning, if in some smothering dreams you too could pace behind the wagon that we flung him in, and watch the white eyes writhing in his face, his hanging face, like a devil sick of sin, if you could hear at every jolt the blood come gargling from his froth corrupted lungs, obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud of vile and curable sores on innocent tongues, my friend, you would not tell with such high zest to children hardened for some desperate glory the old lie Dulce et decorumest. This issue is addressed more fully below and in the program concerning the poetry of World War I. At this point I introduce the following caveat. The criticisms levelled against the proliferation and adulation of war is made on a species and societal level and at the individual level only in respect of those who willingly participate in it. It is not generally directed at the individual combatants who are often unwitting victims of the societal propaganda. An example of an individual who exemplifies personal responsibility is Peter Heggs, current US Secretary of Defence, who rebadged himself as the Secretary for War and who is perhaps the greatest current glorifier of war. He is reported saying It's lethality, lethality, lethality. Everything else is gone. When President Trump chose me for this position, the primary charge he gave me was to bring the warrior culture back to the Department of Defense. He, like me, wants a pentagon, laser focused on war fighting, lethality, meritocracy, standards and readiness. That's it, that's my job. The contrary view of the personal responsibility of all combatants was put by the singer Donovan in his protest song about the Vietnam War called The Universal Soldier, and he makes the obvious point that wars would not happen if the ordinary soldier simply refused to obey orders of those who are motivating the war. Its lyrics read He's five foot two and he's six feet four. He fights with missiles and with spears. He's all of thirty one and he's only seventeen. He's been a soldier for a thousand years. He's a Catholic, a Hindu, an atheist, a Jain, a Buddhist, and a Baptist and a Jew. He knows you shouldn't kill, and he knows he always will. Kill you for me, my friend, and me for you. And he's fighting for Canada, he's fighting for France, he's fighting for the USA, and he's fighting for the Russians, and he's fighting for Japan, and he thinks we'll put an end to war this way, and he's fighting for democracy, he's fighting for the Reds. He says it's for peace of all. He's the one who must decide who's to live and who's to die, and he never sees the writing on the wall. But without him, how would Hitler have condemned them at the Cal? Without him Caesar would have stood alone. He's the one who gives his body as the weapon of the war, and without him all this killing can't go on. He's the universal soldier, and he really is to blame. His orders come from far away no more. They come from him and you and me and brothers can't you see? This is not the way we put an end to war. The Australian journalist and poet Montague Grover wrote the poem I killed a man set in South Africa in the Boer War. The poem addresses the personal emotional and moral concerns of killing another person just because they are said to be your enemies. Bear in mind that the British and Australian forces were the invaders in South Africa and the Boers were defending their homeland. The same is true of the Turks and the battle at Gallipoli. The poem I killed a man reads I killed a man at Gaspan, I killed him in a fair fight, and the Empire's poets and the Empire's priests swear blind I acted right. The Empire's poets and the Empire's priests make out my deeds were fine. But I can't stop the eyes of the man I killed from staring into mine. I killed a man at Gaspan, maybe I killed a score, but this one wasn't a chance shot home at a thousand yards or more. I fired at him when he'd got no show, we were only a pace apart, with the cordite scorching his old worn coat as the bullet drilled his heart. Killed a man at Gaspan, I killed him fighting fair, we came on each other face to face, and we went at it then and there. Mine was the trigger that shifted first, his was the life that sped, and a man I'd never quarrel with were spread on the boulders dead. I killed a man at Gaspan, my first and God hope my last. Harder to dodge than my bullet is the look that this dead man's eyes cast. If the empire asks for me later on, it'll ask for me in vain before I reach for my bandola to fire on a man again. I killed a man. Man a gaspan, an hour ago about, and there he lies with his staring eyes and his blood still trickling out. I know it was either him or me. I know that I killed him fair, but all the same wherever I look, that man I killed is there. The issue of glorification of war and then the ultimate tragedy of war came to its full realization in World War I. At the start of the war there was great excitement by men of their chance for adventure, to have their war and to prove themselves in battle. By the end of the war there was nothing but pain, loss and disgust for the whole enterprise. It reminds me of the story of the ultimate optimist who ascended to the top of a high rise building. The building had offices at each level, which had windows. The optimist jumped and as he fell past each level of the building, the occupants of the officers heard him say so far so good. In Flanders Field was written by the Canadian Lieutenant Colonel John McCray, 1872 to 1918, while serving in the French trenches. It speaks of their sacrifice and serves as a command to the living to press on. As with many of the most popular works of the First World War, it was written early in the conflict before the romanticism of the war turned to bitterness and disillusion for soldiers and civilians alike. The later World War I poetry is the subject of its own episode. Cray's poem read In Flanders fields the poppies blow, between the crosses row on row, that mark our place and in the sky the lark still bravely singing fly, scarce heard amongst the guns below. We are dead, short days ago, we lived