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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
American writers on peace and against war
Upton Sinclair: Selections on war
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Upton Sinclair
From Boston (1928)
It was time to get excitable young rebels out of the country; the family realized that clearly more and more every day. For it appeared that the signing of the armistice was not going to mean peace; not even the signing of a treaty would mean it. Our troops were to stay in Germany; worse yet, they were to stay in Siberia and Archangel, and wage President Wilson’s private war upon the Russian people. The American army and navy were to service as a world police-force for the capitalist system. Exactly what Cornelia had seen the Boston police do in Plymouth, the national police were going to do all over Europe and Asia, sometimes under our command, sometimes under British command. And any persons at home who objected to this program would be hit over the head with the so-called espionage act; a law enacted to punish enemy spies, and now serving to jail American citizens for protesting against attacks upon a friendly people without a declaration of war.
It was the White Terror. Conducted partly by mobs, and partly by police and government agents acting as mobs, it had for its aim the destruction of every means through which the American people might learn how their blood and treasure were being wasted. It stopped at no crime; the law-enforcers of city, state and nation became the leading criminals. In New York four Russian boys and a girl, all of them under age, attempting to distribute a circular against the invasion of Russia, were seized by the police and tortured until one of them died; the rest were prosecuted in the federal courts and received sentences of twenty years’ imprisonment.
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“It is nothing but a coward’s attempt to frighten and distress us. Joe was connected with the American legation in Russia, when President Wilson begin his private war on the Russian people, which was nothing but wholesale murder for the benefit of the British Tories. Joe said what he thought about it, and he may actually have done something to try to stop it. If he has a ‘criminal record,’ that is it. I’m sure.”
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