Quote of the Day (W.H. Auden, on ‘The Situation of Our Time’)

“The situation of our time
Surrounds us like a baffling crime.
There lies the body half-undressed,
We all had reason to detest,
And all are suspects and involved
Until the mystery is solved
And under lock and key the cause
That makes a nonsense of our laws.”— British-American poet, playwright, and essayist W.H. Auden (1907-1973), “New Year Letter (January 1, 1940),” from Collected Poems, edited by Edward Mendelson (1976)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Born Yesterday,’ on the ‘Struggle Between the Selfish and the Unselfish’)

[Reporter Paul Verrall is discussing Harry Brock, a vulgar, hot-tempered, corrupt tycoon, with the businessman’s mistress, Billie Dawn.]

Paul Verrall [played by William Holden]: “Harry's a menace.”

Billie Dawn [played by Judy Holliday]: “He's not so bad. I seen worse.”

Paul: “Has he ever thought of anyone but himself?”

Billie: “Who does?”

Paul: “Millions of people, Billie. The whole history of the world is a story of a struggle between the selfish and the unselfish.”

Billie: I can hear you.

Paul: “All that's bad around us is bred by selfishness. Sometimes selfishness can even get to be a - a cause, an organized force, even a government. And then it's called fascism. Can you understand that?”

Billie: “Sort of.”

Paul: “Well, think about it.

Billie: You're crazy about me, aren't ya?”

Paul: “Yes.”

Billie: “That's why you're so mad at Harry.”

Paul: “Listen, I hate his life, what he does, what he stands for—not him. He just doesn't know any better.”

Billie: “I go for you, too.”—Born Yesterday (1950), screenplay by Albert Mannheimer and Garson Kanin based on Kanin’s play, directed by George Cukor

Appreciations: Ernest Hemingway’s Tale of Early Fascist Italy

“On the flat road we passed a Fascist riding a bicycle, a heavy revolver in a holster on his back. He held the middle of the road on his bicycle and we turned out for him. He looked up at us as we passed. Ahead there was a railway crossing, and as we came toward it the gates went down.

“As we waited, the Fascist came up on his bicycle. The train went by and Guy started the engine.

" ‘Wait,’" the bicycle man shouted from behind the car. ‘Your number's dirty.’

“I got out with a rag. The number had been cleaned at lunch.

" ‘You can read it,’ I said.

" ‘You think so?’

“ ‘Read it.’

" ‘I cannot read it. It is dirty.’

“I wiped it off with the rag.

" ‘How's that?’

" ‘Twenty-five lire.’

" ‘What?’ I said. ‘You could have read it. It's only dirty from the state of the roads.’

" ‘You don't like Italian roads?’

" ‘They are dirty.’

" ‘Fifty lire.’ He spat in the road. ‘Your car is dirty and you are dirty too.’

" ‘Good. And give me a receipt with your name.’

“He took out a receipt-book, made in duplicate, and perforated, so one side could be given to the customer, and the other side filled in and kept as a stub. There was no carbon to record what the customer's ticket said.

" ‘Give me fifty lire.’

“He wrote in indelible pencil, tore out the slip and handed it to me. I read it.

" ‘This is for twenty-five lire.’

" ‘A mistake," he said, and changed the twenty-five to fifty’

" ‘And now the other side. Make it fifty in the part you keep."

“He smiled a beautiful Italian smile and wrote something on the receipt stub, holding it so I could not see.

" ‘Go on," he said, ‘before your number gets dirty again.’"—American novelist, short-story writer, memoirist, and Nobel Literature laureate Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), “Che Ti Dice La Patria?”, in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition (1987)

I had never heard of “Che Ti Dice La Patria?” until I saw it mentioned in the preface to the Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. It is not one of the more anthologized of the Nobel laureate’s tales—nor, based on my experience in high school and college, one of the more assigned titles in American literature courses.

But it is of a piece with some of his other classic fiction—and, given the world’s slide back into revanchist nationalism and authoritarian, more relevant than at any time since World War II.

It’s hard to read its early sentences without thinking of the longer, more symbolic, and more famous first chapter of A Farewell to Arms. It has the same close attention to natural description, and the same sense of wondering what is to come:

“Outside the villages there were fields with vines. The fields were brown and the vines coarse and thick. The houses were white, and in the streets the men, in their Sunday clothes, were playing bowls. Against the walls of some of the houses there were pear trees, their branches candelabraed against the white walls. The pear trees had been sprayed, and the walls of the houses were stained a metallic blue-green by the spray vapor. There were small clearings around the villages where the vines grew, and then the woods.”

