History is a vast reservoir of dead facts and live arguments—a series of rhetorical bludgeons designed to beat the present into submission.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
And yet The Great Anti-War Cartoons as a whole isn’t all that convincing. In fact, it’s irritating. Part of the problem is Yoe’s decision to arrange the book thematically, so that, for instance, all the cartoons showing the globe are placed next to one another. Here the world is dripping with blood, here it’s threatened with bayonets, and there it’s reduced to a cinder. Even the best cartoonists have a limited symbolic repertoire; highlighting their deficiency this way seems kind of cruel. Nor does it help that Yoe includes an aphoristic sentence or two at the beginning of each section. “‘Suppose they gave a war and nobody came’ was an intriguing question posed by peaceniks during the Vietnam War.” No shit? That’s deep, man.
Yoe explains that he chose the cartoons with a view to promoting pacifism, rejecting those that dealt too specifically with individual conflicts and instead selecting “drawings that strike a universal chord.” But universal chords don’t allow for much variation. No matter how well played, they get kind of monotonous over the course of an entire book. Say “war is bad” once and I’ll agree with you. Say it 190 times and my commitment to nonviolence may start to waver.
Our own George Washington killed some enemies, too. Not as many as Genghis, of course—but just how many are too many to kill in the name of liberty? Like most worthwhile moral questions, that one doesn’t have an easy answer.
