12 Common Sense Quotes About War from George Bernard Shaw

G.B. Shaw, September 1914

In November 1914, George Bernard Shaw published a controversial 35,000 word essay  in a supplement for the New Statesman titled “Common Sense About the War” that blamed both sides for the conflict and attacked British propaganda.  The public reception was not friendly, many his countrymen accusing him of a lack of patriotism. Piling on across the pond, The New York Times added: "Like Iago, Mr. Shaw is nothing if not critical, and in this crisis his criticism is for the most part bitter, extreme, and in purpose destructive." 

I recently got around to reading  the essay and—while there's some of the expected socialist, anti-capitalist cant and a few expressions of unclassifiable bollocks—I found that there's also much that lives up to the "Common Sense" promise of the title.  A link to the full article is provided below, but here are a dozen of Shaw's quotes that I think are worth singling out. MH

1.   The time has come,”to pluck up courage and begin to talk and write soberly about the war.”

2.   Our way of getting an army able to fight the German army is to declare war on Germany just as if we had such an army, and then trust to the appalling resultant peril and disaster to drive us into wholesale enlistment. 

3.  It is very difficult for anyone who is not either a Junker  [i.e Young nobleman,  country squire, etc.]  or a successful barrister to get into an English Cabinet. . . The Foreign Office is a Junker Club. Our governing classes are overwhelmingly Junker: all who are not Junkers are riff-raff whose only claim to their position is the possession of ability of some sort: mostly ability to make money.

4.  Will you now at last believe, O stupid British, German, and French patriots, what the Socialists have been telling you for so many years: that your Union Jacks and tricolours and Imperial Eagles ( where the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered ) are only toys to keep you amused, and that there are only two real flags in the world henceforth: the red flag of Democratic Socialism and the black flag of Capitalism, the flag of God and the flag of Mammon?

5.   I see the Junkers and Militarists of England and Germany jumping at the chance they have longed for in vain for many years of smashing one another and establishing their own oligarchy as the dominant military power in the world. 

6.  When Europe and America come to settle the treaty that will end this business (for America is concerned in it as much as we are), they will not deal with us as the lovable and innocent victims of a treacherous tyrant and a savage soldiery. They will have to consider how these two incorrigibly pugnacious and inveterately snobbish peoples, who have snarled at one another for forty years with bristling hair and grinning fangs, and are now rolling over with their teeth in one another's throats, are to be tamed into trusty watch-dogs of the peace of the world.

7.  Some of the best disposed parties will stumble over the old delusion of disarmament. They think it is the gun that matters. They are wrong: the gun matters very much when war breaks out; but what makes both war and the gun is the man behind them. And if that man really means the peace of the world to be kept, he will take care to have a gun to keep it with. 

8. Junker-Militarism promotes only stupid people and snobs, and suppresses genuine realists as if they were snakes, it always turns out when a crisis arrives that  the silly people don't know their own silly business.  The Kaiser and his ministers made an appalling mess of their job. 

9. Even the wise, who loathe war, and regard it as such a dishonour and disgrace in itself that all its laurels cannot hide its brand of Cain, had to admit that police duty is necessary and that war must be made on such war as the Germans had made by attacking France in an avowed attempt to substitute a hegemony of cannon for the comity of nations. There was no  alternative.

10.  We cannot smash or disable Germany, however completely we may defeat her, because we can do that only by killing her women; and it is trifling to pretend that we are capable of any such villainy. [Oh?] Even to embarrass her financially by looting her would recoil on ourselves, as she is one of our commercial customers and one of our most frequently visited neighbors.

11.   Militarism must not be treated as a disease peculiar to Prussia.

12. To sum up, we must remember that if this war does not make an end of war in the west, our allies of to-day may be our enemies of to-morrow, as they are of yesterday, and our enemies of to-day our allies of to-morrow as they are of yesterday; so that if we aim merely at a fresh balance of military power, we are as likely as not to negotiate our own destruction.

Coming Soon:   GBS presented a retrospective view of the war in the preface to the published version of his 1919 play Heartbreak House. I'll be presenting a similar selection of my favorite quotes from that document in the near future. MH

Bernard Shaw's full 35,000 word essay “Common Sense About the War” can be downloaded as a pdf document HERE.