The road that the two American travelers, the unnamed narrator and “Guy,” use is “not yet dirty”—an irony that will reverberate at the end of the story, when the road’s cleanliness and maintenance become a point of contention.

The first Fascist party member is anxious to hitch a ride with the Americans because, despite Il Duce’s boast that he “made the trains run on time,” transportation in his regime remains haphazard. His condescension is pronounced enough that the narrator tells Guy, “he will go a long way in Italy.”

The two travelers stop for a meal in the Ligurian city of La Spezia, with the woman waiting on them wearing “nothing under her house dress”—a waitress doubling as a prostitute. Uneasy, Guy asks if he has to allow the woman to wrap her arms around him. “Certainly,” the narrator responds sarcastically. “Mussolini has abolished the brothels. This is a restaurant.”

The shakedown by the bicycle-riding, revolver-wielding Fascist that concludes the quote at the start of this post illustrates the petty abuses that filter down even to the lowest levels of an unaccountable dictatorship.

Readers at the time of its publication in 1927 in The New Republic could have been forgiven for questioning if the piece was fact or fiction. I myself wonder, even now particularly after learning that Hemingway had driven through Spezia with a friend named “Guy” (Hickok, a foreign correspondent for the Brooklyn Eagle), on his way to obtain a record of his baptism after being wounded in WWI—a document that enabled him to wed Pauline Pfeiffer in the Roman Catholic Church.

One thing is for sure, though: with each Italy-related work of Hemingway’s’ in the Twenties, his contempt for the harm that Mussolini was inflicting on the nation was growing apace. He had come to regard the dictator as a strutting liar with a dangerous appetite for power through his stint as a reporter for Toronto Daily Star (including an interview in which the newly installed dictator claimed ominously that “the Fascisti are now a half a million strong” and “have force enough to overthrow any government that might try to oppose or destroy us”).

Mussolini, the young writer noted acidly, had a “genius for clothing small ideas in big words.”

In 1929, with his WWI novel, A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway’s account of the retreat from Caporetto would fly in the face of official propaganda that refused to acknowledge this unmitigated military disaster. In the same chapter, his description of the carabinieri—the country’s arbitrary, vicious military police---seems colored not just by their actions during the war but by their misconduct starting in 1922 as Mussolini’s paramilitary force for suppressing dissent.

Quote of the Day (Aldous Huxley, on a Leader As ‘A Good Public Performer’)

“People do not follow a Leader because he has a demonstrably sound and workable political plan. They follow him because he is a good public performer and because he knows how to provide them with the psychological satisfactions they need. His programme may be self-contradictory and manifestly absurd; but that makes not the slightest difference. Few people are concerned with logic and not many care very much even about their own material interests. They ask for their daily bread, of course; but for very little more than their daily bread. The wealth they covet is not material, but psychological; they crave emotional satisfactions, they want, in the expressive American phrase, ‘to feel good.’” — English novelist/essayist Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), “The Prospects of Fascism in England,” March 3, 1934, in Aldous Huxley, Between the Wars: Essays and Letters, edited by David Bradshaw (1994)

Quote of the Day (Anand Giridharadas, on Fascism and the ‘Age of Tribalism’)

“If the definition of fascism is the use of state power to throw out election results and legitimise the use of violence in politics, there are people [championing] that now—and they are outcompeting us. This age of tribalism is not really about right or left any more, but about a pro-democracy and anti-democracy movement. The pro-democracy side has a fatalism about the impossibility of bringing people over from the other side — and that is a recipe for tyranny.”—American journalist Anand Giridharadas quoted by Gillian Tett, “Lunch With the FT: ‘The Fascists Are Better at Politics,” The Financial Times, Dec. 31, 2022-Jan. 1, 2023

The image accompanying this post, of Anand Giridharadas speaking at the Meaning Conference, was taken June 28, 2019.

