Bourne Randolph Silliman - At War with War

For Pam, Eve and Paula

Copyright 2017 by Seymour Chwast

Introduction 2017 by Victor Navasky

Art and design by Seymour Chwast

Camille Murphy, associate designer

A PUSHPIN EDITIONS BOOK

Steven Heller/Seymour Chwast

SEVEN STORIES PRESS

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Chwast, Seymour, cartoonist. | Container of (expression): Sunzi, active 6th century B.C. Sunzi bing fa. English. | Container of (expression): Erasmus, Desiderius, 1536 Querela pacis. English. | Container of (expression): Bourne, Randolph Silliman, 18861918. War is the health of the state.

Title: At war with war / Seymour Chwast.

Description: New York : Seven Stories Press, 2017.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017001833 (print) | LCCN 2017010733 (ebook) | ISBN 9781609807795 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781609807801 (E-book)

Subjects: LCSH: WarPhilosophyComic books, strips, etc. | Military art and scienceComic books, strips, etc. | BISAC: COMICS & GRAPHIC NOVELS / Nonfiction. | HISTORY / Military / General. | HISTORY / World.

Classification: LCC U21.2 .A7375 2017 (print) | LCC U21.2 (ebook) | DDC 355.0201dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017001833

Ebook ISBN9781609807801

v4.1

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Introduction

Victor Navasky

The power of cartoons and caricatures shouldnt be underestimated. For centuries, tyrants have had their perpetrators censored, imprisoned and otherwise inconvenienced. Nevertheless, most people still regard cartoons as trivia, an example of what Sir Ernst Gombrich, the Austrian art historian, has called the low medium of illustration. But comes now Seymour Chwast, who makes clear in the following pages just how cartoons and illustrations can be deployed to transmit a message that educates and informs, even as it incites; a message qualitatively beyond anything possible by words alone.

Seymour Chwast, co-founder in 1954, with Edward Sorel and Milton Glaser, of the legendary Push Pin Studios, which revolutionized the world of design, is, at age 85, still deploying his art to give peace a chance.

But the award-winning designer/artist/illustrator harbors no illusions that his graphic timeline depicting wars, conquests, invasions and terrorist attacks dating from 3300 BCE, will put an end to war. What I do hope is to arouse awareness. To expose wars stupidity. In 5000 years we havent learned anything. We havent found a way to avoid destruction and killing. That amazes me.

It also has caused him, with the help of Kickstarter, to give birth to this book.

At War With War, is a sequel to his earlier A Book of Battles. It mobilizes black-and-white cartoons to reveal the irrelevance, futility, brutality and absurdity of war. For this peace activist, maybe the times they are a-changin, but as Chwasts images illustrate, the arrows have turned into H-bombs but thats the only change. The idea of war is as it has always been to kill people.

To make his point, Chwast has gone out of his way not to give us beautiful or artistic pictures. Instead, we get stark black-and-white drawings. I did not want to make this pretty, he says. War isnt pretty. As his former Push Pin colleague Milton Glaser notes, his black-and-white images are in the anti-war tradition of German expressionists like Kthe Kollwitz, who worked with drawing, etching and woodcuts. The drawings he has chosen need no elaboration. They are self-explanatory. By making the case against the futility of war in visual terms, Chwast has performed an invaluable service.

His images are simple and, as former Push Pin partner Ed Sorel puts it, tasteful. (And they complement what Milton Glaser has called the left-brain logic of Chwasts anti-war activism by speaking in the right-brain language of creativity.) Says Chwast: I end it in 2015 with no happy ending. There is no ending. That seems to be the downside to this book.

And yet Chwasts drawings starkly raise the question: can it really be true that there is no end to war? Abraham Lincoln, who understood the power of images (he once called the Civil War cartoonist Thomas Nast my number one recruiting sergeant), said, we must disenthrall ourselves from the culture of violence and guns, and then we shall save our country.

Seymour Chwast, activist, artist, warrior against war, is a world-class disenthraller.

O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in painin the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

Excerpt from The War Prayer

Mark Twain

BCE

3300 King Menes, the conqueror, unites Egypt

2154 Gutians overrun southern Mesopotamia

1763 Hammurabi of Babylon conquers Sumer

1595 Hittites sack Babylon

1285 Hittites battle Egyptians at Kadesh

1116 War between Israelites and Philistines

1100 Dorian invasion of southern Greece

Libyan prince takes control of the Egyptian delta

Tiglath Pileser III conquers Babylon, founds New Assyrian Empire

Spartan conquest of Messinia

Assyrian king, Sennacherib, conquers Babylon and Judah, threatens Jerusalem

Assyrian king, Esarhaddon, conquers northern Egypt

Medes and Chaldeans destroy Ninevah

Nebuchadnezzar destroys Jerusalem