War in Gulliver's Travels

In Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift launches an elaborate satire on many aspects of human behavior, as well as against the political and religious institutions of his day. His assaults against thinly veiled, and therefore easily recognizable, targets take the form of an explanation to the uninitiated, so they are simplistic and pose as unbiased explication while actually steeped in vitriolic sarcasm. Swift leaves virtually no aspect of human society unscathed in his pointed take-downs of popular thought, particularly that which is ostensibly based on lofty human ideals. Among the most pointed of his barbs is the one directed at the subject of war. On this subject, Swift so thoroughly discredits both the people who engage in war and their trivial reasons for pursuing it that the reader is prompted to question why people would be willing to bring about such massive destruction for so little apparent cause. This introspective reasoning appears to be precisely what Swift is trying to provoke.

In Chapter V of Part IV, the author openly addresses the issue of war, recounting to his "Master" the details of the French Revolution, in which "about a million of YAHOOS might have been killed�and perhaps a hundred or more cities taken, and five times as many ships burnt or sunk" (Swift). When asked by his Master what the causes or motives might be that "made one country go to war with another," the author responds through the character of Gulliver:

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ng; and sometimes because he is too weak" (Swift). The more Gulliver details these reasons, the more it becomes clear that no matter which way a dispute goes, one party or the other takes it as a reason to go to war. Another issue that the author addresses in his "explanation" is that war takes advantage of the plight of the less fortunate: "It is a very justifiable cause of a war, to invade a country after the people have been wasted by famine, destroyed by pestilence, or embroiled by factions among themselves" (Swift). Since it is true that historically, wars have often been waged against those who have already been weakened by internal or external factors, Swift is accurate in decrying the inhumanity of war. By compounding war's frivolity with its inhumanity, he takes a double pot-shot at the lack of substance in the premises offered for engaging in it. When rendered in this way, the bright reasons for going to war pale against the merciless exploitation of the devastated innocents. On this argument of exploitation alone, the author might enlist the reader's support for his anti-war philosophy, but he offers even further insights as to why war is deplorable: It is justifiable to enter into war against our nearest ally, w

Category: Literature - W