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With all this talk about Red and Blue states in this country, where it seems that never the two shall meet, For Whom the Bell Tolls can scare you. In the Spanish Civil War, the middle/ business class, even in smaller villages tended to sympathize with the Fascists (not the bad word it became after WWII), and the peasants with the Republicans. There is a very long scene where Republican guerillas come into a town, gather up all the business people along with the town priest, make them individually run the gauntlet between columns of fellow citizens with clubs, then throw them over a cliff into the sea. It is the most chilling account I have ever read in literature and one you will always remember when political tensions in this country get so high that you sometimes hear journalists allude to civil war.
A good novel like this can present truth far more effectively than journalistic pieces. I have read a few very good long histories of the Spanish Civil War, and they do not come close to Hemingway's accounts in this novel.
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