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  • From: Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>
  • To: "homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org" <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Homestead] Ernest Hemingway on war
  • Date: Sun, 02 Oct 2005 13:44:30 -0500

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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