Anti-War Protest

Introduction

During times of war, soldiers on the front line must acclimate to the realities of combat and the possibility of death. However, those who are fighting are not the only ones that must face the uncertainties and fear that are part of warfare. Those at home—the families, friends, and fellow citizens of those soldiers—must also learn to cope with the war. In the era of the World Wars, many coped with the help of patriotism. Men and women enlisted in the armed service to fight on behalf of their country, and citizens, certain that their soldiers were doing the right thing, contributed to the war effort on the home front while praying for the safe return of soldiers. Anti-war activists and pacifists protested U.S. involvement in both wars, but they were in the minority and often were former soldiers themselves who had previous battle experience.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, when the Korean, Vietnam, and Gulf wars were beamed into living rooms across the globe, prior methods of coping with war no longer seemed relevant. The televised wars of the twentieth century brought the terrible realities of war home in an immediate and graphic way, and many found that patriotism was not enough to deal with the nightly images on their television. In fact, many refused to accept war at all, and would not allow it to go unopposed. The Vietnam War was one of the most controversial and heavily protested wars in American history.

The image of an anti-war protester that most readily comes to many people's minds is that of a Vietnam War protester in the 1960s, and the peace movement that gathered momentum through the late 1960s and early 1970s. However, anti-war sentiments are not a new phenomenon, as wars have been protested since the beginning of time. The protest movement truly blossomed with the advent of television, where images and messages could be sent across the globe instantaneously. A protest in one town could reach across the nation and the world in hopes that viewers would join the fight against war.

Throughout various generations and conflicts, writers, artists, and ordinary citizens have questioned the necessity of war. They question not only the justification of specific wars being fought in their times, but the need for battle and war in any time. By doing so, they hope to raise enough doubts about war and its outcomes that nonviolent means of conflict resolutions will be sought in the future, rather than combat.

Civil Disobedience

The father of modern anti-war literature is arguably Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862). Thoreau was a semi-reclusive nature enthusiast whose seminal essay "Civil Disobedience" (1849) has inspired generations of anti-war protesters and pacifists. Thoreau believed that the individual has the ability to make positive change in the world, and as such, should raise his or her voice against the government when his or her conscience demands it: "The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right." He cautioned that blindly following the government's decisions and laws, especially in respect to waging war, leads to soldiers fighting "against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences," becoming nothing more to the government than "small moveable forts … at the service of some unscrupulous man in power."

Thoreau encourages citizens to oppose decisions they disagree with in a peaceful, "civil" manner. He was writing in opposition to slavery, attempting to persuade those opposed to it to speak out and act on behalf of the slave population. The sentiment of the essay, however, is still applicable to modern readers, specifically to those who oppose war. He urges action in accordance with a person's convictions: "Action from principle, the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary." "Civil Disobedience" has encouraged many political leaders in their quests for peaceable change, including Mahatma Gandhi and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. It remains today a defiant and influential tract.

Voices from World War I

Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) was a World War I soldier who produced poetry in the midst of war. In October 1917, the twenty-four-year-old Owen sent his mother the poem "Dulce Et Decorum Est" with a note, "Here is a gas poem, done yesterday." The matter-of-fact presentation with which he introduced "Dulce Et Decorum Est," the Latin phrase for "It is sweet to die for your country," belies the impact it has had on many generations of readers. The title of the poem juxtaposes, or compares, the patriotic sentiment of dying for one's country—making the ultimate sacrifice—with the harsh, un-noble deaths that many young soldiers faced on the battlefield. There is little glorious or sweet about soldiers "coughing like hags…. / Many had lost their boots / But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind." The soldiers are then subject to a gas attack, and one soldier who does not get his mask on in time flounders "like a man in fire or lime." This is neither the essence of a glorious war, nor a dignified way to die. In the end, he pleads with his readers not to pass on the myth that it is sweet or noble to die for one's country to "children ardent for some desperate glory." He tells readers they would not even think of doing so if they were to see, hear, and smell the actual effects of war. Owens himself died in battle just one week before the end of the war.

Novelist Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970) was another World War I soldier who wrote about his personal war experiences in the novel All Quiet On The Western Front (1927). It is a fictionalized story of a German soldier and his company set in the trenches of World War I. The protagonist Paul Baumer is an idealistic young man compelled to join the German Army by his schoolteacher, who urges his students to join up. He is inspired to fight much like the young soldiers in "Dulce Et Decorum Est," naively eager to see battle. After ten weeks of brutal training and the immediate shock that comes from his first battle experience, Paul and his friends are mentally and physically beaten down through the course of several campaigns. There is no happy ending to this novel, no honor in battle or glory in dying for one's country, as each of Paul's school friends and fellow soldiers are eventually killed. Paul reflects that when the war ends, he will be ruined for peacetime. In that reflection, Remarque speaks to how deep the battle scars penetrate even the most innocent and optimistic.

