The Army Chief can start by making sacrifices of his own.
War! Do you realize what it means? Do you know of any more terrible word in our language? Does it not bring to your mind pictures of slaughter and carnage, of murder, pillage, and destruction? Can’t you hear the belching of cannon, the cries of the dying and wounded? Can you not see the battlefield strewn with corpses? Living humans torn to pieces, their blood and brains scattered about, men full of life suddenly turned to carrion. And there, at home, thousands of fathers and mothers’ wives and sweethearts living in hourly dread lest some mischance befall their loved ones, and waiting, waiting for the return of those who will return nevermore.
You know what war means. Even if you yourself have never been at the front, you know that there is no greater curse than war with its millions of dead and maimed, its countless human sacrifices, its broken lives, ruined homes its indescribable heartache and misery.
‘It’s terrible’, you admit, ‘but it can’t be helped’. You think that war must be, that times come when it is inevitable, that you must defend your country when it is in danger.
Let us see, then, whether you really defend your country when you go to war. Let us see what causes war, and whether it is for the benefit of your country that you are called upon to don the uniform and start off on the campaign of slaughter.
Let us consider whom and what you defend in war: who is interested in it and who profits by it.
Do you see how the game is played? You are not told that you are asked to protect the privileges and dividends of some American capitalist in a foreign country. They know that if they tell you that, you would laugh at them and you would refuse to get yourself shot to swell the profits of plutocrats. But without you and others like you they can’t make war! So they raise the cry of ‘Defend your country! Your flag is insulted!’ Sometimes they actually hire thugs to insult your country’s flag in a foreign land, or get some American property destroyed there, so as to make sure the people at home will get wild over it and rush to join the Army and Navy.
Don’t think I exaggerate. American capitalists are known to have caused even revolutions in foreign countries (particularly in South America) so as to get a more ‘friendly’ new government there and thus secure the concessions they wanted.
But generally they don’t need to go to such lengths. All they have to do is appeal to your ‘patriotism’, flatter you a bit, tell you that you can ‘lick the whole world,’ and they get you ready to don the soldier’s uniform and do their bidding.
It is not for your country that you fight when you go to war. It’s for your governors, your rulers, your capitalistic masters.
Neither your country, nor humanity, neither you nor your class — the workers — gain anything by war. It is only the big financiers and capitalists who profit by it.
War is bad for you. It is bad for the workers. They have everything to lose and nothing to gain by it. They don’t even get any glory from it, for that goes to the big generals and field marshals.
What do you get in war? You get lousy, you get shot, gassed, maimed, or killed. That is all the workers of any country get out of war.
War is bad for your country, bad for humanity: it spells slaughter and destruction. Everything that war destroys — bridges and harbors, cities and ships, fields and factories — all must be built up again. That means that the people are taxed, directly and indirectly, to build it up. For in the last analysis everything comes from the pockets of the people. So war is bad for them materially, not to speak of the brutalizing effect war has upon mankind in general. And don’t forget that 999 out of every 1,000 who are killed, blinded, or maimed in war are of the laboring class, sons of workers and farmers.
In modern war there is no victor, for the winning side loses almost as much as the defeated one. Sometimes even more, like France in the late struggle: France is poorer to-day than Germany. The workers of both countries are taxed to starvation to make good the losses sustained in the war. Labor’s wages and standards of living are much lower now in the European countries that participated in the World War than they were before the great catastrophe.
‘But the United States got rich through the war,’ you object.
You mean that a handful of men gained millions, and that the big Capitalists made huge profits. Surely they did: the great financiers by lending Europe money at a high rate of interest and by supplying war material and munitions. But where do you come in?
From Now and After by Alexander Berkman. Written in the 1920s. Chapter 6: War?
Available to read or download in multiple formats, for free, here: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alexander-berkman-what-is-communist-anarchism#toc8