Last month, I re-read Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. No particular reason. Except it's a novel about war. The Spanish Civil War. Here in the US, we are always in war. Always warring. With ourselves. With others.
Many Americans volunteered to fight Franco's fascists in the Spanish Civil War, including the poet Langston Hughes. Other blacks joined the forces in Ethiopia against Mussolini's fascists.
Assigned to dynamite a bridge in the city of Sevogia, Hemingway's protagonist Robert Jordan was already on the pine needle forest among a band of Spanish guerrillas fighting on the Republican side against Franco's fascists. In their territory! As a 1940 New Yorker review cited, everything about that war was "serious", and Jordan and the guerrillas were "engaged in serious actions" that required an engagement in "serious thoughts: about war". "There are necessary orders that are no fault of yours and there is a bridge and that bridge can be the point on which the future of the human race can turn. As it can turn on everything that happens in this war."
The guerrillas are no more perfect than Jordan, but as Jordan notes, he finds in these rebels a passion to make a difference. A positive difference in the lives of their fellow citizens. As Hemingway makes clear, theirs was "a war between those who deny life and those who affirm it". It's possible, he suggests, that their actions could provide the path toward an alternative way of being human in the world. And the reviewer notes that the novel was written with one prejudice, "a prejudice in favor of the common human being".
For Whom the Bell Tolls is "an anti-Fascist novel".
While Jordan prepares to carry out his task of dynamiting a bridge, one of the band of guerrillas asks how did he, an American, "happen to come to Spain?" Jordan tells the Spanish band of fighters that he came 12 years before to study the country and the language. "'I teach Spanish in a university.'" Now Jordan hopes to win against the enemy.
After three days spent among the guerrillas and listening to their storyteller, Jordan awakes to a new reality. Inspired by Pilar, he hopes to emulate the storyteller, focusing on those stories that reveal the complications among the human players, the guerrillas and the fascists, alike. He'll have to become a "much better writer than" he is now, Jordan tells himself because "the things he had to come to know in this war were not so simple".
In the end, Jordan succeeds in blowing up the bridge, but with a seriously damaged leg, he is certain to die in the forest in Spain, among the pine needles. Hemingway has Jordan recognize how "completely integrated" he was in the moments he prepares to send his last blow to the fascists, content that he had broken his silence.
In our final view of Jordan, he is taking "a good long look at everything". He looked "up at the sky" and the "big white clouds in it". Then "he touched the palm of his hand against the pine needles where he lay and he touched the bark of the pine trunk that he lay behind".
Perhaps, writes the New Yorker reviewer, "by blowing up the bridge", Jordan, Hemingway, all of us "may be able to cross over into the future".
And, here we are. In the future.
In this new year, 2024, there is news out of Washington D.C. that the US and the UK have sent missiles flying over Yemen. The Houthis are the enemy. There are, too, women and children in Yemen. "The poorest country in the Middle East" (Consortium News), Yemen, is still suffering from Saudi Arabia's assault that killed "hundreds of thousands" between 2015 and 2022. The wealthy Saudis were supported by the US. Taxpayers. Military. Industrial. Corporate. Community.
This development wasn't something that Jordan and the band of Spanish guerrillas considered an alternative future for the human community!
Israel's assault on Gaza is what the Houthis are protesting. The Houthis are not allowing Israeli ships through the Red Sea. No one is suggesting joining the Houthis or Hamas. But as human beings, pursuing alternative ways of being human and committed to life, we are required, too, to engage in "serious" thought if we are to understand the full story. It's a first step in revolutionary thinking.
Otherwise--otherwise, the daily death toll in Gaza is mounting. Oxfam reports that the death toll is "higher than all major 21st-century conflicts", the United Nation's Office for the Coordination of the Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) reports,
The enemy in Gaza is Hamas. But then it's hard to tell. We see the images. As of January 11, 2024, some 1.9 million, that is, 85% of Gaza, has been internally displaced. This from the United Nation's Office for the Coordination of the Humanitarian Affairs. As of today, 23,469 Gazans have been killed while 59,604 have been injured. Seventy-nine journalist and media workers, according to a Committee to Protect Journalists report, have been killed. That's not an alternative way of being.
If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck...
And to many, it looks like genocide, too.
Dr. King spoke about war in his time, too. He talked about being a voice for the voiceless, for women and countless children, bombed and burned. Killed. And yet, they were called the enemy then. And why--when money that could be spend on the least of these, is used to enrich the coffers of corporate CEO warmongers. As King pointed out, "a true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth". In addition, "a true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: 'This way of settling differences is not just'".
King was concerned about the American soldier, who, for the most part, didn't volunteer but was drafted to fight against Communism. As if democracy armed its enablers with a language sanctioning the handing of a M14 to a human being and ordering him to kill another. Many of those soldiers, King stated in "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence", a speech delivered at Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, would come to realize that his tasks placed him on "the side of the wealthy and the secure." No savior, the American soldier helped "create a hell for the poor".
Moving beyond Vietnam, King linked the poor in Vietnam with those in the US, the country spending millions on supplying weapons for war, and all of the poor around the world, facing homelessness and food insecurity, thanks to oppressive Western policies.
"The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways."
The US, he stated, must take the "initiative" to bring about a halt to that tragic war. But we have had many since then. We have been living in the shadow of fascism, telling and listening to stories about why going to war is so necessary for the American people.
But we are facing once again "real choices" and must forgo the "false ones". It is in this moment again that we find ourselves sacrificing our lives (as did Jordan and King) for the sake of a nation's survival against its "own folly".
Even more "disturbing", the deep "malady within the American spirit" has Americans patriotically following the path to war. To violence. There is always the criminalizing of anyone or any "serious thought" that might provide an alternative way of being among others. We must think beyond war, King stated. We must recognize this malady in our spirit if we are to effect "a significant and profound change in American life and policy".
Echoing John F. Kennedy, King spoke of the necessity for "peaceful revolution". Our "nation must undergo a radical revolution of values" if this nation is to remain a democracy. King continues, "we must rapidly begin the shift from a 'thing-oriented' society to a 'person-oriented' society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."
America should take the lead "in this revolution of values". Our best defense against ideologies that depend on chaos and violence is to turn our attention to revolutionizing our values.
Enslaving ourselves to the "business" of harming and killing human beings, and "filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows", and "injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of peoples normally humane", and "sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically" and "mentally" damaged, "cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love".
It's our time to break the silence.
