"Wells, H G - War And The Future" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wells H G)

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I avow myself an extreme Pacifist. I am against the man who
first takes up the weapon. I carry my pacifism far beyond the
ambiguous little group of British and foreign sentimentalists who
pretend so amusingly to be socialists in the /Labour
Leader/, whose conception of foreign policy is to give Germany
now a peace that would be no more than a breathing time for a
fresh outrage upon civilisation, and who would even make heroes
of the crazy young assassins of the Dublin crime. I do not
understand those people. I do not merely want to stop this war.
I want to nail down war in its coffin. Modern war is an
intolerable thing. It is not a thing to trifle with in this
Urban District Council way, it is a thing to end forever. I have
always hated it, so far that is as my imagination enabled me to
realise it; and now that I have been seeing it, sometimes quite
closely for a full month, I hate it more than ever. I never
imagined a quarter of its waste, its boredom, its futility, its
desolation. It is merely a destructive and dispersive instead of
a constructive and accumulative industrialism. It is a gigantic,
dusty, muddy, weedy, bloodstained silliness. It is the plain
duty of every man to give his life and all that he has if by so
doing he may help to end it. I hate Germany, which has thrust
this experience upon mankind, as I hate some horrible infectious
disease. The new war, the war on the modern level, is her
invention and her crime. I perceive that on our side and in its
broad outlines, this war is nothing more than a gigantic and
heroic effort in sanitary engineering; an effort to remove German
militarism from the life and regions it has invaded, and to bank
it in and discredit and enfeeble it so that never more will it
repeat its present preposterous and horrible efforts. All human
affairs and all great affairs have their reservations and their
complications, but that is the broad outline of the business as
it has impressed itself on my mind and as I find it conceived in
the mind of the average man of the reading class among the allied
peoples, and as I find it understood in the judgment of honest
and intelligent neutral observers.

It is my unshakeable belief that essentially the Allies fight for
a permanent world peace, that primarily they do not make war but
resist war, that has reconciled me to this not very congenial
experience of touring as a spectator all agog to see, through the
war zones. At any rate there was never any risk of my playing
Balaam and blessing the enemy. This war is tragedy and sacrifice
for most of the world, for the Germans it is simply the
catastrophic outcome of fifty years of elaborate intellectual
foolery. Militarism, Welt Politik, and here we are! What else
/could/ have happened, with Michael and his infernal War
Machine in the very centre of Europe, but this tremendous