21 July marks American Nobel laureate Ernest Hemingway’s (1899 -1961) 127th birth anniversary. Hemingway’s caveats about the mindless killing that war unleashes seem to resonate uncannily in contemporary times, when war has phenomenally gained in prominence as a smart and swift way of global profiteering. The geo-political eco-system reverberates with the lust for stupendous profit at the cost of waging wars that destroy lives, ruin the environment and exploit the helpless, marginalized people of the world without impunity.
The 21st century wars have now cunningly outsmarted the 20th century ones that killed millions of people for no fault of their own. We are witnesses to wars and conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, Lebanon, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan. The list goes on and the shift in the theatres of war are significant – Ethiopia, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and Sahel region, have been identified as among the world’s top conflict escalation hotspots by the Global Peace Index 2025’.
As 2026 is the ye ar when Hemingway’s first published novel The Sun Also Rises, that foregrounded the trauma and devastation of war, turns 100, one wonders whether from 1926 to 2026, through these ten decades, civilization has matured and mellowed or escalated into abysmal depths. In mid-2026, we still are witness to mass murders, targeted killings and programmed wars. Terrorism flourishes as a global and local establishment, funded by vested interests, leveraging monetization through the arms trade that is indivisibly linked to the politics of power.
It would be delusional to disagree with Hemingway’s anti-war arguments: “The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.” Hence in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the young men and women of the 1920s, who were absolutely traumatized by the impact of the first world war, were described as “members of the Lost Generation”.
In an essay in Esquire, Hemingway had remarked, “(World War I) was the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied, So the writers either wrote propaganda, shut up, or fought.” Unfortunately, such recall of 20th century wars is not about reiterating historical commentaries from the archives. In fact, the reverse seems to be true. Now, all young people who are directly and indirectly involved in 21st century wars and war-like conflicts, are no longer primarily Europeans and Americans as in the 1920s.
Wars raged and are raging in Europe, West Asia, Africa and South Asia. Big wars, middling wars, small wars – are all about the use of highly expensive sophisticated weapons, which are promoted and publicized in the global arms markets, highlighting their gruesome precision. Defense departments are renamed war departments; defense ministers visit countries peddling their latest weapons. Countries which invest in significant yearly purchases of arms receive endearing recognition from global powers who are the world’s dominant manufacturers and exporters of war weapons.
A Google check will reveal that Hemingway’s birth country is the world’s largest exporter of war weapons. Understandably, the world’s largest importer of war weapons is Ukraine. Thereafter the world’s top global importers of arms are India, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Pakistan, respectively. Missing the irony is impossible.
In the war context, Hemingway’s observations about patriotism and nationalism ring true: “I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain… We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through… and read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory…” (A Farewell to Arms)
The result of war or “armed-conflict” as phrased by the United Nations, which categorically avoids use of the signifier ‘war’ is scripted by Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises, which instead of describing the war front, focusses on the mental fractures in the aftermath of war. Hemingway fo cused on the psychological catastrophe that war created: “I got hurt in the war… Oh, that dirty war. We would probably have gone on and discussed the war and agreed that it was in reality a calamity for civilization, and perhaps would have been better avoided.”. In the 20th century Hemingway was one of the premiere writers who repeatedly and tirelessly emphasized the destructive fallout of war in his powerful and sensitive novels.
Beginning with The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway’s complete disgust about the dehumanization that war creates, was underscored without any evasive strategies in his novel A Farewell to Arms published in 1929. “That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn…. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.” Fur thermore, Hemingway commented, “There is nothing as bad as war… When people realize how bad it is they cannot do anything to stop it because they go crazy. There are some people who never realize.
There are people who are afraid of their officers. It is with them the war is made”. Again, in his essay in Esquire in September 1935, Hemingway had stated: “War is no longer made by simply analysed economic forces if it ever was. War is made or planned now by individual men, demagogues and dictators who play on the patriotism of their people to mislead them into a belief in the great fallacy of war when all their vaunted reforms have failed to satisfy the people they misrule.”
In his acclaimed 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway’s disgust about war was unequivocal, where he had not just commented “Wars are caused by undefended wealth” but had also stated, “never think that war, no matter how necessary nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and ask the dead.” Perhaps in anticipation of the techno-smart hovering drones and their lethal precision, witnessed in our troubled times, Hemingway had written in 1940: “But these, wide-finned in silver, roaring, the light mist of their propellers in the sun, these do not move like sharks. They move like nothing there has ever been. They move like mechanized doom”.
Hemingway was a nonconformist writer who protested against war and the politics of war with the courage of his convictions. His active support of the Spanish Civil War is recorded in his play The Spanish Earth and the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. It would be hard to disagree with Hemingway’s claim about his understanding of war, as he had actively participated in both the First and Second World War in various capacities and had directly supported the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s.
I would humbly suggest that in the war-torn 21st century, Ernest Hemingway’s novels, letters and non-fictional writings need to be read, cited, researched and referred to by public intellectuals, teachers, students and hopefully critically informed politicians so that the profit and power of war can be confronted with the advocacy of priceless peace movements.
(The writer is former Dean, Faculty of Arts, Calcutta University and Visiting Professor, Jagiellonian University, Poland.)