Chesterton on War and Peace

Book excerpt: In articles written before, during, and just after World War I, G. K. Chesterton describes what has gone wrong with Germany and warns that, if the nation is not forced to change, this war will followed by a still more horrible war. He criticizes attempts to maintain the peace advocated by internationalists, militarists, and pacifists. (The policies he advocated were similar to NATO and Cold War containment.) He harshly criticizes Teutonism, a then-fashionable form of racism that would mutate into Nazi racism, making him one of Nazism's first critics. The articles have comments explaining the context in which Chesterton wrote. Appendices contain remarks about war from Thomas Aquinas, Winston Churchill, Norman Angell, Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Mahatma Gandhi, and H. G. Wells.