The devastation of combat does not occur solely on the battlefields. Even the countryside, somewhere seemingly peaceful and serene far from the battlefields, can still be affected by the horrors of war. "Patterns" (1916), a poem by Amy Lowell (1874–1925), illustrates the devastation of lives that the war can bring. The wounding or death of a soldier affects not only his or her life, but also the lives of loved ones with a similar or greater impact. Her poem illustrates that there is no solace in being a survivor when a loved one is killed in battle.

Though "Patterns" was written during World War I, it is set during the War of Spanish Succession (1702–1713). In six long stanzas, the reader follows a woman, in first person, as she takes a walk down garden paths. She describes her dress, a stiff, heavily corseted, and patterned brocade gown of the era: "Not a softness anywhere about me, / Only whalebone and brocade." It is a peaceful and quiet setting. She begins to weep when a lime-tree blossom falls onto the bosom of her dress. In the fifth stanza, the reader learns why she is weeping: she has just received a letter informing her that her fiancé, Lord Hartwell, has been killed in action, "In a pattern called war." Lowell juxtaposes two concepts of patterns in her poem: those of the woman at home, and that of war. The woman carefully follows the patterns prescribed for her life, including following the garden path, the formal and appropriate pattern of her clothing that encloses her softness, and waiting for her fiancé's return from war. The patterns that control the woman's life have predictable outcomes. So does the pattern of war, Lowell argues. Men go off to fight a war, and die with little gained for their country, leaving their loved ones full of grief. Both the woman and her fiancé have followed the patterns set before them, but neither pattern ends in hope or happiness: "Christ! What are patterns for?" Perhaps Lowell is suggesting a new pattern of peace, as the existing patterns lead to only heartbreak and death.

After the World Wars

The unprecedented scope and carnage of World War I had a profound effect on many artists, who found the traditional methods of writing, painting, and music-making no longer applicable to the postwar period. The modernist movement, which was a reaction to the restrictive Victorian forms of art and writing, was well underway before the war, but exploded in the years after, as artists, musicians, and writers struggled to depict their worlds after the Great War.

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was an essayist, critic, poet, and novelist. Her novel Jacob's Room (1922) is set during World War I. The title character, whose surname Flanders echoes one of the major killing fields of that war, questions the futility of life and the horror of war. It is a study in character as opposed to a plot-driven novel. The story follows Jacob from his childhood in pre-war England to his death in the war. However, Woolf does not write of Jacob's death, but rather about the now-empty room he leaves behind. Like Lowell's "Patterns," Jacob's Room is a protest against war, revealing the sense of loss and waste over the death of a soldier, and the emptiness these combat deaths leave behind. Woolf broke down the barriers in many ways when it came to the possible approaches of the modern novel. There was no better topic than war to subtly, but in devastating ways, portray the deeply ingrained scars forever branded on people at home.

Dalton Trumbo (1905–1976) conceived of the premise for his novel Johnny Got His Gun (1939) after reading an article about the Prince of Wales visiting a limbless World War I veteran at a Canadian Hospital. The book, about a World War I veteran who has lost all of limbs and his tongue, was published two days after the start of World War II. Though it was a bestseller and won an American Booksellers Award in 1940, Trumbo agreed to suppress future printings of the novel until after the end of war, worried that it would hurt the war effort.

Joe Bonham, the protagonist, narrates his story as if from a living grave, trapped within his body without the means to communicate, indefinitely confined to a hospital bed. He is, in effect, simply a head and a torso. His limbs have been blown off, and his mind wanders through time and space, narrowing in on the things he has lost: a tranquil boyhood, time with women, and a hopeful future. Those things are all gone, casualties of war the same as his body parts. Bonham is without limbs, and without a tongue, but he is defiant in his desire to have his voice heard, fighting against the doctors who would silence him with drugs:

Before he began to feel its effects he knew it was some kind of dope. They were trying to shut him up…. They were forcing him to be silent. They didn't want to hear him.

The Cold War

Novelist Nevil Shute (1899–1960) was a World War I veteran who, like Remarque, was compelled to write about his war experience in a fictionalized manner. A stretcher bearer during the Easter Uprising of 1916 in Ireland, Shute spent the last months of World War I as a soldier in England. On The Beach (1957), a novel about the cold war that followed World War II, reflected the feeling of paranoia and mistrust that permeated the era.

The premise of the novel came from the wishful thinking of Australians, many of whom believed, at the time, that radiation from a nuclear war in the Northern Hemisphere would be kept above the equator by the trade winds. Therefore, however the cold war escalated between the United States and the Soviet Union, Australians would be safe from the fallout. As an aeronautical engineer, Shute knew this theory was groundless. Radiation would cover the world. With On The Beach, the visceral and immediate impact of ground battles is replaced by the long-term legacy of the Bomb. His novel warns that regardless of the justifications for dropping an atomic bomb, the ruin and devastation it will cause for years after its detonation are not worth the temporary strategic gains it provides. In the age of nuclear weaponry, there is no safe place, and novels like On the Beach serve as a preemptive protest against a potential nuclear holocaust.

