Some Somber Signs Of How World Wars Begin

The lesson from history (and from Jesus):
Resist evil with good. In using evil means to 
resist evildoers, we perpetrate ever more evil.

Nicholson Baker's best-selling 2008 work is a compilation of over a thousand vignettes and news clippings that portend the most ghastly destruction in all of human history, World War II. 

The book begins with an 1892 statement by munitions maker Alfred Nobel and ends with a wishful journal entry by Mihail Sebastian on the last day of 1941. This was just weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but after multiple civilian sites had already been brutally bombed by forces on both sides. But most of the over 50 million casualties of that war were still alive on that date.

Here is the first entry:

Alfred Nobel, the manufacturer of explosives, was talking to his friend the Baroness Bertha von Suttner, author of Lay down Your Arms. Von Suttner, a founder of the European antiwar movement, had just attended the fourth World's Peace Conference in Bern. It was August 1892.

     "Perhaps my factories will put an end to war even sooner than your congresses," Alfred Nobel said. "On the day when two army corps may mutually annihilate each other in a second, probably all civilized nations will recoil with horror and disband their troops."

Another post part way through the book, on p. 309:

George Bell, the bishop of Chichester, wrote a letter to the Times of London. It was April 17, 1941.

     The bishop has been moved by what the pope had said on Easter about the suffering of civilian populations. It was barbarous, Bell maintained, for any belligerent nation to attack and terrorize unarmed women and children. "If Europe is civilized at all, what can excuse the bombings of towns by night?" He offered a proposal. What if the British government solemnly declared that it would not bomb at night, provided the German government promised to do the same." "If this single limitation were achieved it would at least make a halt in the world's rushing down to ever deeper baseness and confusion," he said. Gilbert Murray, a classicist at Oxford, wrote in support of Bell's idea, as did Bernard Shaw. The British government made no response.

Here's the last entry, on p. 471:

Mihail Sebastian wrote a few lines in his journal to end the year (1941). "I carry inside myself a few days of the dreadful year we are closing tonight," he said. "But we are still alive. We can still wait for something. There is still time; we still have some time left."

In a time when World War Three looms as an ever greater threat, I highly recommend everyone reading this book. While Hitler and Nazi Germany are clearly villains in this saga, we also see the regrettable part played by world leaders like Churchill and Roosevelt. Munitions and aircraft manufacturers of all kinds are clearly shown to be major agents of evil as well.