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The Obama administration and the Pentagon this week are laying the
groundwork and hinting increasingly openly that extending the war
into Pakistan and Iran will become regrettably necessary - in order
both to stop terrorism and revive the US economy. The only stimulus
programs the US government has been able to manage is the transfer
of wealth from the poor to the rich - and the rich are manifestly
not transferring it back to the poor in the form of jobs or social
services. The only way out, while maintaining and accelerating the
present concentration of wealth, is the regimentation of he majority
of the population - and that has been done in American history only
by war emergencies. <br>
<br>
"The past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes," Mark Twain is
supposed to have said. The similarities between America in the
current decade and the 1930s have frequently been remarked upon.
The following text can be read that way, <i>mutatis mutandis</i>.
It's a magazine article that Ernest Hemingway published in 1935 - at
the time of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia (by "that admirable
Italian gentleman" Mussolini, as FDR described him in 1933) but
before the German invasion of Poland, four years later. (The only
copy I can find online is garbled, but the sense comes through.)<br>
<br>
===========<br>
Not this August, nor this September; you have this year to do in
what you like. Not next August, nor next September; that is still
too soon; they are still too prosperous from the way things pick up
when armament factories start at near capacity; they never fight as
long as money can still be made without. So you can fish that summer
and shoot that fall or do whatever you do, go home at nights, sleep
with your wife, go to the ball game, make a bet, take a drink when
you want to, or enjoy whatever liberties are left for anyone who has
a dollar or a dime. But the year after that or the year after that
they fight. Then what happens to you? <br>
<br>
First you make a lot of money; maybe. There is a chance now that you
make nothing; that it will be the government that makes it all. That
is what, in the last analysis, taking the profits out of war means.
If you are on relief you will be drafted into this great profitless
work and you will be a slave from that day. <br>
<br>
If there is a general European war we will be brought in if
propaganda (think of how the radio will be used for this), greed,
and the desire to increase the impaired health of the state can
swing us in. Every move that is made now to deprive the people of
their decision on all matters through their elected representatives
and to delegate those powers to the executive brings us that much
nearer war. <br>
<br>
It removes the only possible check. No one man nor group of men
incapable of fighting or exempt from fighting should in any way be
given the power, no matter how gradually it is given them, to put
this country or any country into war. <br>
<br>
The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the
currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both
bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and
economic opportunists. <br>
<br>
No European country is our friend nor has been since the last war
and no country but one's own is worth fighting for. Never again
should this country be put into a European war through mistaken
idealism, through propaganda, through the desire to back our
creditors, or through the wish of anyone through war, notoriously
the health of the state, to make a going concern out of a mismanaged
one. <br>
<br>
Now let us examine the present set-up and see what chance there is
of avoiding war. <br>
<br>
No nations, any more, pay their debts. There is no longer even a
pretense of honesty between nations or of the nation toward the
individual. Finland pays us still; but she is a new country and will
learn better. We were a new country once and we learned better. Now
when a country does not pay its debts you cannot take its word on
anything. So we may discard any treaties or declarations of
intentions by any countries which do not coincide completely and
entirely with the immediate and most cynical national aims of those
countries. <br>
<br>
A few years ago, in the late summer, Italy and France mobilized
along their border to fight over Italy's desire for colonial
expansion in North Africa. All references to this mobilization were
censored out of cables and radiograms. Correspondents who mentioned
it in mailed stories were threatened with expulsion. That difference
has now been settled by Mussolini's shift of ambition to East Africa
where he has obviously made a deal with the French to abandon his
North African plans in return for France allowing him to make war on
a free sovereign state under the protection of membership in the
League of Nations. <br>
<br>
Italy is a country of patriots and whenever things are going badly
at home, business bad, oppression and taxation too great, Mussolini
has only to rattle the sabre against a foreign country to make his
patriots forget their dissatisfaction at home in their flaming zeal
to be at the throats of the enemy. By the same system, early in his
rule, when his personal popularity waned and the opposition was
strengthened, an attempted assassination of the Duce would be
arranged which would put the populace in such a frenzy of hysterical
love for their nearly lost leader that they would stand for anything
and patriotically vote the utmost repressive measures against the
opposition. <br>
<br>
Mussolini plays on their admirable patriotic hysteria as a violinist
on his instrument but when France and Jugo-Slavia were the possible
enemy he could never really give them the full Paganini because he
did not want war with those countries; only the threat of war. He
still remembers Caporetto, where Italy lost 320,000 men in killed,
