I saw this Hemingway quote several times today: “Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”
At first, given this week’s MLK quote that wasn’t an MLK quote, I wondered if the Hemingway quote was authentic. It is. So that’s a start.
How about the context? (And yes, I’m fixated on context today.)
I can’t find what Hemingway wrote in its entirety. This passage from the introduction to Hemingway on War has some ellipses, but it lifts us far beyond the bumper-stickerized excerpt that’s making the rounds:
Hemingway was back in Cuba at the Finca Vigía, his farmhouse just outside San Francisco de Paula, when World War II finally came to an end with the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He wrote down his thoughts on the advent of atomic warfare, which were published as the foreword to a book entitled Treasury for the Free World:
We have waged war in the most ferocious and ruthless way that it has ever been waged. We waged it against fierce and ruthless enemies that it was necessary to destroy. Now we have destroyed one of our enemies and forced the capitulation of the other. For the moment we are the strongest power in the world. It is very important that we do not become the most hated. … We need to study and understand certain basic problems of our world as they were before Hiroshima to be able to continue, intelligently, to discover how some of them have changed and how they can be settled justly now that a new weapon has become a property of part of the world. We must study them more carefully than ever now and remember that no weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one. … An aggressive war is the great crime against everything good in the world. A defensive war, which must necessarily turn to aggressive at the earliest moment, is the necessary great counter-crime. But never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and the dead.
Now that’s Hemingway. The war-is-a-crime quote isn’t even the most potent bumper sticker in the bunch. How about “no weapon has ever settled a moral problem” or “we are the strongest power in the world. It is very important that we do not become the most hated”?
As a side note, I’m glad that the quote getting tweeted and retweeted is actually something Hemingway wrote as Hemingway. It would have made me queasy to see the words attributed to “Ernest Hemingway” if they had been, say, something the fictional Pilar said in For Whom The Bell Tolls.
