"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

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....