War & Peace Quote by Michael Franti

“War against war” is a rallying cry that flips militarism’s own language back on itself. Franti borrows the cadence of state power - wars are declared, enemies named, fronts established - then refuses the usual target. The enemy isn’t a nation or a people; it’s the machinery and mentality that make violence feel inevitable. That paradox is the point: if war is treated as the default tool of history, then peace movements need more than polite appeals. They need an organizing myth with heat.

Franti’s second clause lands the strategy: “music is our power.” Not “our comfort,” not “our escape.” Power is what governments claim when they justify force, and what activists are often told they don’t have. Franti insists music can operate like infrastructure for dissent: it gathers bodies, syncs emotions, makes slogans portable, and turns private grief into something you can chant. It’s a deliberately nontechnical theory of influence, rooted in concerts, street marches, mixtapes, and the long tradition of protest songs that outlast news cycles.

The “today” matters, too. Franti came of age alongside late-Cold War anxiety and then the post-9/11 era, when patriotic branding and the politics of fear saturated media. His line pushes back against that atmosphere by offering an alternative kind of mobilization: not armed, not sanctioned, but contagious. The subtext is bluntly optimistic: you can’t bomb an idea, and you can’t arrest a chorus once people know the words.