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100 years ago, Ernest Hemingway foresaw the downfall of our society.

In *The Sun Also Rises,” (1926) Ernest Hemingway, a Chicagoan and son of a doctor who later got the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature, explores the erosion of morality through the disillusioned and aimless lives of his characters, who are part of the “Lost Generation” that emerged after World War I. The novel depicts a world where traditional values have been shattered by the trauma of the war, leading to a sense of moral decay and existential despair.

Hemingway’s characters, like Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley, navigate a landscape where the old moral codes no longer apply. Their lives are marked by a pursuit of fleeting pleasures—alcohol, sex, and travel—as they struggle to find meaning in a world devoid of the moral certainties that once guided them. This pursuit often leads to self-destructive behaviour and a deep sense of emptiness.

The novel’s portrayal of morality is closely tied to its depiction of love and relationships. Brett’s numerous affairs and the complicated dynamics between the characters underscore a loss of genuine connection and commitment. The characters’ inability to find fulfilment in these relationships reflects the broader sense of moral confusion and the breakdown of traditional values.

Hemingway’s sparse, direct prose mirrors the stark reality of this moral decline, capturing the characters’ internal struggles and the pervasive sense of disillusionment. Through their experiences, *The Sun Also Rises* presents a powerful commentary on the death of morality in a post-war world, where the old structures of meaning have crumbled, leaving individuals adrift and searching for new forms of purpose. — Marc Gielissen

…..Hemingway against the jews

Wiki on Hemkingway’s “The Sun Also Rises”:

Antisemitism

[edit]

Mike lay on the bed looking like a death mask of himself. He opened his eyes and looked at me.
‘Hello Jake’ he said very slowly. ‘I’m getting a little sleep. I’ve wanted a little sleep for a long time ….’
‘You’ll sleep, Mike. Don’t worry, boy.’
‘Brett’s got a bullfighter,’ Mike said. ‘But her Jew has gone away …. Damned good thing, what?’

Hemingway has been called antisemitic, most notably because of the characterization of Robert Cohn in the book. The other characters often refer to Cohn as a Jew, and once as a ‘kike‘.^[70] Shunned by the other members of the group, Cohn is characterized as “different”, unable or unwilling to understand and participate in the fiesta.^[70] Cohn is never really part of the group—separated by his difference or his Jewish faith.^[34] Barry Gross, comparing Jewish characters in literature of the period, commented that “Hemingway never lets the reader forget that Cohn is a Jew, not an unattractive character who happens to be a Jew but a character who is unattractive because he is a Jew.”^[71]^[72]

Hemingway critic Josephine Knopf speculates that Hemingway might have wanted to depict Cohn as a “shlemiel” (or fool), but she points out that Cohn lacks the characteristics of a traditional shlemiel.^[73]

Cohn is based on Harold Loeb, a fellow writer who rivaled Hemingway for the affections of Duff, Lady Twysden (the real-life inspiration for Brett). Biographer Michael Reynolds writes that in 1925, Loeb should have declined Hemingway’s invitation to join them in Pamplona. Before the trip, he was Duff’s lover and Hemingway’s friend; during the fiasco of the fiesta, he lost Duff and Hemingway’s friendship. Hemingway used Loeb as the basis of a character remembered chiefly as a “rich Jew.”^[74]

***

What Gielissen says above is all true. But what he dares not say or does not know is that Americans either sensed vaguely or, like Henry Ford, fully realized the whole horrid war — senseless only for us Gentiles but “good for the jews” — had been started by, continued by, and fought for the jews —

1) to make incredible profits,

2) to destroy ancient gentile dynasties (in Germany, Austria, and Russia) which they had long hated,

3) to kill off the best Gentile males;

Heartbreaking scene from near the end of (the mostly excellent) “1917”; the British officer has a hard time staying composed as he gets the dread news…

4) to establish communism, murder the tsar, and enslave the Slavs,

5) to suck all the money out of Germany via the Versailles Treaty, and

6) to pry Palestine loose from Turkey, get it into British hands — and then take it via terror from the Brits.

Hemingway was an Army ambulance driver during WWI and saw ghastly injuries and death, including in an Italian ammunition factory which blew up, killing 300 women and raining down body parts.

He came up after the war to Michigan, including the UP, to hunt, fish, and try to find some inner peace.

Hemingway said many profound things:

Ernest Hemingway was a great writer. He was also an antisemite

[source: the Jewish Forward:https://forward.com/culture/451195/ernest-hemingway-was-a-great-writer-he-was-also-an-antisemite/ ]

How do we grapple with the remarks the author made in his fiction and in his correspondence?

