As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its

Hear, O listener, the piercing words of Oscar Wilde, the master of wit and paradox: “As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.” In this saying he reveals a strange and unsettling truth about the human spirit—that we are often drawn to what we call wicked, as moths to flame, yet turn away in disgust from what we call base, coarse, or vulgar. For Wilde understood that moral condemnation alone does not strip an evil of its allure; it is contempt, not fear, that robs it of its glamour.

The origin of these words lies in Wilde’s reflections on society’s contradictions. He saw how men romanticized war, even while calling it wicked. They wrote poems about the nobility of battle, painted pictures of gallant soldiers, and clothed slaughter in the garments of honor. To declare war “wicked” was to elevate it into a forbidden fruit, dangerous but tempting. But to call war vulgar—petty, tasteless, unworthy of refinement—was to strip it of poetry, leaving it naked as brute savagery. Wilde’s insight was that only then would people turn away, not out of fear of sin, but out of disdain for ugliness.

Consider the story of the Crimean War in the mid-nineteenth century. Though it was a conflict of poor strategy and needless suffering, its poets and chroniclers gave it a strange nobility. Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” immortalized the disastrous cavalry charge, not as folly, but as courage. The war was wicked in its waste, yet fascinating in its spectacle. Soldiers died in mud and blood, but their sacrifice was wrapped in heroic verse, and so the people admired what they should have abhorred. Wilde’s words expose this illusion: so long as war wears the mask of wicked beauty, it enchants.

Now look to the later carnage of the First World War, where the poetry of glory gave way to the mud of the trenches, the choking gas, the shattered bodies. Writers like Wilfred Owen stripped away the glamour, calling war “the old Lie.” Here war began to be seen not as wicked majesty, but as vulgar—futile, base, obscene in its waste. No longer a grand stage for honor, it became a slaughterhouse of youth. And once war was described in vulgar terms, people recoiled from it not with awe but with disgust. Wilde’s prophecy shone clear: vulgarity kills fascination where wickedness cannot.

The deeper meaning of his saying is that language shapes our vision of the world. To call war noble in wickedness is to keep its romance alive; to name it vulgar is to banish it from the realm of art and honor. Wilde understood human vanity: men will flirt with wickedness if it feels majestic, but they will not embrace what society calls vulgar. Thus, the true way to strip war of its charm is not only to condemn it morally, but to reveal its smallness, its stupidity, its tastelessness.

What lesson, then, shall we carry into our own age? It is this: we must change how we speak of war. We must not dress it in the garments of glory or even of tragic grandeur. We must show it for what it is—filthy, cruel, vulgar in its waste of human potential. To call it wicked may stir fascination; to call it vulgar breeds disdain. And disdain, once planted in the hearts of the people, kills the seeds of popularity that make wars possible.

Therefore, O listener, remember Wilde’s teaching. In your speech, in your art, in your thoughts, strip war of its glamour. Show it not as the theater of heroes but as the vanity of fools. Teach the young not that war is wickedly alluring, but that it is coarse, common, unworthy of admiration. For when war is no longer fascinating but vulgar, it will lose its grip upon the human heart. And in that day, the nations may at last learn to choose peace, not from fear of judgment, but from the higher wisdom of disdain.