INGELBIEN RAPHAEL wrote:
>
> >From Tom K:
>
>
> I was only taking Ireland as an example. I admit I sometimes have a soft
> spot for Luxemburg, but you won't catch me saying that the Bolsheviks'
> attitude in the war only reflected their high-minded pacifist principles.
>

I regard pacifism as deeply mistaken. But you don't have to be a
pacifist to oppose a given war. Neither Luxemburg nor Lenin acted (or
claimed to act) from pacifist principles -- they were against workers
slaughtering each other in the war of imperialist against imperialist.

Since 1788 the u.s. has fought 1.66 legitimate wars -- the war to crush
the insurrection of the slave drivers and WW 2 up to the point where the
stupid doctrine of unconditional surrender kicked in. All other u.s.
wars (declared & undeclared) have been at best incredibly stupid, and
usually a crime.

Against the slave drivers unconditional surrender made sense, but not
otherwise.

Incidentally, has anyone on this list ever invoked the distinction
between the meaning and the significance of a poem (or any other text)?
The meaning of a text may be partly at least within the writer's
control, but he/she has no control whatever over the significance others
find in it. I suspect the Wasteland is a poem in which the significance
that some (many / most) readers have found (still find) in it absorbs
whatever meaning it might have or have had. The poem was made possible,
whether or not Eliot (consciously or unconsciously)so so intended it, by
the vast irreality and illegitimacy of the slaughter of the Great War.
The opening line, with its bow to chaucer and rebirth (Renaissance),
evokes willy-nilly the "few thiusand battered books" of Mauberley.

Carrol