The Bullet's Song: Romantic Violence and Utopia

About this book

A hidden moral history of the twentieth century unfolds in William Pfaffs fascinating story of writers artists intellectual soldiers and religious revolutionaries implicated in the centurys physical and moral violence. They were motivated by romanticism nationalism utopianism -- and the search for transcendence. To our twenty-first century already plunged -- once again -- into visionary terrorism and utopian quests they leave a warning.... The account begins with Italys Futurists who glorified war as "the worlds only hygiene"; painted speed action and noise; invented "found sound" and chromatic pianos; thought violence sublime; and demanded "reconstruction of the universe." Gabriele DAnnunzio poet playwright and nationalist buccaneer created a revolutionary utopia in a Dalmatian city stolen in 1919 from Woodrow Wilson and the Versailles Treaty makers. In doing so he invented the political style and rituals of Fascism as well as Third World liberation. T.E. Lawrence archaeologist and spy guided the Arab revolt against the Turks becoming both "Uncrowned King of Arabia" and masochist secular saint. Ernst Jnger artist and scientist the German armys most decorated hero of World War I made heroism a political ideology and became intellectual leader of the National Cause. Hitler was a follower. In World War II Jnger plotted Hitlers assassination and survived to become a symbol of Franco-German reconciliation. Willi Mnzenberg Lenins propaganda genius and an original member of the Comintern invented the political "front" organization created the Sacco and Vanzetti case and seduced a generation of "innocents" to the Communist cause before becoming a dissident himself. He wasstrangled by Soviet agents in a French forest. Andr Malraux fantasist "Byron of the 1930s " world-famous novelist emulator of T.E. Lawrence and make-believe leader of the Chinese revolution discovered "that daydreaming gives rise to action." He created and led an air squadron for Republican Spain wrote himself into the script of the French Resistance as a hero -- and became one. Arthur Koestler the most famous scientific journalist in Europe was a Comintern spy in Spain; condemned to death there he abandoned the cause and wrote Darkness at Noon the most influential anti-Communist work of its time before committing suicide in 1976. Others with roles in The Bullets Song are Benito Mussolini Filippo Tommaso Marinetti Che Guevara Charles de Foucauld Simone Weil Jean-Paul Sartre Simone de Beauvoir Europes terrorists of the 1970s and "Popski" -- Vladimir Peniakoff -- the honorable man who found happiness in leading his private army to war.