felt dawn, saw sunset glow, loved and were loved, and now we lie in Flanders Field. Take up our quarrel with the foe, to you from failing hands we throw, the torch to be yours to hold it high. If you break faith with us who die, we shall not sleep, though the poppies grow in Flanders Field. The Australian journalist, World War I reporter and poet D. H. Souter, 1862 to 1935, wrote Anzac Toast in the tradition of glorifying war. It reads We are content we had our day, brief but splendid, crowned with power and brimmed with action every hour. We have no need for tears or sighs. We who passed in the heat of fight into the soft Elysian night. We who made our sport of death could we turn to a tame away? We are content we had our day. Rupert Brook eighteen eighty seven to nineteen fifteen was an English poet and soldier known for his idealistic sonnet written during World War I, especially the soldier. Bear in mind that this was written the early part of the First World War. It reads If I should die, think only this of me, that there's some corner of a foreign field that is forever England, there shall be in that rich earth a richer dust concealed, a dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, gave once her flowers to love, her ways to roam, a body of England's breathing English air, washed by the rivers, blessed by sons of home, and think this heart all evil shed away, a pulse in the eternal mind, no less, give somewhere back the thoughts by England given, her sights and sound, dreams happy as her day, and laughter learned of friends and gentleness. The American doctor and polymoth Oliver Wendell Holmes senior eighteen ninety to eighteen ninety four extended the glorification of war to the instruments of war in his poem The Old Ironside. Old Ironsides were eighteenth century battleships clad with iron sides for protection. The poem was about a particular old ironside, the USS Constitution that he wanted to preserve for posterity. It reads Ah, tear her tattered ensign down. Long has it waved on high, many an eye has danced to see that banner in the sky. Beneath it rung the battle shout, and burst the cannon's roar. The meteor of the ocean air shall sweep the clouds no more. Her deck once red with heroes' bloods, where knelt the vanished foe, when winds were hurrying over the flood, and the waves were white below. No more shall feel the victor's tread, or know the conquered knee. The harpies of the shore shall pluck the eagle off the sea. Oh better that her shattered pole should sink beneath the wave, her thunder shook the mighty deep, and there should be her grave, nail to the mask her holy flag, set every threadbare sail, and give her to the god of storms, the lightning and the gale. Julian Henry Francis Grenfell, 1888 to 1915, was a British soldier and a war poet of the First World War. His poem Into Battle was first published the day after Grenfell's death in 1915. Grenfell's poem is consistent with the attitude of Sir Ian Hamilton above. He sees this war as an opportunity to experience a heightened form of existence in a glorious noble struggle. It is of course written in the early days of World War I. The poem reads The naked earth is warm with spring, and the green grass and bursting trees lean to the sun's kiss glorying and quiver in the loving breeze. And life is colour and warmth and light and a striving evermore for these, and he is dead who will not fight and who dies fighting has increase. The fighting man shall from the sun take warmth and light from the glowing earth, speed with the light foot winds to run, and with the trees a newer birth. And when this fighting shall be done, great rest and fullness after death, all the bright company of heaven hold him in their high comradeship. The dog star, the seven sisters, Orion's belt with sordid hip. The woodland trees that stand together, they stand to him each one a friend, they gently speak in the windy weather, they guide to valley and riches end, the kestrels hovering by day, and the little hours that call by night, bid him swift and keen as they, as keen of ear and as swift of sight. The blackbird sings to him, Brother, brother, if this be your last song you shall sing, sing well, for you will not sing another. Brother sing. In dreary, doubtful waiting hours before the praise and frenzy starts, the horses show him nobler powers, of patient eyes, courageous hearts, and when the burning moment broke, and all things else are out of mind, and only joys of battle take him by the throat and make him blind. The thundering lines of battle stand, and in the air death moans and sings, but day shall clasp him with strong hands, and the night shall fold him in soft wings. The Greek American soldier, academic, and poet Alexander Koranicus 1916-2006 wrote a series of poems collected under the title In Praise of Heroes, in tribute to all those who he sees as having contributed to wars of liberation. It is a further and more recent example of the tethering of nationalism to war and the adulation of the martial class. Coronicus wrote from the perspective of an American Greek social tribe, and so invokes American and Greek nationalist tropes and myths in such numbers I cannot hope to explain each. But each of the other combatant nations on both sides in World War I, World War II, and the Cold War to which he is referring, did the same and still do. They each ran the flag up the pole and invoked their god as a witness of the justice of their cause. His poem to the Greeks at Mount Olympus concerns the Nazi invasions and occupation of Greece, and it reads Again the transient tyrant clutches at the jewel of the ages, Greece, fatherland of all republics and creator of the arts, island universe, where liberty is nourished by blood of fallen suns amongst the rocks and olives, nation where the spears of modern Persians shatter on the drums, the thundering hearts of Hellenes once again in arms. What evil conscience rides the world, that death shall stalk the home of gods, that plains like harpies fire the hills, and cannon breaks mountain walls, what savage passion risen in the night, sends maidens screaming