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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Romain Rolland: Selections on war
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Romain Rolland
From A World In Birth (L’enfantement) (1933)
Translated by Amalia de Alberti
When Marc began to play on the violin of European peace, Jean Casimir’s girlish tongue began to dance. He was amused at the disorderly intrusion of this grasshopper into the wasps’ nest. This poor chap who imagined he was working for the peace of the world!
“Peace, old chap, is no longer made by the press, nor by speeches, nor in the Forum, nor in Parliament, nor in the interviews of ministers, nor the conferences of diplomatists, nor even at the front of armies. That belongs to the past. It is out of date! Peace and war are in the hands of those who hold the purse-strings: a dozen. ‘Your money or your life!’ They do not even offer you the choice. They will make it for you. Your life or death are in our hands, my dear boy. When we choose!”
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He told, with a wealth of detail…the dates, figures and places of the secret treaties, the conventions which, unknown to them, bound the States, with the complicity of their valets – valets of the press, or the government. He counted on his finger-tips the great newspapers which had sold themselves (when and for how much?) to one or another of these ogres, and told of the control exercised by their agents over sales in kiosks, bookshops and newspaper stalls, of periodicals, pamphlets, and all printed thought.
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“The policies of the thieves, stocks and shares, crash against each other on the Bourse and on the green baize of the States – even, when possible, on the red tables of battlefields…”
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“It is the subtlest game. Politics holds the balance. It hesitates, wavers and bets on both sides; it watches and waits to see which will be the stronger. The game consists in getting on the stronger side one minute before it becomes the stronger. So one seems to walk before it, and the blockhead is taken in. For instance, if the scale of high finance is the heavier we play for Franco-Germanic reconciliation. If it is the scale of industry, we denounce German armaments, and arm ourselves. We drive armament and disarmament at once, with equal strength; both horses are always ready in our stables: Maginot and Briand – war and peace. Our horses rear and bite each other; but that is chiefly for the gallery. They are old well-trained cockaded horses, all very proud of belonging to the France stable. They each wait their turn. And whatever number is drawn we lose nothing.”
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“Where can we turn? Toward those who stake on peace, or those who stake on war? It is the same thing on both sides. On one side Europe (or that’s saying too much – our West) gains perhaps from twenty to thirty years of armed peace. But when one sees what is under it, what the rest of the world pays and will pay for it, can we, can I, associate myself with it? These peacemakers, peace is not their object. It’s money. Money wants peace today, war tomorrow. There is no peace.”
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