Quote of the Day (Aldous Huxley, on Fascism and Political Faith)

“Most people desire certainties, feel the need of a faith. Modern education makes religious faith difficult, but has done nothing to undermine political faith. Masses of men and women think themselves too intelligent and well-informed to believe in miracles or the divinity of Christ, but find not the smallest difficulty in accepting the infallibility of a Leader. The worship of God is an intellectual impossibility for thousands to whom the worship of a divine being, called the Nation, seems the most natural thing in the world. The old tendencies have not been abolished (they never are); they have merely taken new and, on the whole, less desirable channels. Fascism digs these new channels for worship and provides, in its cult of the divine Nation, a kind of lightning-conductor, upon which thousands of reluctant infidels can discharge the accumulations of their will to believe.”— English novelist/essayist Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), “The Prospects of Fascism in England,” March 3, 1934, in Aldous Huxley, Between the Wars: Essays and Letters, edited by David Bradshaw (1994)

Quote of the Day (Martha Gellhorn, on ‘The Taste of Lies’)

“Gradually I came to realize that people will more readily swallow lies than truth, as if the taste of lies was homey, appetizing: a habit.”— American war correspondent, novelist and travel writer Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998), The Face of War (1959)

We are about to see how many Americans will continue to fall for “the taste of lives,” as they have done since 2016. A quarter century since Ms. Gellhorn's death, lies in this country have not only become appetizing but addictive.

Gellhorn, who covered the Spanish Civil War and World War II—two military conflicts resulting from the lies of Fascism—also implicitly revealed why so many people fall under the sway of this hideous approach to government when she wrote, “Citizenship is a tough occupation which obliges the citizen to make his own informed opinion and stand by it.”

Quote of the Day (Timothy Snyder, on Globalization, Totalitarianism, and History)

“Both fascism and communism were responses to globalization: to the real and perceived inequalities it created, and the apparent helplessness of the democracies in addressing them. Fascists rejected reason in the name of will, denying objective truth in favor of a glorious myth articulated by leaders who claimed to give voice to the people. They put a face on globalization, arguing that its complex challenges were the result of a conspiracy against the nation. Communists ruled for longer, for nearly seven decades in the Soviet Union, and more than four decades in much of Eastern Europe. They proposed rule by a disciplined party elite with a monopoly on reason that would guide society toward a certain future according to supposedly fixed laws of history….

“Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the 20th century. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so.”—Yale historian Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons fromthe Twentieth Century (2017)

The accompanying photo of Timothy Snyder was taken Mar. 31, 2016, by Frauemacht.

Quote of the Day (Richard J. Evans, on the Nazi Path to Power)

“By the time he came out of prison [in late 1924, for leading a coup attempt the year before to overthrow Germany’s Weimar Republic], Hitler had assembled the ideology of Nazism from disparate elements of antisemitism, pan-Germanism, eugenics and so-called racial hygiene, geopolitical expansionism, hostility to democracy, and hostility to cultural modernism, which had been floating around for some time but had not so far been integrated into a coherent whole. He gathered around him a team of immediate subordinates—the talented propagandist Joseph Goebbels, the decisive man of action Hermann Goring and others—who built up his image as leader and reinforced his sense of destiny. But despite all this, and despite the violent activism of his brownshirt paramilitaries on the streets, he got nowhere politically until the very end of the 1920s….In October 1929, however, the Wall Street crash brought the German economy tumbling down with it....The political effects of the Depression were calamitous. The Grand Coalition broke up in disarray; so deep were the divisions between the parties over how to deal with the crisis that a parliamentary majority could no longer be found for any kind of decisive action….The Nazis, then, as the elections of September 1930 and July 1932 showed, were a catch-all party of social protest with particularly strong middle-class support and relatively weak, though still very significant, working-class backing at the polls. They had broken out of their core constituency of the Protestant lower middle classes and farming community.”— Cambridge Univ. historian Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 1933-1939 (2005)

Unfortunately, the blueprint for Fascism remains fundamentally the same in the 21^st century as it was in the 1920s and 1930s: the exploitation of multiple far-right ideologies by a single demagogue; the assistance of propagandists who tended to imagery; legislative deadlock; calamitous economic conditions; and then, seemingly out of nowhere, a political coalition with sudden breakout appeal.

