"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

Targeting non-combatants

[methodius.livejournal.com]

In the Spanish Civil War non-combatants werer targeted by both sides, so that is hardly a difference. An AnGlican monk I knew had gone to spain in a non-combatant capacity (before he became a monk), as an ambulance driver or stretcher-beare
r or something, and said that when he saw what anarchists had done to non-combatants, he was never able to take anarchism seriously as a philosophy again. But such atrocities were not confined to one side only. there or in other fields of combat.

Roy Campbell, the South African poet, was often accused of having fascist sympathies (as was J.R.R. Tolkien, a fellow Catholic, and I believe Campbell was peripherally involved with the Inklings at one time). But what appears to have put Campbell off was the atrocities perpetrated by the Republicans, though the bombing of Guernica was a similar atrocity by the Nationalists.

Re: Targeting non-combatants

[(Anonymous)]

You're right, of course. I'm not so naive to think that Muslim terrorists are the ONLY ones in history to deliberately target noncombatants. What I was specifically speaking to, however, is their use of suicide as the means to do it.