Цей текст є перекладом уривку з відомого есе Льва Толстого "Не могу молчать" (1904). Це глибоко анти-військовий твір, у якому Толстой критикує моральне та суспільне виправдання війни. В оригінальному контексті він описував наслідки російсько-японської війни та засуджував те, як суспільство сприймає військові конфлікти.
Ось переклад англійською мовою:
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**Translation:**
The bells will ring, and long-haired people will dress in golden robes and start praying for murder. And the old, well-known horrifying affair will begin again. People who incite others under the guise of patriotism and hatred for murder will laugh. Journalists will rejoice as they will receive double profits. Manufacturers, merchants, and military suppliers will scurry around with glee, anticipating double profits.
Officials of various ranks will hustle, foreseeing opportunities to steal more than usual. Military commanders, receiving double pay and rations, will hope to obtain various highly valued trinkets—ribbons, crosses, stars, and braids—for the murder of people.
Idle gentlemen and ladies will enroll in the Red Cross, preparing to bandage those whom their husbands and brothers will kill, imagining that they are doing a Christian deed.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of ordinary, kind people, torn from peaceful labor, their wives, mothers, and children, will be forced to take up tools of murder and go wherever they are driven. They will wander, freeze, starve, fall ill, and die of disease. Finally, they will be brought to a place where they will be killed by the thousands, killing others by the thousands, without understanding why—people they have never seen and who have done them no harm.
When the number of sick, wounded, and dead becomes so great that even the authorities cannot ignore it, they will stop. The wounded will somehow be collected, the sick will be transported and left, and the dead will be buried, sprinkled with lime. Then, this crowd of deceived people will be led even further.
And this will continue until those who started it all grow bored, or until those who need it achieve their desired goals.
People will become savage, enraged, and brutal once again. There will be less love in the world, and humanity will regress away from Christianity by decades, if not centuries. Those who benefit from it will confidently say again that war is a necessity because it always has been.
And once again, they will prepare future generations for it, corrupting them from childhood.
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### Key Themes:
- **Societal complicity in war:** Tolstoy critiques how various societal classes and institutions benefit or justify war.
- **Moral decay:** The piece highlights the dehumanizing and regressive effects of war on society.
- **Systemic perpetuation:** He emphasizes how societal structures indoctrinate future generations into accepting war as inevitable.
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### Bibliography:
- Толстой, Лев. *"Не могу молчать"*. Опубликовано в 1904 году, Россия.
- Christian, David. *War and Society in World History*. Routledge, 2009.
- Porter, Bruce D. *War and the Rise of the State: The Military Foundations of Modern Politics*. Free Press, 1994.
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### Hashtags:
#AntiWar #Tolstoy #PhilosophyOfWar #Pacifism #WarCriticism #HistoricalReflections #WarAndSociety #ChristianityAndWar
