Top Twenty reasons explicit anti-War novels are absurd, an obscenity to humankind (and the publishers who publish them are the scum of the earth) – in the humble opinion of Stan D. Garde:
Dalton Trumbo’s infamous anti-War novel Johnny Got His Gun is one of the most hideous, grotesque, irresponsible books known to humankind (good title though, alas). Exactly what, after all, can a totally disfigured, utterly unrecognizable, essentially comatose mangled lump of flesh veteran, like his narrator, really be expected to know about the glories of War?
What’s next – Pacifist Patrols? Pro-Peace Paratroopers? Diplomatic Deterrence? Absurd and outrageous.
Words are not bullets in the flesh but missiles in the mind. Responsible authors and publishers must judiciously select what they ought shoot, and not.
Anti-War novels pollute and betray minds and countries, young and old, near and far. Where would the ancient land of Iraq be without War?
It’s impossible to be anti-War and pro-humanity.
It’s impossible to be anti-War and pro-art in novels. Anti-War novels are mere propaganda and thus Rightly dismissed as art (and as anything else with any credibility whatsoever).
What stable State could exist without War? What sane State? What are flags for, if not War? An anti-War novel is like an anti-War flag and ought to be burned. That’s Right, you heard it here first – ultra-Patriot Stan D. Garde is pro-flag burning – in the case of the anti-War flag that is an anti-War novel.
In War We Trust – that’s the great slogan we need to get onto the coins – and into ever more novels as well.
War is life — novels should reflect that. One of the grand thing is not nearly enough.
An anti-War novel is like an anti-War gun. Just plain wrong.
Writing an anti-War novel is bad enough but there’s no accounting for diseased minds. Reading an anti-War novel is far worse, for no one ought voluntarily imbibe disease. But publishing an anti-War novel is easily the greatest crime of all, for to do so is to make treasonous material contagious.
Anti-War novels are anti-American and pro-Enemy.
There is nothing more barbaric than topical and explicit, direct and timely anti-War art and publishing. Intellectually. Aesthetically. Morally. Barr-Bare-Ick. One of the great things about our country of which we can be most proud is that publishers of contemporary novels seem to know this, through and through. Barr-Bare-Ick.
There will be no government contracts, or financial contracts of likely any sort, for the hideous creature that is the overt contemporary anti-War novelist. And Rightly so. Who would fund these monsters?
Those novels and publishers who would resist war – who would hold up the future of humanity as formed by the power of bombs and guns – would be base, were they to exist.
An anti-War novelist is no Good Samaritan but the opposite — the scourge of the civilized world — one who does not help but hinders, one who does not heal but hates, one who does not volunteer himself on the field of battle but merely bleeds from his heart in an offensive and odious way.
The implacable hatred of an anti-War novelist can only be eradicated by force. Fortunately the publishing community needs little tutoring in the exercise of such.
A truly civilized person, duly trained, properly reared, would rather read his own toilet paper than write, read, or publish an anti-War novel.
No explicit and direct, topical and contemporary anti-War novels? The future is bright indeed.
Johnny Gotta Get His Gun
A Practical Policy 
Wow! I admire the eloquence of your words as much as I disagree with their content. The form is so incredibly beautiful, with a sentence such as, “Words are not bullets in the flesh, but missiles in the mind,” that I could be swept along by the intellect and creativity that enfashioned them.
My next reaction was to ask if you were merely being ironic, for instance if you thought that the first act of a fascist state is to impose thought control, so that only the State is allowed to influence the minds of its subjects (formerly its citizenry, until it all became a Nazi experiment in mind control, with the human being as the ultimate lab rat).
Mr Tony Christini, you may be my opponent, but you are not my enemy. Your thoughts and words sharpen my own, albeit in contrast. Please go on to make those points that my own mind’s missiles seek to torpedo. Let everyone see the great display of words as “bombs bursting in air” happens all over the internet. Let them join in the conflagration. And if it is our DNA design and free will choice to make war, let us do it in words, not in bullets.
May it be!
Ray,
Of course I’m being satiric. The point is to pierce the propaganda and catalyze change, first in thought, then in action. Consider Noam Chomsky’s remarks about satire, propaganda, and thought control in various types of socio-political systems and cultures:
“About Orwell’s 1984, I thought, frankly, it was one of his worst books. Could barely finish it. Some parts (e.g., about Newspeak) were clever. But most of it seemed to me — well, trivial. The problem is not a very interesting one; the modes of thought control and repression in totalitarian societies are fairly transparent. In fact, they often tend to be rather lax. Franco Spain, for example, didn’t care much what people thought and said: the screams from the torture chamber in downtown Madrid were enough to keep the lid on. It’s not too well known, but the Soviet Union was also pretty lax, particularly in the Brezhnev era. According to US government-Russian Research Center studies, Russians apparently had considerably wider access to a broad range of opinion and to dissident literature than Americans do, not because it is denied them but because propaganda is so much more effective here. Orwell was well aware of these issues. His (suppressed) introduction to Animal Farm, for example, deals explicitly with “literary censorship in England.” To write about that topic would have been important, hard, and serious — and would have earned him the obloquy that attends departure from the rules.
“Caricature can be very well done. Swift is marvelous, for example. Animal Farm is pretty good, in my opinion. But 1984 I thought was a serious decline from his best work.
“Caricature is an art, and not an easy one. But when well done, a very important one. As for dealing with Orwell’s problem,* I try to do it in the ways I know how to pursue; 1000s of pages by now. No doubt there are other ways, maybe better ways. But others will have to find what works for them.”
*[Orwell’s problem: how is it that oppressive ideological systems are able to] “instill beliefs that are firmly held and widely accepted although they are completely without foundation and often plainly at variance with the obvious facts about the world around us?”
Other than my own antiwar novel Homefront, as far as I am aware, there are no overt anti Iraq War novels about the criminal US invasion and occupation of Iraq. That’s an utter scandal of the literary and publishing establishment, and that is what I satirize above.
One novel explicitly critical of the so-called neo-conservatives and the Bush Administration (it doesn’t strictly focus on the Iraq War) has been published in Canada — it’s called Homeland, by Paul William Roberts. It’s lively and informative and ought to be widely known, which it’s not. My review of Homeland should appear at PopPolitics soon (http://www.poppolitics.com). In the meantime, a slightly abbreviated version of that review, with link to a much longer version, can be found here:
https://apragmaticpolicy.wordpress.com/2006/12/01/homeland-and-partisan-fiction/
The point is to pierce the propaganda and catalyze change, first in thought, then in action, via clinical analysis or fact-based and often “clinical” satire (and in many other ways) as I do via Tropetopia, Pangloss, and Dimslow satires, and through literal critiques as well. Andy Borowitz critiques with satire as a contributing columnist over at Truthdig: http://www.truthdig.com/about/staff/43.
I’ll add that I think what people have a hard time getting their minds around is how incredibly scandalous so much of US culture is. The complete lack of explicit anti Iraq War novels is a tremendous scandal. It goes unmentioned. Or, worse, such barbarism is denied. It’s barbaric — in a country where a lot of people read novels daily, including many novels that are focused on social issues, where many novels are taught in school, and where novels are often made into movies viewed by tens of millions — it’s barbaric that there are essentially no overt anti Iraq War novels.
And it’s symptomatic and sometimes ideological that some people can’t see how barbaric that lack is — even some people who are wholly opposed to the US invasion and occupation of Iraq.