"Poets Exploding Like Bombs"

[poliphilo]

Young men love to fight. They particularly love to fight in a good cause. In the 1930s lthousands  of young British men- not street thugs, but scholars, poets, trades unionists, students-  went off to fight in the Spanish Civil War, in a cause that only tangentially touched them-  "for Communism and for liberty".  They included George Orwell, the poet Laurie Lee and -fleetingly- W.H. Auden. 

So what's so surprising about young British Muslims going off to seek martyrdom in Iraq?

Auden, who became tiresomely conservative in middle age, later disowned his poem "Spain". It's one long adrenaline rush. Strip out the specific cultural references and the overwhelming intelligence, and isn't this what jihadis feel?

Comments

counterpoint

[seraphimsigrist.livejournal.com]

As always yours is thoughtful and leads to
some thought and if this resulting thought is
contrapuntal it is not intended as argumentative
but precisley as counterpoint.

I understand this line of thought
and the intended empathy but it is not
I think it can quite work or at least not
to make sane what is madness...
we hear of course Yeats intoning
"you who Mitchel's prayer have heard
'send war in our time Lord' know
{and the rest]" or the great South
African poet and adventurer Roy Campbell
speaking as "the talking bronco" of
the flowering barrels of the fascist
rifles. for he was on the other side from
the men you mention in that war in Spain.
the jihadis are mad, possessed... as surely
as ,in Jung's expression, the Nazis were
possessed by the Wotan archtype...so they
are sick and mad with the madness rising
from the depth of their own history
and also that finally of all of us...

I think our reaching out to this state
(and I would regard the Islamist as not exactly
within the same state of possession as an Auden
or Campbell or Mitchel or Wolf Tone etc) we are
right to see it as human and right to see how
it is not something alien to our humanity but
we might err a little and letting romanticism
override a sense of pathology and also I would
say to override the awareness that some pathologies
needs be resisted even with deadly force or at
least as Dr Johnson in another context
(paraphrasing)
"knock down the madman who comes at you with
a stick first and only then reason with him.

Re: counterpoint

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure that Islamism is any madder than the fashionable European ideologies of the 1930s- the varieties of Fascism on one side and the varieties of Communism on the other.

My point is that young men- idealistic and naive- are easily suckered into fighting for detestable causes.

Have you read Orwell's Homage to Catalonia?

orwell

[seraphimsigrist.livejournal.com]

yes of course. he was with the
POUM was it?

Re: orwell

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

That's right- the Trotskyists

unamuno

[seraphimsigrist.livejournal.com]

my favorite quote on spain is
from miguel de unamuno (who supported
franco in a sense)
theirs are the red of blood
and ours are white like pus and
I do not know which are worse.

Re: unamuno

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Which makes me think of the movie The Red and the White (by Miklos Jancso, I think) where the camera roves the battlefield from incident to incident without discriminating between the sides.

Hey, I want to see it again....