Politics & Power Quote by Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway isn’t doing the tender, bruised-humanity thing here. He’s writing like a reporter with a knife, turning “panacea” into a trap word: the cure that’s really a con. Inflation and war aren’t framed as accidents or hard choices; they’re pitched as policy shortcuts that let leaders look competent without doing the tedious work of governance. The line’s power comes from its rhythm of escalation and its blunt symmetry: first, the monetary cheat; second, the blood-soaked spectacle. Different tools, same intent - buy time, manufacture motion, and push the bill onto someone else.

The subtext is almost contemptuous about the audience’s role. Temporary prosperity is described like a stage set: wages rise on paper, factories hum, flags wave, and people mistake activity for health. That “temporary” isn’t an economic footnote; it’s the whole indictment. Hemingway implies that publics can be managed with sensations - higher numbers, heroic narratives - while structural rot deepens. “Permanent ruin” lands like a hangover you can’t sleep off: debt, distorted markets, broken institutions, traumatized bodies.

Context matters. Hemingway lived through World War I, the boom-and-bust churn of the 1920s, the Great Depression, and another world war. He watched modern states learn to mobilize mass economies and mass emotions at once. Calling inflation and war “refuge” is the moral tell: these aren’t merely bad outcomes, they’re temptations - hiding places for opportunists who thrive when accountability dissolves into emergency.