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November 29, 2005
The Spanish Civil War - Dos Pasos and Hemmingway...
Neo-NeoCon has (as usual) a very engaging post on her Blog which centers on a New Yorker review of a book. The book in question: The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of Jose Robles by Stephen Koch; takes up the question of what really happened in Spain during the war.
As you can tell from the Wikipedia article, it was very confusing.
Here is where the New Yorker review comes down:
- Because we live in the age after the age of class war, when no idea has taken the place of socialism to carry the human aspiration for equality, the historiographical debate over the nature of the Spanish Civil War has a blind spot when it comes to the human heart of the matter. The files of the Soviet secret police have exploded forever the fiction of good versus evil in Spain...
Intellectuals can hardly keep away from politics any more than other citizens, and probably less, especially in decades like the nineteen-thirties (or this one, for that matter). But, because they typically bring to it an unstable mix of abstraction and narcissism, their judgments tend to be absolute, when nothing in politics ever is. This is why a writer as devoted to the visible, concrete world as Hemingway could nonetheless stumble so badly during his time in Spain: he lacked a sense of politics. The writer forever in search of one true sentence ended up accepting a whole raft of lies. Dos Passos, for his part, lacked the inner toughness to recover from the blow his idealism was dealt by José Robles’s murder and Hemingway’s betrayal.
Yes, you heard that right. The "good" side in the Spanish Civil war was just as "bad" as the "bad" side in the war. There was really little reason to choose between one side or the other. Both sides murdered their political enemies, both side lied about what they were doing and why. Both side made friends with the most evil governments on the planet.
What should have been done? The British and French reaction, to stay out of the fight and support neither side, actually seems like the right thing to do, given the reality of the two sides... And yet, if they had intervened, the war almost certainly would have ended sooner, the suffering might have been much reduced. It would hardly have mattered which side the British or French choose to support.
Sometimes it seems as if civil wars are necessary to resolve contradictions in society which cannot be settled through dialog. I would argue the U.S. Civil war falls into that category. Was the Spanish Civil war necessary? Was the Lebanese civil war necessary? I have no good answers to these questions.
Sometimes, there are no good choices, only bad ones. Was the choice not to interfer with the Spanish civil war the least bad choice? Or just the easiest?
Posted by rakhier at November 29, 2005 09:47 PM