As the cold war escalated, the fears of a nuclear war weighed heavily on the world and its leaders. Tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union were high in the 1950s and 1960s. In On Nuclear War and Peace (1958), a transcription of three Radio Oslo broadcasts made earlier that year, Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) implores world leaders to call on their consciences to remain calm and focused in times of cold war antagonism. His speech echoes Thoreau's call for individuals to follow their consciences in "Civil Disobedience." Schweitzer's plea for peace is coupled with a plea for humanity: "Now we must re-discover the fact that we—all together—are human beings, and that we must strive to concede to each other what moral capacity we have." He dismisses the idea that peace has become a utopian ideal, and therefore, an unrealistic pursuit for modern society. He warns that peace must be attempted at all costs to protect mankind: "the situation today is such that [peace] must in one way or another become reality if humanity is not to perish."

The Vietnam War

Vietnamese writer Vu Bao (1926–), author of the story "The Man Who Stained His Soul," was a soldier in the war that Vietnam waged against French involvement in Indochina in the 1950s. The war culminated in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, in which the Vietnamese, led by Ho Chi Minh, defeated the French. Thereafter, Vietnam was divided into two countries, the communist North and the anti-communist South. Ten years later, the first American troops arrived in Vietnam, beginning a war that lasted almost a decade.

In "The Man Who Stained His Soul," Bao mocks the events of battle that can become propaganda when televised. After an American battalion captures an enemy outpost, they are forced to reenact the capture so that it can be televised. The movements and actions of the soldiers are carefully choreographed for the reenactment, including the scene where the victorious soldiers hoist the U.S. flag over the outpost. The soldier who takes part in the flag-raising reenactment was not even a part of the actual battle. He had deserted, staying behind the front lines, yet is captured on film as a hero. Bao's fictionalized account of a staged battle for the benefit of cameras is based on an actual event that happened in World War II. The famous image of the Marines planting the U.S. flag on Iwo Jima was not captured in the heat of battle, but was in fact staged for its photogenic and patriotic qualities after the fact.

Bao's story condemns war as a choreographed and carefully planned media event, where victorious and patriotic images are used to manipulate citizens into thinking the war is being won, even when it is not. As in Bao's story, where the cowardly soldier becomes the hero in a staged battle, the U.S. government often depicted the United States as the victor in Vietnam, even when facts provided evidence to the contrary.

The seeds of doubt over the war in Vietnam sparked an unprecedented anti-war protest. Millions of U.S. citizens protested the war in Vietnam, demanding an end to the fighting and a return of troops. Many folk singers and songwriters wrote now-legendary songs in protest, including Bob Dylan's "Masters of War," John Lennon's and Yoko Ono's "Give Peace a Chance," Joan Baez's "Saigon Bride," and Simon and Garfunkel's "Seven O'Clock News/Silent Night." Just as the war had become televised, popular icons had become anti-war protesters, with the same goals as Owen, Remarque, and Schweitzer: peace.

The Gulf War

Poet W. S. Merwin's (1927–) poem "The Wars in New Jersey" (1992) is a reaction to the first Gulf War in 1991: "the campaigns as we know we know / were planned and are still carried out for our sake." Yet Merwin argues in his poem that the citizens, for whose sake the wars are fought, are never asked if they want the wars in the first place. They are never given an opportunity to speak out against the war before it happens. Merwin places the battle at home right from the title and reminds the reader that many have died for the sake of their fellow citizens, whether they wanted to or not. The war in question here is less tangible and bloody than the Gulf War that had just been waged when the poem was written. This poem deals with a more abstract war, one that pits individual conscience against a government bent on waging battle. Like Thoreau in "Civil Disobedience," Merwin writes of the war that must be waged against one's government to stand up for something one believes is right.

Conclusion

In the face of certain war, speaking for peace can sometimes be a daunting responsibility. The arduous struggle to believe that one voice can make a difference can silence that voice altogether. The literature of protest, however, reminds readers that every voice must speak its conscience, and provides examples of individuals who have made a difference in the eternal quest for a peaceful world.

SOURCES

Lowell, Amy, "Patterns," in Vol. 1 of The American Tradition In Literature: Shorter Edition, 10th edition, McGraw-Hill, 2002, pp. 1478-81.

Owen, Wilfred, "Dulce Et Decorum Est," in Vol. 2 of The Norton Anthology: English Literature, 6th edition, edited by M. H. Abrams, W. W. Norton, 1993, pp. 1845-46.

Merwin, W. S., "The Wars in New Jersey," Michael Parker's Blog at Salon.com, http://www.blogs.salon.com (November 13, 2003); originally published in Travels by W. S. Merwin, Knopf, 1992.

Schweitzer, Albert, On Nuclear War and Peace, The Albert Schweitzer Fellowship, www.schweitzerfellowship.org. (August 18, 2005).

The Wilfred Owen Association, World War I Poets on the Battlefield, http://www.1914–1918.co.uk/owen/ (July 4, 2005).

Thoreau, Henry David, "Civil Disobedience," in The Portable Thoreau, Revised Edition, ed. Carl Bode, Viking Press, Inc., 1975, pp. 109-37.

Trumbo, Dalton, Johnny Got His Gun, Bantam Books, Inc., 1939, 1959, pp. 184-85.