Why Write Anti-War When You Can Write Anti-Glacier? After All, the Government Will Silence You Less (Anti-War)

 In 1969, Kurt Vonnegut published his famous dark comedy anti-war book, Slaughterhouse-Five. One of the greatest lines in this book touches on the futility of writing an anti-war book, "there would always be wars, [and] they were as easy to stop as glaciers ... and even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death." 

Glacier 

Being anti-war is a strange thing. I think very few citizens are actually pro-war. I dislike war, and I wish it did not have to exist. But some wars, such as fighting against Nazis, I think are justified. However, being anti-war is something that should not be silenced. Yet, that is exactly what the U.S. government continues to do. 

A fine example of this is WWI. The former U.S. President Woodrow Wilson was reelected in 1916 under the promise of keeping the United States out of World War I. Obviously, this did not happen. Wilson entered the U.S. into WWI to “make the world safe for democracy.” However, all that anti-war sentiment did not disappear overnight. So Wilson took the step necessary to make the American public agree with him. 

This started with The Committee on Public Information (CPI). Wilson created the committee to change the American public's opinions on the war. They used posters, political cartoons, radio broadcasts, pretty much whatever they could use to persuade the public that the smartest thing would be to fight this war. And for the most part, it worked. 

A pro-war poster made by the CPI

 

However, not everyone fell for it. So what happened to them? Prison mostly. To quote Martin Luther King Jr. "If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand some of these illegal injunctions. Maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they hadn't committed themselves to that over there."

I've started looking into the websites antiwar.com and The American Conservative. I am shocked to have never heard of these websites before. I liked The American Conservative's platform and layout better, but both websites are very professional and well-made. So why are they not easier to find? What is the government trying so hard to hide from us? Why have they imprisoned anti-war citizens? 

All these questions are ones I will continue to ask and never stop searching for. Because unlike the U.S. government, I am not pro-war.