from the well, and brings a blackout over all Thermopylae. Be once again the vanguard of mankind, let torches blaze from Olympus to herald for all time the place of brotherhood, to all the sad and bleeding world. Written elsewhere on the role of Darwinian evolution and the male sex drive, conscious or unconscious, direct or sublimated as the root cause of wars. Programme three is directed to this issue. This is not of you or share alone. In programme three I recited the poem from the Australian poet Judith Wright entitled Eve to Her Daughters. The American women's rights advocate Elizabeth Caddy Stanton delivered the following speech to a convention following the American Civil War arguing for an amendment to their constitution that would give women the same rights as men. She entitled her speech The Destructive Male. The speech reads I urge the sixteenth Amendment because manhood suffrage or man's government is civil, religious and social disorganisation. The male element is a destructive force, stern, selfish, aggrandizing, loving war, violence, conquest, acquisition, breeding in the material and moral world alike, a discord disordered disease and death. See what a record of blood and cruelty the pages of history reveal through what slavery, slaughter and sacrifice, through what inquisitions and imprisonments, pains and persecutions, blackcoats and gloomy creeds, the soul of humanity has struggled for centuries, whilst mercy has veiled her face and all the hearts have been dead alive to love and hope. The male element has held high carnival thus far. It has fairly run riot from the beginning, overpowering the feminine element everywhere, crushing out all the diviner qualities in human nature until we know but little of true manhood and womanhood, of the latter comparatively nothing, for it has scarce been recognised as a power until the last century. No one need wonder at the disorganization, at the fragmentary condition of everything when we remember that man who represents but half of a complete being, but with half an idea on every subject has undertaken the absolute control of all subliminary matters. People object to the demands of those whom they choose to call the strong minded because they say the right of suffrage will make women masculine. That is just the difficulty in which we are involved today. Though disenfranchised, we have few women in the best sense. We have simply so many reflections, varieties and delutions of the masculine gender. The strong natural characteristics of womanhood are repressed and ignored independence for so long as man feeds women, she will try to please the giver and adapt herself to his condition. To keep a foothold in society, women must be as near like man as possible, reflect his ideas, opinions, virtues, motives, prejudices and vices. She must respect his statutes, though they strip her of every inalienable right and conflict with that higher law written by the finger of God on her soul. She must look at everything from its dollar and sense point of view, or she is a mere romancer. She must accept things as they are and make the best of them, to mourn over miseries of others, the poverty of the poor, their hardships in jail, prisons, asylums, the horrors of war, cruelty and the brutality in every form, all this is mere sentimentalizing. Protest against the intrigue, bribery and corruption of the public life to desire of sons might follow some business that did not involve lying, cheating, a hard and grinding selfishness would be arrogant nonsense. In this way man has been moulding women to his ideas by direct and positive influences, or she, if not a negation, has used indirect means to control him, and in most cases developed the very characteristics both in him and herself that needed repression. And now man stands appalled at the results of his own excesses and mourns in bitterness that falsehood, selfishness and violence are the law of life. The need of this hour is not territory, gold mines, railways, or species payments, but a new evangel of womanhood to exalt purity, virtue, morality, true religion, to lift man up into the higher realms of thought and action. We ask women's enfranchisement as the first step towards recognition of that essential element in government that can only secure the health, strength and prosperity of the nation. Whatever is done to lift women to a true position will help to usher in a new day of peace and perfection for the race. In speaking of the masculine element, I do not wish to be understood to say that all men are hard, selfish and brutal, for many of the most beautiful spirits the world has known have been clothed with manhood, but I refer to those characteristics though often marked in women that distinguish what is called the stronger sex. For example, the love of acquisition and conquest, the very pioneers of civilization, when expended on the earth, the seas, the elements, the riches and the forces of nature, are powers of destruction when used to subjugate one man to another and sacrifice nations to ambition. Here the great conservator of women's love, if permitted to assert itself as it naturally would in freedom against oppression, violence and war, would hold it all these destructive forces in check, for women know the cost of life better than man does, and not with her consent would a drop of blood ever be shed, one life sacrificed in vain. With violence and disturbance in the natural world we see constant efforts to maintain an equilibrium of forces. Nature, like a loving mother, is ever trying to keep land and sea, mountain and valley, each in its place, to hush angry winds and waves, balance the extremes of heat and cold, of rain and drought, that peace, harmony and beauty may reign. There is a striking analogy between matter and mind and the present disorganization of society warns us that in the dethronement of women we have let loose the element of violence and ruin that she only has the power to curb. If the civilization of the ages calls for an extension of suffrage, surely a government of the most virtuous educated men and women would better