"The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder,
rapine, and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a
destiny imposed by the deity to regenerate our victims while
incidentally capturing their markets, to civilize savage and senile and
paranoidal peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells or
metal mines."
-John T. Flynn, As We Go Marching

"No matter what the cause, even though it be to conquer with tanks and
planes and modern artillery some defenseless black population, there
will be no lack of poets and preachers and essayists and philosophers to
invent the necessary reasons and gild the infamy with righteousness. To
this righteousness there is, of course, never an adequate reply. Thus a
war to end poverty becomes an unanswerable enterprise. For who can
decently be for poverty? To even debate whether the war will end poverty
becomes an exhibition of ugly pragmatism and the sign of an ignoble mind."
-John T. Flynn, As We Go Marching

"The so-called Christian virtues of humility, love, charity, personal
freedom, the strong prohibitions against violence, murder, stealing,
lying, cruelty-all these are washed away by war. The greatest hero is
the one who kills the most people. Glamorous exploits in successful
lying and mass stealing and heroic vengeance are rewarded with
decorations and public acclaim. You cannot, when the war is proclaimed,
pull a switch and turn the community from the moral code of peace to
that of war and then, when the armistice is signed, pull another switch
and reconnect the whole society with its old moral regulations again.
Thousands of people of all ranks who have found a relish in the morals
of war come back to you with these rudimentary instincts controlling
their behavior while thousands of others, trapped in a sort of no man's
land between these two moralities, come back to you poisoned by cynicism."
-John T. Flynn, As We Go Marching

Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a
farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it
is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people
don't want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in
Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the
country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to
drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist
dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no
voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.
That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked,
and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the
country to danger. It works the same in any country."
-Hermann Goering (attributed)

"Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each
one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who have had the fortune of being
born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler,
grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other
spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot
to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon
all others. The inhabitants of the other spots reason like manner, of
course . . ."
-Emma Goldman, Patriotism

"How is a military drilled and trained to defend freedom, peace and
ahppiness? This is what Major General O'Ryan has to say of an
efficiently trained generation: 'The soldier must be so trained that he
becomes a mere automoton; he must be so trained that it will destroy his
initiative; he must be so trained that he is turned into a machine. The
soldier must be forced into the military noose; he must be jacked up; he
must be ruled by his superiors with pistol in hand.' This was not said
by a Prussian Junker; not by a German barbarian . . . but by an American
major general. And he is right. You cannot conduct war with equals; you
cannot have militarism with free born men; you must have slaves,
automotons, machines, obedient disciplined creatures, who will move,
act, shoot and kill at the command of their superiors. That is
preparedness, and nothing else."
-Emma Goldman, Preparedness: The Road to Universal Slaughter

"Sure, there were lots of bodies we never identified. You know what a
direct hit by a shell does to a guy. Or a mine, or a solid hit with a
grenade, even. Sometimes all we have is a leg or a hunk of arm. The ones
that stink the worst are the guys who got internal wounds and are dead
about three weeks with the blood staying inside and rotting, and when
you move the body the blood comes out of the nose and mouth. Then some
of them bloat up in the sun, they bloat up so big that they bust the
buttons and then they get blue and the skin peels. They don't all get
blue, some of them get black. But they all stunk. There's only one stink
and that's it. You never get used to it, either. As long as you live,
you never get used to it. And after a while, the stink gets in your
clothes and you can taste it in your mouth. You know what I think? I
think maybe if every civilian in the world could smell this stink, then
maybe we wouldn't have any more wars."
-Technical Sergeant Donald Haguall, 48th Quartermaster Graves
Registration (quoted in Purnell's History of the Second World War)

"YOUNG MEN: The lowest aim in your life is to become a soldier. The good
soldier never tries to distinguish right from wrong. He never thinks;
never reasons; he only obeys. If he is ordered to fire on his fellow
citizens, on his friends, on his neighbors, on his relatives, he obeys
without hesitation. If he is ordered to fire down a crowded street when
the poor are clamoring for bread, he obeys and see the grey hairs of age
stained with red and the life tide gushing from the breasts of women,
feeling neither remorse nor sympathy. If he is ordered off as a firing
squad to execute a hero or benefactor, he fires without hesitation,
though he knows the bullet will pierce the noblest heart that ever beat
in human breast.

"A good soldier is a blind, heartless, soulless, murderous machine. He
is not a man. His is not a brute, for brutes kill only in self defense.
All that is human in him, all that is divine in him, all that
constitutes the man has been sworn away when he took the enlistment
roll. His mind, his conscience, aye, his very soul, are in the keeping
of his officer. No man can fall lower than a soldier-it is a depth
beneath which we cannot go."
- Jack London

"To destroy governmental violence only one thing is needed: it is that
people should understand that the feeling of patriotism which alone
supports that instrument of violence is a rude, harmful, disgraceful,
and bad feeling, and above all is immoral. It is a rude feeling because
it is natural only to people standing on the lowest level of morality
and expecting from other nations such outrages as they themselves are
ready to inflict. It is a harmful feeling because it disturbs
advantageous and joyous peaceful relations with other peoples, and above
all produces that governmental organization under which power may fall
and does fall into the hands of the worst men. It is a disgraceful
feeling because it turns man not merely into a slave but into a fighting
*****, a bull, or a gladiator, who wastes his strength and his life for
objects which are not his own, but his government's. It is an immoral
feeling because, instead of confessing himself a son of God . . . or
even a free man guided by his own reason, each man under the influence
of patriotism confesses himself the son of his fatherland and the slave
of his government, and commits actions contrary to his reason and
conscience."
-Leo Tolstoy, Patriotism and Government