Adam Shatz in the Paris Review on Leonard Cohen:

'Love was his deepest faith, but it was permeated by the messianic Judaism of his ancestors, which accounts for what Walter Benjamin might have called their “profane illumination.” And though he was not an explicitly political artist, his songs are already nourishing a spirit of resistance to the new order, much as Neruda’s poems did for the people of Chile after the overthrow of Allende. In “Everybody Knows,” for example, a song full of the mordant humor that coursed through his late work, Cohen remarks: “Everybody knows the war is over / everybody knows the good guys lost.” This was no expression of despair. On the contrary, he was warning against the cynical postures of those who prefer to sit on the sidelines when barbarism spreads. He knew that the war had barely begun, and that the “good guys”—very much including the women he loved so fiercely—had to keep fighting.'

Read the article here.

The war has barely begun. A frightening thought.

But already in 1974 Cohen sang:

"Why don't you come on back to the war, don't be a tourist,
Why don't you come on back to the war, before it hurts us,
Why don't you come on back to the war, let's all get nervous."