[Homestead] Ernest Hemingway on war

Gene GeRue genegerue at ruralize.com
Sun Oct 2 14:44:30 EDT 2005


  The Kansas City Star is running a bunch of stuff under the heading: 
Ernest Hemingway at 100. It is at:
http://www.kcstar.com/hemingway/index.html

This comes from an article titled: Susan Beegel: What I like about Hemingway:

"His deepest commitment was to telling the truth about war. Today we are so 
healthily obsessed with the social problems of gender, race and 
environment, we have unhealthily forgotten the social problem that can 
impartially slaughter by the millions men, women and children of every 
race, religion, color and creed, while laying waste to the earth and 
poisoning the sea for all species and their generations to come.

We are so obsessed with respecting our differences we have forgotten how to 
respect our common humanity.

Not Hemingway. Badly wounded as a Red Cross volunteer in World War I, he 
experienced firsthand the Greco-Turkish War, the Spanish Civil War, the 
Sino-Japanese War and World War II, often coming under fire. Before his 
death in 1961, he would taste the terrors of hot war and cold in a nuclear 
age, and lose his much-loved Cuban home to revolution.

In his novels The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell 
Tolls, as well as in his superb short fiction and dispatches from many 
fronts, Hemingway bears witness to the horror of war and its psychic 
aftermath with graphic realism.

He reminds us that wounded soldiers scream for the mercy of death, that a 
munitions factory explosion blows women workers into unrecognizable 
fragments, that invading armies practice rape and murder, that refugee 
mothers will not surrender their dead babies, that enemy soldiers are good 
men with families, that the capacity for atrocity knows no ideology, that 
killing another human being can destroy a man's serenity for life, that 
jets and automatic weapons make it easy. . . ."





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