SUPPOSE WE GIVE PEACE A CHANCE IN 2017?

Lawrence Rosenwald, ed., War No More: Three Centuries of American Antiwar and Peace Writings, with a foreword by James Carroll (New York: Library of America, 2016) (From the book jacket: "Americans have been at war for most of our history as a people. Wars of conquest gave way to wars of empire, the Civil War to the World Wars, and the Cold War to the War on Terror. Our national anthem celebrates heroism under fire, and martial imagery permeates our politics and our pasttimes. But in every turn in this history, Americans have questioned and resisted both particular wars and justifications for war in general. Taking up the pen instead of the sword, they have produced a body of literature of great passion and power, a homegrown American tradition that refuses the proposition that war is the inevitable price of liberty or prosperity--that dares to envision a world where people learn war no more. Gathering essays, letters, speeches, memoirs, songs, poems, cartoons, leaflets, stories, and other works by nearly 150 writers from the colonial era to the present, War No More brings this extraordinary writing together for the first time in a single volume, a 'conversation,' in the words of editor Lawrence Rosenwald, 'not yet fully described by historians, not fully available to activists, but living in these pages.'" From Nicholson Baker, "Why I'm a Pacifist: The Dangerous Myth of the Good War, 736, 755, reprinted from The Way the World Works: Essays (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012): "When are we going to grasp the essential truth? War never works. It never has worked. It makes everything worse. Wars must be, as Jessie Hughan wrote in 1944, renounced, rejected, declared against, over and over, 'as an ineffective and inhuman means to any end, however just.' That, I would suggest, is the lesson that the pacifists of the Second World War have to teach us.").