Pacifist
Or, My War and Louis Lepke
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
“When I went to prison he disowned me. There will always be wars, he said. No there won’t, I said. Shit no, I said, are you crazy? That was roughly forty years ago. It was apparent to me then that war must soon become totally unthinkable. It happened even quicker than I’d thought it would. And so now we most of us do the best we can never to think of it, even though, as I write, about one-fourth of the world’s best technological and scientific minds are employed full time in preparing for this unthinkable war. . . .”
“Both polemic and memoir, Pacifist is the story of a life lived passionately according to principles; principles severe enough to land Wetzel in prison and generous enough to accommodate a friendship with Louis Lepke, chief killer for Murder, Inc. Wetzel’s voice, savage and sane, is itself an act of war against war.” —Tobias Wolff
Donald Wetzel lives and writes in Bisbee, Arizona.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wetzel, who declared himself a conscientious objector before Pearl Harbor, spent the WW II years in prison. In this thin volume, he defines his pacifist belief with considerable passion, describing people he met and his struggle to maintain equilibrium especially during his time in a psycho ward. Louis Lepke of "Murder, Incorporated'' befriended him briefly, possibly, suggests the author, because he mistook Wetzel for a fellow Jew. In writing about Lepke's death in the electric chair, Wetzel fetches far to draw a parallel with Hiroshima. The weakness of the book is the author's tendency to oversimplify. The war years are an era when it was ``morally correct for a man to blow other men, women and children to bits . . .''; the average citizen believes that ``America is good and Russia is bad and the bomb is necessary to our happiness.'' Although Wetzel's thinking is sometimes fuzzy, his writing is pungent. Lepke ``was considered by many to be the leading murderer, in the private sector, of his day.'' A fourth of July parade is ``a kind of rain dance for war.''
