Swords To Ploughshares - References in Popular Culture

References in Popular Culture

• In his farewell address, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower, when speaking about the military-industrial complex stated:

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

• In their speeches at the signing of the 1979 Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty, Jimmy Carter, Anwar Sadat, and Menachem Begin all referenced the saying in calling for peace.
• In Ronald Reagan's Address to the 42d Session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, New York.

Cannot swords be turned to plowshares? Can we and all nations not live in peace? In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences world-wide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. And yet, I ask you, is not an alien force already among us? What could be more alien than war and the threat of war?

• The popular anti-war song "The Vine and Fig Tree" repeats the verse

And everyone neath their vine and fig tree

shall live in peace and unafraid,

Everyone neath their vine and fig tree

shall live in peace and unafraid.

And into ploughshares beat their swords

Nations shall learn war no more.

And into ploughshares beat their swords

Nations shall learn war no more.

• Create a world with no fear

Together we'll cry happy tears

See the nations turn

Their swords into plowshares — Heal The World by Michael Jackson (1991)

• They will live again in freedom

In the garden of the Lord.

They will walk behind the ploughshare,

They will put away the sword.

The chain will be broken

And all men will have their reward. — finale of the musical Les Misérables

• You took your sacrifice to the gods of war

Traded your children's lives for a mess of gold

And beat your ploughshares into swords

Breathing free. — "Protect and Survive" by Runrig

• The Don Henley song "The End of the Innocence" contains the line: "They're beating plowshares into swords, for the tired old man that we elected king"
• The Stephen Stills song "Feed the People" includes the line: "Turn your swords to ploughshares everywhere, and feed the people."
• The phrase Pax Arva Colat meaning "Let Peace Cultivate the Fields" is the motto of the World Ploughing Organization.
• In the song "What Good are Plowshares if we use them like Swords?" Hoots and Hellmouth ask:

What good are plowshares if we use them like swords?

Don't spoil the harvest, we ain't got much more.

• The collectible card game Magic: The Gathering features a card named "Swords to Plowshares". It is an Instant that exiles a creature (removes a creature from the game entirely), and allows its controller to gain life equal to the creature's power. It costs one white Mana to cast.
• In the Brave Saint Saturn song "Blessed are the Landmines" the phrase is reversed in a satire:

Beat your plowshares into swords

beat your pulpits, turn your tables

blessed are the hand-grenades

bless the church who rattles sabers

• "Swords to Plowshares" is a spell on the Healer spellsheet in the LARP Amtgard. It "destroys" a weapon to heal the wielder.
• In the song "High Caliber Concentrator" by Clutch:

We'll thresh the psyche and till the pride

Distill the blood, proclaim the gun divine

Damn the foul ego, praise the promised swarm

We are the ploughshare, and yet we are the sword

• Sex, Bombs and Burgers: How War, Porn and Fast Food Shaped Modern Technology, a novel by Peter Nowak, published in 2010 examines the phenomenon in detail.

The plowshare is often used to symbolize creative tools that benefit mankind, as opposed to destructive tools of war, symbolized by the sword, a similar sharp metal tool with an arguably opposite use. The common expession "beat swords into plowshares" has been used by disparate social and political groups.

This analogy is used several times in the Bible such as in the following verses:

Isaiah 2:4 "And He will judge between the nations, And will render decisions for many peoples; And they will hammer their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not lift up sword against nation, And never again will they learn war."

Joel 3:10 "Beat your plowshares into swords And your pruning hooks into spears; Let the weak say, "I am a mighty man."

Micah 4:3 "And He will judge between many peoples And render decisions for mighty, distant nations. Then they will hammer their swords into plowshares And their spears into pruning hooks; Nation will not lift up sword against nation, And never again will they train for war."

An expression of this concept can be seen a bronze statue in the United Nations garden called Let Us Beat Swords into Plowshares, a gift from the Soviet Union sculpted by Evgeniy Vuchetich, representing the figure of a man hammering a sword into the shape of a plowshare.