for most of history, war was seen as noble, holy, thrilling, manly, glorious.20 Though it was only after the cataclysms of the twentieth century that war ceased to be venerated, the seeds of pacifism had been planted by one of the “fathers of modernity,” the philosopher Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536), in his 1517 essay “The Plea of Reason, Religion, and Humanity against War.”