wounded and missing, of which amount 265,000 were missing, although
he has trained a generation of young Italians who believe Italy to
be an invincible military power. <br>
<br>
Now he is setting out to make war on a feudal country, whose
soldiers fight barefooted and with the formations of the desert and
the middle ages; he plans to use planes against a people who have
none and machine guns, flame projectors, gas, and modern artillery
against bows and arrows, spears, and native cavalry armed with
carbines. Certainly the stage is as nearly set as it ever can be for
an Italian victory and such a victory as will keep Italians' minds
off things at home for a long time. The only flaw is that Abyssinia
has a small nucleus of trained, well armed troops. <br>
<br>
France is glad to see him fight. In the first place anyone who
fights may be beaten; Italy's Black Caporetto, her second greatest
military debacle, was administered by these same Ethiopians at Adowa
when fourteen thousand Italian troops were killed or driven from the
field by a force which Mussolini now describes as 100,000
Ethiopians. Certainly it is unfair to ask fourteen thousand troops
to fight one hundred thousand but the essence of war is not to
confront your force of fourteen thousand with a hundred thousand of
anything. Actually the Italians lost more than 450o white and 2000
native troops, killed and wounded. Sixteen hundred Italians were
taken prisoners. The Abyssinians admitted losing 3000 men. <br>
<br>
The French remember Adowa and less possibly though more recently,
Baer and Braddock (who knows but what Owney Madden may have bought a
piece of the Ethiopians?), and they know that anybody who fights may
be beaten. Dysentery, fever, the sun, bad transport, many things can
defeat an army. There are also a number of tropical diseases which
can only become epidemic when given the opportunity afforded by an
invading army of men unused to the climate and possessing no
immunity against them. Anyone who fights near the equator can be
beaten by the mere difficulty of keeping an army in the field. <br>
<br>
Then France feels that if Italy wins or loses, the war will cost her
so much that she will be in no position to make trouble in Europe.
Italy has never been a serious problem unless she has allies,
because she has no coal and no iron. No nation can make war without
coal and iron. Lately Italy has tried to overcome this by building
up an enormous air-force and it is her air-force that makes her the
threat she is in Europe today. <br>
<br>
England is glad to see Italy fight Ethiopia. First she may be
whipped which, they figure, will teach her a lesson and lengthen the
peace of Europe. Secondly if she wins that removes the annoyance of
Abyssinian raids along the northern frontier province of Kenya and
gives someone else the responsibility of suppressing the perennial
Abyssinian slave trade across to Arabia. Next England must
undoubtedly have an arrangement with the possible victor about the
water project in north-eastern Ethiopia which she has long coveted
for the watering of the Sudan. It is only logical that Anthony Eden
should have arranged about that when he was in Rome recently. Lastly
she knows that anything Italy finds and brings out of Ethiopia must
come through the Suez Canal or, taking the long way around, the
straits of Gibraltar, while if Japan had been permitted to penetrate
into Ethiopia and thus gain a foothold in Africa what she took would
go direct to Japan and in time of necessity there would be no
control over it. <br>
<br>
Germany is glad to have Mussolini try to gobble Ethiopia. Any change
in the African status quo provides an opening for her
soon-to-be-made demands for return of her African colonial
possessions. This return, if made, will probably delay war for a
long time. Germany, under Hitler, wants war, a war of revenge, wants
it fervently, patriotically and almost religiously. France hopes
that it will come before Germany is too strong. But the people of
France do not want war. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for
one's 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
it is only the frontal bone or your optic nerve that is smashed, or
your arm 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, it's not supposed to be so
painful but they always scream with it, it's the idea I suppose, or
have the flash, the Jamming clang of high explosive on a hard road
and find your legs both 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. Before the
war you always think that it's not you that dies. But you .will die,
brother, if you go to it long enough. <br>
<br>
The only way to combat the murder that is war is to show the dirty
combinations that make it and the criminals and swine that hope for
it and the idiotic way they run it when they get it so that an
honest man will distrust it as he would a racket and refuse to be
enslaved into it. <br>
<br>
If war was fought by those who wanted to fight it and knew what they
were doing and liked it, or even understood it, then it would be
defensible. But those who want to go to the war, the élite, are
killed off in the first months and the rest of the war is fought by
men who are enslaved into the bearing of arms and, are taught to be
more afraid of sure death from their officers if they run than
possible death if they stay in the line or attack. Eventually their
steadily increasing terror overcomes them, given the proper amount
of bombardment and a given intensity of fire, and they all run and,
if they get far enough out of hand, for that army it is over. Was
there any allied army which did not, sooner or later, run during the
last war? There is not room here to list them. <br>
<br>
No one wins a modern war because it is fought to such a point that
everyone must lose. The troops that are fighting at the end are
incapable of winning. It is only a question of which government rots
the first or which side can get in a new ally with fresh troops.