Appreciations: Ray Bradbury’s Tale of T-Rex, Environmentalism and Fascism

“It towered thirty feet above half of the trees, a great evil god, folding its delicate watchmaker’s claws close to its oily reptilian chest. Each lower leg was a piston, a thousand pounds of white bone, sunk in thick ropes of muscle, sheathed over in a gleam of pebbled skin like the mail of a terrible warrior. Each thigh was a ton of meat, ivory and steel mesh. And from the great breathing cage of the upper body those two delicate arms dangled out front, arms with hands which might pick up and examine men like toys, while the snake neck coiled. And the head itself, a ton of sculptured stone, lifted easily upon the sky. Its mouth gaped, exposing a fence of teeth like large, sharp knives. Its huge eyes rolled, empty of all expression save hunger. It closed its mouth in a death grin. It ran, its pelvic bones crushing aside trees and bushes, its taloned feet clawing damp earth, leaving prints six inches deep wherever it settled its weight. It ran with a gliding ballet step, far too poised and balanced for its ten tons. It moved into a sunlit arena warily, its beautifully reptilian hands feeling the air.”—Science-fiction writer and screenwriter Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), “A Sound of Thunder,” in The Stories of Ray Bradbury (Everyman’s Library, 2010)

I picked this passage from Ray Bradbury’s sci-fi story “A Sound of Thunder” to illustrate his enormously vivid powers of physical description--something I don't think I adequately explored in my prior post in honor of his centennial earlier this year. But the story as a whole—about man’s foolish certainty that he can best Nature—also makes for a powerful admonition for our time.

Several months ago, a friend, a retired Florida schoolteacher, told me about this story. It is a great example of why one of my high school English teachers, Sister Margaret Bradley, preferred the phrase “Alternative Futures” to another by which this genre is better known: “Science Fiction.” “Alternative Futures” is concerned less with gadgets than with concerns likely to persist well beyond the present moment.

Bradbury set this tale in 2055, anticipating what life would be like a century roughly from when he was writing, in 1952—when the Cold War was already a decade old, when memories of Fascism were fresh, and when the Broadway hit Inherit the Wind had reminded Americans of the battle over evolution that had occurred in Dayton, Tenn., during the Scopes “Monkey Trial.” In cinema, time travel had begun to be treated by directors, most famously in George Pal’s adaptation of H.G. Well’s The Time Machine. All these elements—fascism, evolution and time travel—figure in Bradbury’s story.

The company at the heart of this story, “Time Travel Safari,” involves a plaything for the rich: returning to prehistoric times to hunt live dinosaurs. (Remarkably, the tale also foreshadowed by a year the development of Disneyland.)

This Great Misadventure is fraught with danger, but the hunter who signs up for it, Eckels, chafes at bureaucrats who potentially impede his problematic pursuit. So what if a billion mice cease to exist because of one of his actions? A member of the company, Travis, tries to explain what is at stake:

“Well, what about the foxes that’ll need those mice to survive? For want of ten mice, a fox dies. For want of ten foxes, a lion starves. For want of a lion, all manner of insects, vultures, infinite billions of life forms are thrown into chaos and destruction. Eventually it all boils down to this: fifty-nine million years later, a caveman, one of a dozen on the entire world, goes hunting wild boar, or saber-toothed tiger for food. But you, friend, have stepped on all the tigers in that region. By stepping on one single mouse. So the caveman starves. And the caveman, please note, is not just any expendable man, no! He is an entire future nation. From his loins would have sprung ten sons. From their loins one hundred sons, and thus onward to a civilization. Destroy this one man, and you destroy a race, a people, an entire history of life.”

The company that runs Time Travel Safari is terrified that an infraction of the rules may lead to a bureaucratic crackdown of their operation—a fictional illustration of how business has feared the long arm of government for ages. But these seemingly draconian regulations may be viewed another way: that the state has been forced to take such stringent measures now because citizens refused to take voluntary mass action when it could have made a difference.

While Bradbury’s treatment of dinosaurs could be satirical in “Tyrannosaurous Red” (which explores the creatures’ use in cinema), in “A Sound of Thunder” it is prophetic, a warning that man’s weaponization of technology to tame nature, his seizure of godlike power even to tinker with the past, would be severely punished—and for generations.

