This is your hour – when darkness reigns.  Luke 22:53

Your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear. For your hands are stained with blood, your fingers with guilt. Your lips have spoken lies, and your tongue mutters wicked things. No one calls for justice; no one pleads his case with integrity. They rely on empty arguments and speak lies; they conceive trouble and give birth to evil… Their deeds are evil deeds, and acts of violence are in their hands. Their feet rush into sin; they are swift to shed innocent blood. Their thoughts are evil thoughts; ruin and destruction mark their ways. The way of peace they do not know; there is no justice in their paths. They have turned them into crooked roads; no one who walks in them will know peace. So justice is far from us, and righteousness does not reach us. We look for light, but all is darkness; for brightness, but we walk in deep shadows. Like the blind we grope along the wall, feeling our way like men without eyes. At midday we stumble as if it were twilight; among the strong, we are like the dead. We all growl like bears; we moan mournfully like doves. We look for justice, but find none; we look for deliverance, but it is far away.  Isaiah 59:2-11

War is held in greater esteem than ever.  A skilled proficient in this business, that murderer of genius, von Moltke, once replied to some Peace delegates in the following terrible words:

“War is sacred; it is instituted by God; it is one of the divine laws of the world; it upholds in men all the great and noble sentiments: honor, self-sacrifice, virtue, and courage.  It is War alone that saves men from falling into the grossest materialism.”

To assemble four hundred thousand men in herds; to march night and day without rest, with no time to think, read, or study, without being of the least use to anybody; wallowing in filth; sleeping in the mud; living like animals in continual stupefaction; sacking towns; burning villages; ruining the whole population, and then meeting similar masses of human flesh and falling upon them; shedding rivers of blood; strewing the fields with mangled bodies mixed with mud and blood; losing arms and legs and having brains blown out for no benefit to anyone; dying somewhere on a field while your old parents, wife, and children are perishing of hunger – that is called saving men from falling into the grossest materialism!  Guy de Maupassant

We will content ourselves with reminding you that the different states of Europe have accumulated a debt of a hundred and thirty billion francs (about a hundred and ten within the last century), and that this colossal debt has arisen almost exclusively from the expenses of war; that in times of peace they maintain standing armies of four million men, which they can increase to ten million in times of war; that two-thirds of their budgets are absorbed by interest on these debts and by the maintenance of land and sea forces.  Gustave de Molinari

Again there is war!  Again there is needless and quite unnecessary suffering, together with fraud and a general stupefaction and brutalization of men.

These men are separated from each other by thousands of miles – Buddhists whose law forbids the killing not only of men but even of animals, and Christians professing a law of brotherhood and love.  Hundreds of thousands of such men seek one another out on land and sea like wild beasts to kill, torture, and mutilate one another in the cruelest possible way.  Can this really be happening, or is it merely a dream?  Something impossible and unbelievable is taking place, and one longs to believe that it is a dream and to awaken from it.

But it is no dream.  It is a dreadful reality.

It is understandable that a poor, uneducated Japanese may have been torn from his field and taught that Buddhism consists not in having compassion for all that lives, but in offering sacrifices to idols.  And it is understandable that a similar poor illiterate fellow from the neighborhood of Túla or Nízhni-Nóvgorod may have been taught that Christianity consists in bowing before icons of Christ, the Mother of God, and the Saints.  It is understandable that these unfortunate men, taught by centuries of violence and deceit to regard the greatest crime in the world – the murder of their fellow men – as a noble deed, could commit these dreadful crimes without regarding themselves as guilty.  But how can so-called enlightened men support war, preach it, participate in it, and, worst of all, without being exposed to its dangers themselves, incite their unfortunate, defrauded brothers to take part in it?  These so-called enlightened men cannot help knowing, I do not say the Christian law (if they recognize themselves to be Christians), but all that has been and is being written and said about the cruelty, futility, and senselessness of war.  They are regarded as enlightened just because they know all this.  Most of them have themselves written and spoken about it.  Not to mention the Hague Conference, which evoked universal praise, and all the books, pamphlets, newspaper articles, and speeches concerning the possibility of solving international misunderstandings by international courts.  No enlightened man can help knowing that universal competition in the armaments of different states must inevitably result in endless wars and general bankruptcy, or in both of these together.  They cannot help knowing that besides the insensate and useless expenditure of billions of rubles on preparations for war, millions of the most energetic and vigorous men perish in wars at the most productive time of their lives.  (Fourteen million men have so perished during the past century.)  Enlightened men cannot but know that the grounds of a war are never worth a single human life or a hundredth part of what is spent on it.  (In fighting for the emancipation of the Negroes, much more was spent than would have bought all the slaves in the Southern States.)

Above all, everyone knows and cannot but know that wars evoke the lowest animal passions and deprave and brutalize men.  Everyone knows how unconvincing the arguments in favor of war are (such as those brought forward by de Maistre,[2] von Moltke, and others).  They are all based on the sophistry that it is possible to find a useful side in every human calamity, or on the quite arbitrary assertion that wars must always exist because they have always existed – as if the evil actions of men can be justified by the advantages they bring or by the fact that they have long been committed.  Every so-called enlightened man knows all this.  But suddenly a war begins and it is all instantly forgotten, and the very men who only yesterday were proving the cruelty, futility, and senselessness of wars, now think, speak, and write only of how to kill as many men as possible, of how to ruin and destroy as much of the produce of human labor as possible, and how to inflame the passion of hatred to the utmost in those peaceful, harmless, industrious men who by their labor feed, clothe, and maintain the pseudo-enlightened men who force them to commit these dreadful deeds, contrary to their consciences, welfare, and faith.

[2] Translator’s note – Joseph de Maistre was an ardent Roman Catholic who acted as Sardinian ambassador at Petersburg from 1803 to 1817.