Sometimes the allies are useful. Sometimes they are Rumania. <br>
In a modern war there is no Victory. The allies won the war but the
regiments that marched in triumph were not the men who fought the
war. The men who fought the war were dead. More than seven million
of them were dead and it is the murder of over seven million more
that an ex-corporal in the German army and an ex-aviator and former
morphine addict drunk with personal and military ambition and fogged
in a blood-stained murk of misty patriotism look forward
hysterically to today. Hitler wants war in Europe as soon as he can
get it. He is an ex-corporal and he will not have to fight in this
one; only to make the speeches. He himself has nothing to lose by
making war and everything to gain. <br>
<br>
Mussolini is an ex-corporal, too, but he is also an ex-anarchist, a
great opportunist, and a realist. He wants no war in Europe. He will
bluff in Europe but he never means to fight there. He can still
remember what the war was like himself and how he left it after
being wounded in an accident with an Italian trench mortar and went
back to newspaper work. He does not want to fight in Europe because
he knows that anyone who fights may lose, unless of course one can
arrange to fight Rumania, and the first dictator who provokes a war
and loses it puts a stop to dictators, and their sons, for a long
time. <br>
<br>
Because the development of his regime calls for a war he chooses
Africa as the place to fight and the only surviving free African
state as his opponent. The Abyssinians unfortunately are Christians
so it cannot be a Holy war. But while he is making Ethiopia Fit for
Fiats he can, of course, suppress slavery on paper, and doubtless in
the Italian War College, it looks like a foolproof, quick and ideal
campaign. But it may be that a regime and a whole system of
government will fall because of this foolproof war in less than
three years. <br>
<br>
A German colonel named Von Lettow-Vorbeck with an original force of
5000 troops, only two hundred and fifty of whom were whites, fought
160,000 allied troops for a period of over four years in Tanganyika
and Portuguese Africa and caused the expenditure of 72,000,000
pounds sterling. At the end of the war he was still at large
carrying on guerrilla warfare. <br>
<br>
If the Abyssinians choose to fight on in guerrilla warfare rather
than make peace Italy may find that Ethiopia will be an unhealing
wound in her side that will drain away her money, her youth and her
food supplies and return men broken in health and disgusted with
suffering and the government that sent them to suffer with promises
of glory. It is the disillusioned soldiers who overthrow a regime.
<br>
<br>
It may be that this war in Africa will prolong the temporary peace
in Europe. In the meantime something may happen to Hitler. But of
the hell broth that is brewing in Europe we have no need to drink.
Europe has always fought, the intervals of peace are only
Armistices. We were fools to be sucked in once on a European war and
we should never be sucked in again.<br>
<br>
--Ernest Hemingway, "Notes on the Next War: A Serious Topical
Letter." Esquire: September 1935
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="http://www.fullposter.com/snippets.php?snippet=139"><http://www.fullposter.com/snippets.php?snippet=139></a>.<br>
<br>
-30-<br>
<br>
<br>
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