[HN Gopher] What They Wrote About the War
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What They Wrote About the War
Author : lermontov
Score : 29 points
Date : 2021-04-23 06:05 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.lareviewofbooks.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.lareviewofbooks.org)
| mcguire wrote:
| " _The essay burst like a bombshell, not so much above his
| enemies as in [George Bernard] Shaw's own life. Good friends
| broke with him; allies publicly condemned him; he was pushed out
| of professional societies; bookstores and libraries removed his
| work from their shelves. When he wanted to publish a follow-up,
| The New Statesman refused._ "
|
| WWI was immensely popular in Britain, at least in the first
| years.
|
| " _In August 1914, at the start of World War I, Admiral Charles
| Fitzgerald founded the Order of the White Feather with the
| support of the prominent author Mary Augusta Ward. The
| organisation aimed to shame men into enlisting in the British
| army by persuading women to present them with a white feather if
| they were not wearing a uniform._ "
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_feather#World_War_I)
| 1cvmask wrote:
| George Bernard Shaw and his timeless insights:
|
| The New Statesman published Shaw's essay as a "war supplement."
|
| "The time has come," he wrote, "to pluck up courage and begin to
| talk and write soberly about the war." Shaw claimed he could
| muster clear thoughts about England's role because he was Irish.
| He was unmoved by imperialist sentiments and patriotic lies. The
| government had cited Germany's invasion of Belgium as its cause
| for war, but he thought this was false and hypocritical. If not
| Belgium, some other excuse would have been found, as a close
| examination of the actions and secret agreements of the Foreign
| Secretary made clear. Britain was the world's most aggressive
| imperial power, occupying numerous countries around the globe
| with no less callousness and no more legitimacy than Germany in
| Belgium. Britain had no right to object to the imperialism of
| others while blithely practicing an imperialism of its own. The
| English press critiqued German Junkerism, but England was led by
| its own imperious oligarchs and aristocrats, a class analogous to
| the Junkers and just as bad, just as belligerent, just as
| unaccountable. Only through the democratization of foreign
| policy, the socialization of landed wealth, and a postbellum
| rejection of imperial militarism on all sides -- including that
| of France and England -- could the war be made to serve just
| ends. Demonizing the German enemy was a base and baseless act of
| propaganda. If Germany was defeated, it should not be humiliated
| or loaded down with an impossible war debt, otherwise the cycle
| of inter-imperial wars would continue.
|
| ----
|
| I first got into George Bernard Shaw with the false attribution
| of fish/ghoti:
|
| Ghoti is often cited to support English spelling reform, and is
| often attributed to George Bernard Shaw,[5] a supporter of this
| cause. However, the word does not appear in Shaw's writings,[2]
| and a biography of Shaw attributes it instead to an anonymous
| spelling reformer.[6] Similar constructed words exist that
| demonstrate English idiosyncrasies,[1] but ghoti is the most
| widely recognized.[citation needed]
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti
| cafard wrote:
| In Heinrich Mann's novel _Man of Straw_ , the anti-hero manages
| to get out of military service with a bogus diagnosis of foot
| problems. He drew on Thomas Mann's experience: their mother knew
| a doctor, the doctor was willing to do a favor, Thomas Mann was
| discharged.
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(page generated 2021-04-23 23:01 UTC)