Are smeared with the great Khan's seal in vermillion;
And the forgers are punished with death.
And this costs the Kahn nothing,
And so he is rich in this world.
We move on to the story of Metevsky, apparently an arms dealer, and I detect anti-Semitism here. Metevsky, whoever he was, seems to have hidden behind Biers (whoever ...) while their company thrives. 'You' becomes 'yew'; 'to' becomes 'tew' (how could that possibly be a fair transcription of the word, in any accent?). Metevsky becomes:
The well-known philanthropist,
Or "the well-known financier, better known,"
As the press said, "as a philanthropist,"
Gave - as the Este to Louis Eleventh, -
A fine pair of giraffes to the nation,
And endowed a chair of ballistics,
And was consulted before the offensives.
So there's a conflation of financiery and warmongery, which isn't that surprising. It's another manifestation of the disgust with the political state after the war.
And so on, without much to add until
War, one war after another,
Men start 'em who couldn't put up a good hen-roost
I'm being surprised at the amount of reference to the Great War. Obviously, I shouldn't be, but Ez was (as far as I can see) not a combatant, so he's not a war poet in the conventional sense.
One day, while investigating a complaint, I was in a law library annex, where bound volumes of The Magistrate from 1914-18 were in the bookcases. Naturally, I flicked through them, and it struck me that the war had quite little effect on life away from the front - a magistrate's life went on as before, while the suffering of the troops was largely ignored or minimised. But then Ez was not a comfy magistrate. Nevertheless, I can't help keeping seeing echoes of Mein Kampf, that same sense of betrayal and of a world gone badly wrong and in need of a saviour. (Post posting edit: wish to point out I haven't read Mein Kampf, but have read about it. Thank you. Goodnight.)
1 comment:
He lost his friends and gifted artists, sculpturers in the war. Look at a history of his life at that time. He lived in UK - so he felt the First World War in his heart! It destroyed Europe and its young .. a horrid shameful bloody mess engineered by the ruling elite (started for their own ends - it inspired the beginning of a Communist regime for those in Russia fed up by such exploitation of the masses, the Proletariate) . The real losers in WW1 were ordinary men and women .....boys murdered in the trenches in their millions. Of course he was angry, driven distracted by the horror. It sent sensitive people mad and those who survived the trenches had PTSD. That war made no sense - such mass carnage by our leaders at the time; They did not die though. Oh no.
Post a Comment