There is the great danger and the great difference. France is a country and Great Britain is several countries but Italy is a man, Mussolini, and Germany is a man, Hitler. A man has ambitions. A man rules until he gets into economic trouble; he tries to get out of this trouble by war. A country never wants war until a man through the power of propaganda convinces it. Propaganda is stronger now than it has ever been before. Its agencies have been mechanized, multiplied and controlled until (in a state ruled by any one man) truth can never be presented. War is no longer made by simply analyzed economic forces, if it ever was. War is made or planned now by individual men -- demagogues and dictators who play on the patriotism of their people to mislead them into a belief in the great fallacy of war when all their vaunted reforms have failed to satisfy the people they misrule. And we in America should see that no man is ever given (no matter how gradually or how noble and excellent the man) the power to put this country into a war which is now being prepared and brought closer each day with all the premeditation of a long-planned murder. For when you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the time of crisis comes. They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for ones country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason: Hit in the head, you will die quickly and cleanly, even sweetly and fittingly except for the white blinding flash that never stops... unless perhaps its only the frontal bone or your optic nerve that is smashed, or your jaw carried away, or your nose and cheek bones gone, so you can still think but you have no face to talk with. But if you are not hit in the head, you will be hit in the chest, and choke in it, or in the lower belly, and feel it all slip and slide loosely as you open, to spill out when you try to get up. Its not supposed to be so painful but they always scream with it -- its the idea I suppose. Or, have the flash: the jamming clang of high explosive on a hard road and find your legs are gone above the knee, or maybe just below the knee, or maybe just a foot gone and watch the white bone sticking through your puttee, or watch them take a boot off with your foot a mush inside it, or feel an arm flop and learn how a bone feels grating, or you will burn, choke and vomit, or be blown to hell a dozen ways, without sweetness or fittingness; but none of this means anything. No catalogue of horrors ever kept men from war. - Ernest Hemingway, 1935 WWI ambulence driver & corpsman for the Red Cross; Recipient of the Italian silver medal of military valor on July 8th, 1918, at the age of 18.
Posted on: Sun, 18 Jan 2015 18:44:00 +0000