War & Peace Quote by Fredrik Bajer

A polite indictment hides inside Bajer’s measured prose: the peace movement is preaching to the choir, and it’s doing so with the complacency of people who mistake moral purity for political strategy. “Peace literature” may be “to good effect,” he grants, but the phrase lands like a backhanded compliment. The good effect is largely internal - fortifying pacifists already committed to the cause - while the real battlefield is elsewhere, among the unconvinced.

The subtext is painfully modern. Advocacy can become a closed loop: a self-reinforcing ecosystem of pamphlets, lectures, and affirmations that build community and clarity while leaving power untouched. Bajer isn’t dismissing the value of argument; he’s diagnosing a distribution problem. The verb “canvassing” matters. It’s practical, almost electoral: go door-to-door, build coalitions, translate ideals into language that survives contact with skepticism, nationalism, and fear. He’s asking pacifists to stop treating persuasion as an afterthought and start treating it as the work.

Context sharpens the edge. Writing in an era when Europe’s alliances, militarization, and imperial ambitions were hardening into habit, Bajer understood that wars don’t arrive as single catastrophes; they’re socially normalized long beforehand. That’s why he targets readership. If only pacifists are reading peace texts, the movement is culturally quarantined.

Bajer’s intent isn’t to flatter pacifists with their righteousness. It’s to pressure them into relevance: if peace is the goal, persuasion is the method, and the audience that matters is the one that doesn’t agree with you yet.