You Could Fight - Hemingway - Spanish Civil War Leftist Partisan

(1:19 min) Mp3 https://xenagoguevicene.files.wordpress.com/2023/10/2023-10-30brotherhood.mp3 In Hemingway’s 1940 novel ‘For Whom The Bell Tolls’ the leftist character Robert Jordan speaks of dedication to the Leftwing cause of the Spanish Republic, and oppressed around the world. The character speaks about the feeling at the Anarchist and Soviet Stalinist hotel meeting centers where activists and party members and fighters organized.

At either of those places you felt that you were taking part in a crusade. That was the only word for it although it was a word that had been so worn and abused that it no longer gave its true meaning. You felt, in spite of all bureaucracy and inefficiency and party strife something that was like the feeling you expected to have and did not have when you made your first communion. It was a feeling of consecration to a duty toward all of the oppressed of the world which would be as difficult and embarrassing to speak about as religious experience and yet it was authentic as the feeling you had when you heard Bach, or stood in Chartres Cathedral or the Cathedral at León and saw the light coming through the great windows; or when you saw Mantegna and Greco and Brueghel in the Prado. It gave you a part in something that you could believe in wholly and completely and in which you felt an absolute brotherhood with the others who were engaged in it. It was something that you had never known before but that you had experienced now and you gave such importance to it and the reasons for it that your own death seemed of complete unimportance; only a thing to be avoided because it would interfere with the performance of your duty. But the best thing was that there was something you could do about this feeling and this necessity too. You could fight.

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