Therefore stifle man’s grand sweet dream of peace.
A fat living of domineering idleness for industrial pirates and their pampered pets and shameless hangers-on is not much longer possible, unless the masters as usual can set the working people clutching at one another’s throats, draining one another’s sweat and blood in a hateful spasm of international epilepsy called “patriotic” war.
Therefore drug the working people.
Therefore read again to the weary multitude the goriest pages of history, and declare to them that an act must be soaked in a brother’s blood before it is magnificent. The people must lust again for another savage storm of stupid wrath called war.
Therefore we see the war-flag of capitalism shrewdly waved before the bulging, easily inflamed eyes of the multitude: “Good fighters—war”; “young men not only willing, but anxious to fight—war”; “heroes, heroes—war”; “glory, military glory—war”; “noble, noble soldiers—war”; “ours the most improved arms in the world—war”; “greatest navy on earth—war”; “splendid victories—war”; “better militia—larger army—war”; “our national honor—war”; “we never surrender—war”; “America in the Orient—war”; “we must defend our foreign markets—war”; “see the brave boys behind the guns—war”; “send the fleets around the earth and dare the world to war”; “we are all ready for war, war, war”;—over and over this oratorical flag, this Christless vocabulary of blood-spilling cruelty, on and on, year after year—till these disgusting phrases steam in memory with the spurting blood of the long-mourned slain.
Another war is necessary.
Therefore fill the trenches with the carcasses of citizens and with fixed bayonets march on—on—on to noisy glory, on to the red madness of the brutal battlefield. This is the pagan text of literary and oratorical hirelings before a nation of Christians and peaceful Jews; this is the loveless refrain bellowed before blushing school girls; this is the Alexandrian slogan before excitable, impressible boys; this is the gore-stained banner to be gallantly flaunted on holidays before the tear-wet eyes of the sad old widows and the hobbling cripples of the Civil War; this is the race-cursing call to ninety millions of people sick of stupidly disputing with sword and cannon, longing to embrace one another in caressing fraternalism. Hideous echoes of the cruel voice of Caesar, savage whoop from the tomb of Napoleon, the assassin of France, barbarous yell from the war-cursed plains of the long, long ago—this—yes, this is the sublime height reached by the average orthodox teacher and preacher of patriotism.
And from all parts of this thinly veiled despotism of foxy, industrial tsars, comes enthusiastic approval of all such teaching;—approval from the profit-stuffed leeches whose pouting lips suck and tug at the veins of the toiling multitude; approval from the supercilious snobs at Palm Beach, Newport and Monte Carlo; approval from the editorial intellectual prostitutes of a subsidized press; approval from the “leading citizens” that roll contemptuously along carefully smoothed streets in rubber-tired carriages and from those who sneer through the palace car windows at the common “hired hands” who man the trains and keep the track in repair; approval from the masters who own the mills and mines and stick out their tongues in scorn at the hundreds of thousands out of work or on strike for a few cents more a day; approval from the “great business men” who search the earth for markets for goods produced by the sweating wage-slaves shrewdly kept too poor to buy what their own weary minds and their puffed and blistered hands create; and, saddest of all, approval from the millions of shame-faced wage-earners viciously seduced with ironically empty “prosperity” phrases, chloroformed with pompous military rhetoric, stupefied with the proud strut and cheap swagger of “prominent” and “cultivated” vulgarians—yes, approval also from these modest modern slaves through whose veins seems to slip the inherited taint of long, low-bowing servitude.
Another war is “necessary.”
Therefore from Mississippi to Minnesota and from Florida to Oregon there is a wide-grinning chuckle of lip-smacking satisfaction in the palaces and club-houses of America’s industrial masters when the easily deceived multitude clap their calloused palms in thoughtless approval as the bribed orator makes fierce visaged War stalk with hypnotic fascination across the stage before the plain deludable people. The people’s delight in arms is thus artfully deepened;—and thus and therefore both the walls of prejudice and the defiant fortresses of glittering steel—behind which the gorged masters of the multitude have for ages fattened and threatened in security—these fortresses of prejudice and force are with increasing diligence made stronger with every possible opportunity, made stronger by every possible means.