By Mary DearbornJuly 21, 2022

Editor’s note: Ernest Hemingway would have turned 123 today. He was a celebrated writer and a larger-than-life public figure. But, both in his private correspondence and his first novel, he espoused antisemitic ideas and spread negative Jewish stereotypes. How do we handle his legacy of antisemitism?Unquestionably, Ernest Hemingway was antisemitic. Studded throughout his letters are nasty remarks about Jews.*** JdN: Gentiles always write jew-truths to each other only in letters….

***But Hemingway felt his prejudice had a place in his fiction as well, most notably in “The Sun Also Rises,” his classic 1925 novel about a group of Paris expatriates at the bullfights in Pamplona.Hemingway routinely describes Robert Cohn, introduced in the novel’s first lines as “the middleweight boxing champion of Princeton,” as a “kike” and a “rich Jew”; his obnoxiousness fuels the plot. (Cohn was based on Harold Loeb, a friend who gave Hemingway crucial support in getting his early work published; Hemingway could not forgive anyone who did him a good turn.) The antisemitic insult of writing a character like Cohn into his first major novel is breathtaking: it was not, like Hemingway’s letters, intended for private consumption only, but as characterization and a plot device in a work of fiction — a novel, as it turned out, written for the ages.

Indeed, it could be a parlor game on the order of listing the famous alcoholics in American literature: Name the 20th-century authors who were antisemites — Theodore Dreiser; Hemingway; F. Scott Fitzgerald (a little); Sinclair Lewis; Ezra Pound, of course; T. S. Eliot; William Faulkner; Thomas Wolfe — the list goes on. Posthumously, there’s safety in numbers: Writers are less likely to be called out for their beliefs if their peers share them.

I heard from many quarters when I began my research for my biography that, yes, Hemingway was an antisemite — but “everyone” was “back then,” I was assured. Perhaps the fact that he aired his prejudice against Jews almost 100 years ago — that is, before the Holocaust — and was a dedicated anti-fascist at a crucial time makes the difference for many people. It’s another matter entirely after World War II and the massacre of the European Jews: If he wrote now what he did then, the response would be shock and outrage. And yet he gets a pass, it seems, because he was writing in another era.

One Hemingway critic, Richard K. Peterson, referred to the “fashionable antisemitism of the 1920s,” which another scholar called “modish,” as if there was no connection between the desensitization inculcated by this cultural habit and, say, the fact that American leaders during the war did so little in response to mounting evidence that the Nazis had set out to exterminate Jews.

Does this make Ernest Hemingway a bad writer? Does it mean we should no longer read him? I don’t think so. The aesthetic satisfaction and sheer joy of reading such works as “In Our Time” and “A Moveable Feast,” or encountering the enduring truths of such novels as “A Farewell to Arms,” “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and, yes, “The Sun Also Rises” are undeniable. The books remain.

An argument could be made, in fact, that this terrible failing gives us another reason to look at Hemingway’s life and read his fiction: to understand how a man of his complexity and humanity could hold such beliefs. In turn, this can give us a more fully rounded picture of the writer, which can enrich our reading and inform how we live, as the best literature always does. I’ve tried in my book to understand the man behind Hemingway’s great achievements, to re-create the epic scale of his finally tragic life. But he no longer gets a pass, not from this biographer, anyway, for what he said and wrote about Jews.

Mary Dearborn is the author of “Ernest Hemingway: A Biography” (Knopf).

…….Hemingway and masculinity

Excellent article on author Ernest Hemingway by Andrew Joyce, whom I have interviewed. I only object to Joyce leaving out Hemingway’s boasting — true or a favor-currying lie — of massacring German civilians as an Army correspondent during WWII.

On Hemingway, Jews, and Masculinity

Speaking of Hemingway as a war correspondent, my article the September/October issue of The Barnes Review, with the link found below, brings up his accurate judgment of this scandalous waste of American (and German) blood, the almost four-month-long Battle of Huertgen Forest ( September 19, 1944 to February 10, 1945), when Americans first crossed over onto German soil.

US Army General Omar Bradley, who looked like a chimpanzee (photo), as do many Jews, ordered 120,000 men to slog their way, on foot, directly into a wooded dungeon of machine guns, mines, booby traps and preset artillery.

They perished for what historians now call “the strategically insigniﬁcant Huertgen Forest.”

Hurtgen_Sept-Oct 2005

Soldiers of Company E, 110th Infantry Regiment, 28th Infantry Division move cautiously through the Huertgen Forest near the Raffelsbrand road junction, November 2, 1944.