represent the whole and protect the interest of all than would the representation of either sex alone. The American novelist and poet Mark Twain, eighteen thirty five to nineteen ten, in the war prayer. He was the author of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and other works. In his poem he's scathing at the blind patriotic and religious fervor as a motivation for war. The structure of the work is simple. An unnamed country goes to war, and patriotic citizens attended church services. People call upon God to grant them victory and protect their troops. Suddenly an aged stranger appears and announces he is God's messenger. He explains to them that he is here to speak aloud the second part of their prayer for victory, the part which they had implicitly wished but have not spoken aloud. The prayer for the suffering and destruction of their enemies. What follows is a grizzling depiction of hardship inflicted on war torn nations by their conquerors, the ends, with the man being condemned as a lunatic and quote for there was no sense in what he said close quote. The poem reads O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our heart, go forth to battle. We thou near them. With them in spirit, we go forth from the sweet place of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells. Help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale form of their patriots dead. Help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded writhing pain. Help us to lay waste their humble homes with hurricanes of fire. Help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief. Help us to turn them out roofless with their children, to wander unfriendly the wastes of their desolate land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun's flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn in travail, imploring thee for refuge of the grave, and denied it. The prayer goes on For our sake who adore thee, O Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their woes with their tears, stain the white snows with the blood of their wounded feet. We ask it in the spirit of love of him who is the source of love, and who is the ever faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset. Seek his aid with humble and contrite heart. Amen. The conscientious objector Carl Shapiro wrote a poem that embodies the rejection of the vitriol and ostracism directed at those who did not march to the beat of the military drum and who suffered political and social ostracism and legal persecution for their views. The poems set out in the text of the hard copy available I've not recited it here. Those who see a world without war and violence as the go-to for dispute resolution are often accused of being unrealistic or utopian. The word utopian was first used by Sir Thomas Moore in a novel of that name and literally meant nowhere, but has come to mean an ideal place. The earliest known attempt to define a utopia was Plato in the Republic, with his philosopher governed totalitarian society. Since then there have been many other attempts that have been collated by the British philosopher John Carey in his book Faber Book of Utopia. The literature generally divides utopia. Utopias into two basic kinds, one in which the greater good is brought about through an authoritarian regime such as with Plato and George Orwell's 1984, and the other where it's consensual, such as in Marx's model from everyone according to their ability to everyone according to their needs. Some utopian models are societies on earth and some of a religious kind in heaven or so or its equivalent. In the case of earthly utopias, there are the real world experiments and the idealizations of past or future societies such as Voltaire's Eldorado and Candide, and the British author James Hilton's Shangri La set out in his novel Lost Horizons in 1933. The British philosopher John Carey has collated these various utopias in his book Faber Book of Utopias. He argues that they are all unrealistic because they involve a different form of humanity to that which presently exists. He argues that present humanity is what it is, and any utopia is just dreaming. Humans will never agree on any set of social ethics and will always manifest self interest and greed. This is true, but Carey assumes that human nature will always remain embedded in the Darwinian evolutionary phase and be as selfish and violent as it presently is. Any utopia will necessarily be a goal for the future development and not something that humanity will achieve in the short or medium term. It is a goal that needs deep time and self directed evolution without extinction events about which I've written elsewhere. Some writers warn against the slippery slope from utopian to dystopian, EG HG Wells Time Machine, George Warwell's nineteen eighty four Animal Farm, and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. There are a couple of other poems that I included in the hard copy that I haven't yet recited and I think I might just recite them now to for completeness' sake. One of them is the American novelist and poet Stephen Crane eighteen seventy one to nineteen hundred, who penned the following satirical poem on the effect of war on women. It reads Do not weep, maiden for war is kind. Because your lover threw wild hands towards the sky and the affrightened steed ran on alone, do not weep, war is kind. Hoarse booming drums of the regiment, little souls who thirst for fight. These men were born to drill and die. The unexplained glory flies above them. Great is the battle god, great and his kingdom, a field where a thousand corpses lie. Do not weep, babe, for war is kind. Because your father tumbled in the yellow trenches, raged at his breast, gulped and died, do not weep, war is kind, swift blazing flag of the regiment, eagle with crest of red and gold, these men were born to drill and die. Point for them the virtue of slaughter, make plain to them the excellence of killing, uh and a field where a thousand corpses lie. Mother whose heart hung humble as a button on the bright splendid shroud of your son, do not weep. War is kind.