War & Peace Quote by Charles Bukowski

Bukowski’s line lands like a spit-take on the old bargain that war propaganda keeps trying to sell: your death will mean something. He strips the myth down to its ugly arithmetic. People die; wars continue. The sentence is almost offensively plain, built on a blunt causal claim that refuses the soothing narrative of sacrifice-as-solution. There’s no “glory”, no “honor”, not even the consolation of effectiveness. Just the grim observation that the machinery doesn’t jam because a body gets fed into it.

The awkward stutter of “a a war” even helps, accidentally or not: it sounds like someone talking in real time, annoyed, tired, unimpressed with polished slogans. That’s very Bukowski. His persona thrives on puncturing uplift, dragging high-minded rhetoric back into the alley where the bills still have to be paid and the bruises still show.

Subtextually, it’s an indictment of institutions that launder violence into virtue: governments that need fresh bodies, publics that want clean stories, and a culture that romanticizes the soldier while treating the veteran like an inconvenient afterimage. He’s not arguing that resisting evil is always pointless; he’s challenging the comforting idea that individual martyrdom, by itself, changes the structure that produces war. The intent is corrosive clarity: if death doesn’t stop the cycle, maybe the real target isn’t the enemy “over there” but the incentives, myths, and appetites “over here” that keep wars bankable, narratable, and politically useful.