War & Peace Quote by Bertolt Brecht

A “good war” pitched as civic improvement is Brecht at his most poisonous: the line mimics the cozy cadence of barroom common sense, then lets it rot in your mouth. The speaker isn’t a general or a statesman; he’s the neighbor who thinks he’s being practical. That’s the trap. By putting militarism in the voice of local, aggrieved normalcy (“’round here”), Brecht shows how catastrophe gets sold as community housekeeping.

The joke turns on bureaucracy. War, the ultimate breakdown of human life, is praised for its “organization,” while peace is smeared as an unruly force “running wild.” Brecht flips the usual moral hierarchy and exposes a modern sickness: we’ve learned to confuse order with virtue. If something has a chain of command, a budget, a uniform, it feels serious. Peace, by contrast, is portrayed as shapeless, unadministered, and therefore suspicious. The line needles a society that can mobilize instantly for slaughter but can’t coordinate housing, wages, or justice without calling it chaos.

Context matters: Brecht lived through the First World War’s aftermath, the rise of fascism, and the administrative fetish of the modern state. He watched “organization” become a secular religion, with efficiency as its liturgy. The subtext is not simply anti-war; it’s anti-complacency. Brecht is pointing at the way ordinary language launders violence, making war sound like a solution to the annoying inconvenience of freedom. Peace “running wild” is the nightmare of anyone who profits from management.