American GIs in Europe had never before fought an extended battle in a forest. They were neither properly trained nor equipped for it. Under 100-foot trees and in gorges, radios were unreliable; planes saw nothing; coordinated troop movements were next to impossible.

America was throwing her ﬁnest young men at the entrenched Germans, who were at their most dangerous, like any nation, when operating on and protecting their own soil.

[I would add that, ironically, 50% of the Americans in this carnage were of German blood themselves, being from Pennsylvania, from a federalized Pennsylvania Army National Guard division. They were killing their own cousins for the Jews, or being killed by them.]

As I wrote on page 67 (in the photo caption on the right)

Ernest Hemingway was a war reporter at the Battle of Huertgen Forest and saw the psychological collapse of his friend, Regimental Commander Colonel Charles T. Lahm.

In his book Over the River and Into the Trees, he wrote:

“In Huertgen the dead froze solid, and it was so cold that their faces froze red. We received many reinforcements, but I thought it would be easier to just shoot them when they jumped off the truck rather than have to drag them back in from wherever they were headed to get killed.”

General James Gavin, commander of the 82nd Airborne, stated: “It was the most costly, unproductive and poorly led battle that our Army ever fought.”

To subscribe to The Barnes Review, six high-caliber issues a year,

….founded by the late, great Willis Carto…

Willis Carto, a man among men

….and still going very strong today, click here!

https://barnesreview.org/product-category/tbr-subscriptions/

(I will keep uploading on a regular basis on this website more of the pdf’s of the sixty-two TBR articles that I and Margi wrote or translated.)

….Irish gal looks at modern Boston

(fr. l. to r.) Michelle Wu from Chicago, married to a jew named Pewarski and with three kids, is the mayor of once Irish Boston; Maura Healy is an arch-liberal, childless lesbian and governor of Massachusetts; Prince William of England and his wife are both part-jewish (both actually via Goldsmiths); William looks it.

A donor of Irish heritage wrote me:

Can I just say something about this article?

Virtus –to remasculinize white men; primal feelings in race-mixing and race-preserving; British cops arrest Christian, but promote mullah with loudspeaker on London Bridge

I personally never quite fit the description of the woman depicted here — never once felt the slightest bit attracted to a darkie.

Especially after 17 years of being bullied and getting into scraps with them in my school in Latino-infested Fall River and Pawtucket. Maybe I am just one of the few who has a bit more control over those faculties

I always preferred blond and redheaded males — my own kind. During those years of bearing through that racial jungle in those cities I sometimes wished to be back in my native Quincy with other Irish-Americans..
.

.
But when I did get to visit again for the first time in years I was flabbergasted by how East-Asian it had become! Some places had signs in Chinese!

I felt my insides twisted up in extreme discomfort… like there was nowhere to run to. No sanctuary. It’s an awful feeling and it doesn’t help to have a liberal family disregarding your feelings about these changes.

It’s also led to lots of bottled up anger and resentment, depression, and fantasies of expelling these invasive species, hardworking as they may be, from my birth city. None of us gave permission to be overrun.

*** The “Irish Riviera” is/was the South Shore, a region south of Boston Harbor along the Atlantic coast, which includes Quincy, Squantum, a peninsular area of Quincy, Scituate, Marshfield, and Cohasset.

Irish percentage in these towns:

47.5 Scituate
46.5 Braintree
45.8 Hull
45.6 Marshfield
44.9 Avon
44.9 Pembroke
44.6 Milton
44.5 Abington
44.3 Whitman
44.2 Hanover
43.4 Weymouth
43.0 Walpole
42.2 Holbrook
41.4 Duxbury
41.2 Norwell
40.8 Hanson
17.4 Boston

***
I have also had an uptick, John, in brown men ogling me and trying to ask me out. Acting out as an “unfriendly New Englander” has worked for me so far, but I still feel like I need a second shower after the fact.

***

I replied:

I will run your impactful remarks (minus any identifiers, of course) and respond. There is this moment of cosmic weirdness we are all at now where this whole earth feels alien.

We cannot live like this anymore alongside this vile enemy who clearly wants us dead.

One delegate at the DNC convention yesterday said something truly bolshevik, which fits with the new Demoncrat party that is truly a hate-driven communist organization:

“You’re either at the table or on the menu.”

This is a quote,btw, from Al Capone. What a lovely sentiment.

The “Lost Generation” has been that way since WWI!; the Chinese wave washing over once-Irish Boston