As I started to read the following even more pointed explanation to Eckels, I couldn’t help but think of how it relates to climate change—but by the end, I heard an eerie premonition of COVID-19:

“A dead mouse here makes an insect imbalance there, a population disproportion later, a bad harvest further on, a depression, mass starvation, and, finally, a change in social temperament in far-flung countries. Something much more subtle, like that. Perhaps only a soft breath, a whisper, a hair, pollen on the air, such a slight, slight change that unless you looked close you wouldn’t see it. Who knows? Who really can say he knows? We don’t know. We’re guessing. But until we do know for certain whether our messing around in Time can make a big roar or a little rustle in history, we’re being careful. This Machine, this Path, your clothing and bodies, were sterilized, as you know, before the journey. We wear these oxygen helmets so we can’t introduce our bacteria into an ancient atmosphere.”

This is not the only warning Eckels receives: he is given the chance to back out, and told bluntly that:

*The Thunder Lizard they are hunting is “the damnedest monster in history”;

*In the prior year, six safari leaders and a dozen hunters had been killed; and

*The company refuses to guarantee that he’ll come back alive;

*If Eckels does survive, he’ll incur a $10,000 fine and possible government action if he disobeys instructions.

But Eckels, not just oblivious to risk but maybe driven by it, blows off this advice as a challenge to his machismo (“Trying to scare me!”). His heedlessness is so enormous that he even uses a proprietary adjective about the hunt (“Shooting my dinosaur”).

The quotation that starts this post conveys dramatically what Eckels has let himself in for. Cascading images follows his discovery of the great beast, but Bradbury avoids a common mistake of other writers—mixed metaphors—because they all revolve around T-Rex’s barely concealed potential for extreme violence: its “arms with hands which might pick up and examine men like toys,” its “pebbled skin like the mail of a terrible warrior,” its “fence of teeth like large, sharp knives” and its “death grin” mouth,

The story’s denouement—Eckels stepping on a single butterfly as he veers off the path and flees from the threatening dinosaur, with cataclysmic environmental consequences—anticipated by a decade “The Butterfly Effect,” decade MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz’s theory that the flap of a butterfly’s wings might ultimately cause a tornado. (See Peter Dizikes’s 2011 article for MIT Technology Review on this landmark contribution to chaos theory.)

But the ramifications of Eckels’ folly extend further. At the start of the tale, a Time Travel Safari employee agrees with him that it’s a good thing that a particular Presidential candidate had just lost:

“We’re lucky. If Deutscher had gotten in, we’d have the worst kind of dictatorship. There’s an anti-everything man for you, a militarist, antichrist, anti-human, anti-intellectual. People called us up, you know, joking but not joking. Said if Deutscher became President they wanted to go live in 1492.”

Yet, upon returning to present time, Eckels discovers that the prospect he had dreaded—a Deutscher victory—has not only come to pass, but even been embraced by citizens. (The clerk behind the desk says, “We got an iron man now, a man with guts!")

The electoral reversal, Bradbury implies, is made possible by breakdowns in education and communication, signaled by a change in the sign greeting visitors to Time Travel Safari, with each word changed—misspelled—from what Eckels encountered before his trip.

It is not hard to imagine how Bradbury, were he alive today, might have viewed a President intent on degrading all rivals and critics as “weak.”

So prolific and varied was Bradbury’s career that a reader is bound to find something of value and interest in at least one of his works—and, in this centennial year of his birth, there can hardly be a more opportune time to introduce him to readers.

My schoolteacher friend admitted that, as much as she admired this particular story, it was not so easy to teach her former high school students, many of whom had only the dimmest concept of what concepts like evolution and the interdependence of species are all about.

Nevertheless, I hope that more teachers will try to teach this story—preferably in print form, but if not, then through playing for their classes a DVD of the 1985-1992 cable TV series Ray Bradbury Theater, in which the novelist adapted this short story for an episode starring Hill Street Blues actor Kiel Martin as the oblivious Eckels.

