Hellraisers Journal: From The Masses: Art Young on Munitions Makers Fanning the Flames of Hatred

Submitted by JayRaye on Sun, 02/28/2016 - 12:56pm

You put a gun in my hand and you hide from my eyes,
Then you turn and run farther when the fast bullet fly.
-Bob Dyaln

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Monday February 28, 1916
From The Masses: The Munition Maker & Uncle Sam

This month's Masses expressed a few thoughts on the war now raging in Europe. We found the following drawing by Art Young to be especially relevant.

"It's a Great Country" by Art Young:

The Masses, The munition maker and Uncle Sam by Art Young, Feb 1916.png

The munition maker has made us hated in Europe, and now we must buy munitions
from him to defend ourselves against that hatred.
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An Editorial and a Poem by Harry Kemp:

As To Patriotism

The editors of the New York Globe honored us with a public denunciation for offering to our readers an anti-enlistment pledge. They seem to think we are almost as bad as Christ. For they accuse us of opposing enlistment not only in the future but in the remote past.

If Editor Eastman had been in Sparta when the Three Hundred were recruited who defended democratic Greece against the onrushing autocracy of Persia, he would have urged them not to enlist.

That is a wild inference. Suppose an editor announced that fighting with swords and spears was out of date, would that be a betrayal of Leonidas? Every once in a while we have to decide that something has seen its day. Every once in a while we have to take an inventory of our stock, and throw away what is rotten and useless. War is rotten and useless.

If the editors of the Globe will read a book by Norman Angell, called The Great Illusion, they will find very cogent proofs offered of the proposition that victory in war between modern nations brings no substantial benefit-moral, political, cultural or even financial.

The book is not about Leonidas, it is about us. But it throws a backward ray of light over the whole history of nationalism that makes war look rather futile and ridiculous. We are not sure Greek culture and the democracy of the maritime cities (all maritime cities were democratic if you didn't see the slaves) would have lost much through Persian conquest.

It is possible that a Persian conquest would have spread Greek culture beyond Greece and Ionia.

The fact that Leonidas was a hero need not prevent our seeing this. If we have not attained a higher ideal than Leonidas died for, we have not fulfilled the promise of his death.

We have in fact attained a higher ideal than nationalism-the ideal of a free humanity. And in some of us this ideal, we are happy to say, has supplanted patriotism altogether.

And while it might conceivably happen, that this ideal should demand our enlisting in a national army-to fight either against our own country or with it-it is in the highest degree improbable. It is so improbable that people of the pledge-signing disposition may very well be encouraged to express in that way their absolute renunciation of the patriotic ideal, and its military retinue, as essentially barbaric, inane, and homicidal.

We suspect that those who signed that pledge would be the first to bleed, were the cause of industrial liberty at stake.

ZENOBIA
LO, Caesar's legioned army, victor-led.
A sight to glad and pride the Roman eye!
Wrinkled and monster elephants sweep by,
Making the earth to quake beneath their tread;
Caesar, himself, with laurel on his head,
Rides next, and all his banners flaunt the sky.

But now the eager concourse gapes and hums,
For She who makes the triumph-march complete,
Zenobia, naked and imperial, comes,
With gold chains chiming from her hands and feet-
Her kingdom overthrown, herself a prize-
Yet no capitulation in her eyes!
-HARRY KEMP.