Essay on war: argumentative text on war, with reflections by Italian and non-Italian authors on conflicts and their consequences.
The movement of the winds preserves the sea from the putrefaction to which it would be reduced by a lasting calm, so war preserves peoples from the fossilization to which a lasting or perpetual peace would reduce them.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
War is the worst evil that afflicts human society and is the source of all evil and corruption. It is not possible to provide an absolute and immediate cure.
Immanuel Kant.
Introduction
The war essay is one way teachers can help students think about ongoing conflicts: the Israeli-Palestinian one and the one between Russia and Ukraine .
Below you will find a completed essay on war complete with reflections by Italian and foreign authors, from which you can take inspiration to complete the topic assigned to you by the teachers.
Although war is in fact a massacre, it continues to be waged. The motivations are multiple: political, military, economic, territorial and religious. War has deep roots in history, with evidence dating back to the most ancient civilizations. Although it clearly represents a destructive and harmful force for humanity, even among intellectuals there are contrasting opinions: on the one hand those who condemn it, on the other those who glorify it as a symbol of power.
Among the critics of the war we find Renato Serra, who describes it as a source of loss, pain, waste and devastation.
In his “Examination of Conscience of a Man of Letters” taken from “La Voce” of 30.4.1915 he states:
It is an old lesson! War is a fact, like so many others in this way; it is enormous, but it is the only one; next to the others, which have been and which will be: it does not add to them; it does not take anything away. It changes nothing, absolutely, in the world. Not even literature: […]. War changes nothing. It does not improve, it does not redeem, it does not erase: by itself alone. It does not work miracles. It does not pay debts, it does not wash away sins. In this world, which no longer knows grace. The heart struggles to admit it: […] What is it that will change on this tired earth, after it has drunk the blood of so much slaughter: when the dead and the wounded, the tortured and the abandoned sleep together under the clods, and the grass above is tender, shiny, new, full of silence and luxury in the sun of spring that is always the same?”
Development
There is probably no objective way to talk about war, much less to wage it. Thinking of a world without war or of a “just” war is probably impossible, due to the very nature of war and the state of human society.
It is certain that the Greeks distinguished two types of conflict:
- Stasis , a violence subject to limits and rules, in which it is taken for granted that the moment of violence will inevitably be followed by recomposition and coexistence;
- Polemos , the unlimited violence towards others.
Since, however dramatic, war will continue to exist, I believe that international law and human ethics should try to tend as much as possible towards the former and avoid the latter.
I don’t know if this is possible, but it’s fair to hope so.
Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky also condemned the war as a theater of horrors and destruction. In his poetry the atmosphere of war is made lugubrious, marked by the blood and cries of so many victims. He writes:
“Evening edition! Evening edition! Evening edition!
Italy! Germany! Austria!”
And on the square, lugubriously bordered in black,
a stream of purple blood poured out!
A café broke its bleeding muzzle,
reddened by a feral cry:
“The poison of blood in the games of the Rhine!
The thunder of howitzers on the marble of Rome!”
From the sky torn against the stings of the bayonets,
star tears dripped like flour on a rag
and pity, crushed by the soles of the shoes, screamed:
“Ah, leave me, leave me, leave me!”
The War in Ungaretti
Giuseppe Ungaretti with his poems takes a stand against the horror and brutality of war:
SOLDIERS
It’s like
autumn
on the trees,
the leaves
The poem, written during a lull in the fighting in the Bosco di Courton, on the Italian-French front, expresses how the soldiers feel suspended between life and death, like the leaves on the trees in autumn, when a breath of wind is enough to make them fall.
SAINT MARTINO OF THE CARSO
Of these houses
there is nothing left
but a few
shreds of wall
Of the many who corresponded with me
there is not even that much left
But in my heart
no cross is missing
My heart is
the most torn country
The second poem contains images of desolation and death. The effects of destruction can be read on the houses of the village in a squalid landscape of rubble and ruins upon which the fury of events has fallen.
The War for D’Annunzio and Marinetti
But there are also those who see war in a positive sense, almost as if it were an indispensable act. Among these, Gabriele d’Annunzio :
[…] The immense closed furnace is still lit, our people, our brothers: and our Genius wants it to remain lit, and that the fire pant and that the fire toil until all the metal melts, until the casting is ready, until the impact of the iron opens the way for the burning blood of the resurrection […].
For the futurists, on the other hand, war is an inebriating, almost aphrodisiac experience. Marinetti, author of the Manifesto, despises the neutralists, and not only that: he approves and even instigates the use of violence. He writes:
“We have recently happily punched, in the streets and squares, the most feverish opponents of the war” .
For Marinetti, the clash is the only solution for society:
We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and temerity. Courage, audacity, rebellion, will be essential elements of our poetry. We want to exalt aggressive movement, feverish insomnia, the running step, the somersault, the slap and the punch. There is no more beauty, if not in the fight. No work that does not have an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. We want to glorify war – the only hygiene of the world – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of libertarians, beautiful ideas worth dying for and contempt for woman.
The war in Papini
In the marginal areas of futurism there is Giovanni Papini who, like Marinetti, exalts war:
[…] there are too many of us. War is a Malthusian operation. There is too much here and too much there that presses against each other. War puts the games back on track. It creates a vacuum so that one can breathe better. It leaves fewer mouths around the same table. And it gets rid of an infinity of men who lived because they were born; who ate to live, who worked to eat and cursed work without the courage to refuse life […].
For him, the victims of the clash are nothing more than a reject of society:
Among the many thousands of carcasses embraced in death and no more different than the color of their clothes, how many will be, I don’t say to mourn, but to remember?
Papini believes that the massacre of soldiers is useful, since “war benefits agriculture and modernity”: the bodies will fertilize the fields to feed the remaining men, the best ones.