Quote of the Day (Mark Mazower, on ‘Complacency About American Democracy’)

“In fact if there is one good thing to come out of the current political uncertainty, it is that complacency about American democracy will be harder to sustain in future. Let us not worry overly about how to define a fascist: there are plenty of other nasty kinds of authoritarian regimes. It is the crisis of democracy that should concern us more. We know by now what can happen when the institutions of representative government become bitterly polarised, when large swathes of the electorate lose the capacity to compromise, when power and wealth pile up in the hands of elites and when those in charge of the state give up the challenge of responding to widespread economic hardship. History is not a one-way street and democracy has turned authoritarian before. Can it happen again? Why not?”— Columbia University historian Mark Mazower, “Fascism Revisited,” Financial Times, Apr. 14-15, 2018

Quote of the Day (Eric Hoffer, on Why ‘The Ideal Devil is a Foreigner’)

“Finally, it seems, the ideal devil is a foreigner. To qualify as a devil, a domestic enemy must be given a foreign ancestry. Hitler found it easy to brand the German Jews as foreigners. The Russian revolutionary agitators emphasized the foreign origin (Varangian, Tartar, Western) of the Russian aristocracy. In the French Revolution, the aristocrats were seen as ‘descendants of barbarous Germans, while French commoners were descendants of civilized Gauls and Romans.’ In the Puritan Revolution the royalists ‘were labeled “Normans,” descendants of a group of foreign invaders.’”— American moral and social philosopher Eric Hoffer (1898-1983), The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951)

 No movie or fiction will scare me this Halloween quite like this analysis of political fanaticism. Thirty-five years after its author's death, it bears rediscovery and reflection...

Quote of the Day (Ernest Hemingway, on the Fascists)

“Milan—The Fascisti, or extreme Nationalists, which means black-shirted, knife-carrying, club-swinging, quick-stepping, nineteen-year-old potshot patriots, have worn out their welcome in Italy. Banks and large commercial houses, who contributed the funds that launched the Fascist movement as a protective measure against as threatened Communist revolution, have withdrawn their support and the mass of the Italian press have turned solidly against the Fascisti. Meanwhile the Fascisti, solidly organized, are forming themselves into a political party and by a constant series of outrages, are keeping Italy in a state of class war.”—Ernest Hemingway, “Italy’s Blackshirts,” The Toronto Star Weekly, June 24, 1922, collected in Dateline, Toronto: Hemingway’s Complete Dispatches for The Toronto Star, edited by William White (1985)

Papa was a better fiction writer than he was a foreign correspondent—or, at least, a political prognosticator. It was not that he had any love for Italy’s rising strongman: Seven months after writing the above, he was telling readers of the paper he was writing for in that early stage of his career, the Toronto Daily Star, that Benito Mussolini was “Europe’s Prize Bluffer.”

Maybe if Ernest Hemingway had been stationed in Italy longer (even beyond his time serving as a volunteer ambulance aide there in WWI), he might have better appreciated how the political winds were blowing and understood that the Fascists, far from having “worn out their welcome,” had within their grasp 20 years of iron-fisted rule ahead of them.

Others might argue that the signs of the times were already unmistakable: As early as this day in 1921, Mussolini’s Fascists had gone, in a one-month election, from zero to 35 members in the Chamber of Deputies (the lower house of the Italian parliament), and had picked up additional strength with the election of ten Nationalists, their political allies.

That election not only represented the Blackshirts’ first rung up the political ladder, we can see now, but a blueprint for political thuggery that would soon be followed by the Nazis in Germany, the Falangists in Spain, and other states in Eastern Europe. A single month of campaigning resulted in 105 dead and 431 wounded at the hands of Mussolini’s street goons. 

By October 1922, the month the future Il Duce was asked to form a government by the king of Italy, the Fascists numbered 300,000—tenfold their strength only two years before.

The 22-year-old Hemingway only saw the insuperable difficulties before the Fascists (by “fighting, burning, pillaging anything resembling communism,” they had guaranteed for themselves “a lifetime job” in northern Italy, where Marxism was strongest). 

He made a mistake that all too many people in the democratic West were making all the way up to the onset of WWII: believing that transparently silly leaders could be laughed out of existence before they damaged their countries or the larger world.

By 1936, when Francisco Franco made his power grab in the Spanish Civil War, Hemingway would not make the same mistake. 

It was not that he had stopped being a political naïf (his gullible acceptance that Jose Robles was executed as a Fascist spy rather than for running afoul of Stalinists in the Republican government of Spain wrecked Hemingway’s two-decade friendship with John Dos Passos). But at least now he knew the cost of underestimating the Fascists.

Fascism was more than “a lie,” he told the American Writer’s Congress in June 1937: “The totalitarian fascist states believe in the totalitarian war. That, put simply, means that whenever they are beaten by armed forces they take their revenge on unarmed civilians.”