Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Anton Tammsaare
From The Misadventures of the New Satan (1939)
Translated by Olga Shartze
“One more thing: what do you think I’d be better on earth – a peasant, a merchant, an industrialist, a worker, a diplomat, a scientist, a writer, an artist, or a preacher? Who will achieve salvation easiest, in our days?”
“That’s hard, very hard to say,” Peter mumbled thoughtfully. “In my day I was a fisherman, and you know as well as I do what happened. Farming is a good occupation, because if war breaks out, laying waste the land, burning down all your buildings, destroying your livestock, and killing your wife and children, you’ll certainly go to heaven, seeing that you couldn’t expect any mercy or charity from anyone but our Lord. Now, if war doesn’t break out and you start growing rich quickly, thanks to all manner of government subsidies and wanting to live in the style of an industrialist or a merchant, thriving on the high prices set in the name of the fatherland, you’ll do better to forget about saving your immortal soul, though you might attend church as regularly as respectability demands and pay your church dues without the intervention of the police.
“…Now, if idle talking is all you’re interested in, diplomacy will be the right field, for the actual doing is done by the stock exchange brokers and the arms manufacturers. Intellectual work is no good either. Once upon a time the spirit exerted its influence on those in power, and now it’s the other way around. Supposing you’re a scientist, a writer, or an artist, how can you possibly come close to God if Mammon rules the powers that be, and the powers that be rule you?…”
***
A living man brought in much more profit than a dead one, although business could also be made on the dead by helping them on their way to heaven with caskets, graveyard plots, wreaths, tombs, embalmment, and touching obituaries. But the worth of the dead was piffling compared to that of the living man. To see it in its proper perspective take the war, for instance, that greatest enterprise of the modern age. Try harnessing a dead man to a chariot!
***
Look at the cripples who come back from war – no arms or legs at all – and yet they got along somehow, and lived. Was that reason enough not to fight a war?
***
He had grown so rich that he no longer had to confirm his national spirit or his patriotism with any kind of commitments – that’s how trustworthy he was! He paid no taxes at all, but as taxes were imposed on him anyway he exercised his right to shift the onus on to those who were not as prosperous and whose national feelings and patriotism were therefore dubious. When Ants held forth on the subject of patriotism, which he was rather fond of doing, his own rights and privileges were uppermost in his mind, and this seemed quite natural to him, and to others too.
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