Declassified docs reveal truth about FBI’s contribution to Hemingway’s demise | Hacker News Reader

Declassified docs reveal truth about FBI’s contribution to Hemingway’s demise

history101.com

67 pointspseudolus42 comments

As a recovering alcoholic, I've noticed a tendency for non-alcoholics to look for a reason a person might drink themselves to death. People love stories, especially tragic stories. In this case the story is "The FBI drove him to drink and suicide." This story has a bad guy and a tragedy.

The problem with this is twofold. The FBI followed a lot more people who didn't drink themselves to death. Second, alcoholism is a disease like cancer. It takes people out for no good reason. Many people have had periods of heavy drinking and wonder if it was alcoholism. It wasn't because they stopped. Alcoholics can't stop drinking without help. Then when you add mental illness to the situation, which many do in Hemingway's case, it becomes even less based the circumstances and more about the disease of alcoholism comorbid with bipolar disorder.

The FBI looking at him was stressful no doubt, but it's not why he drank or shot himself.

>The FBI looking at him was stressful no doubt, but it's not why he drank or shot himself.

It doesn't really make sense, and is rather an offense to normal morality, to say that because someone has a disability, that weakens them in terms of resisting abuse or torture, that it mitigates the responsibility of the perpetrators.

In support of this being a societal norm, here:

"The eggshell rule (also thin skull rule or talem qualem rule)[1] is a well-established legal doctrine in common law, used in some tort law systems,[2] with a similar doctrine applicable to criminal law. The rule states that, in a tort case, the unexpected frailty of the injured person is not a valid defense to the seriousness of any injury caused to them"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggshell_skull

IF you want to have a larger discussion about the abuse of power by the FBI under J Edgar Hoover, there is plenty of material to work with.

My point was that the general public wants to attach a story to someone who drinks or drugs themselves to death. People are more comfortable with reasons and they don't understand that death from alcoholism and bipolar depression often doesn't need a reason other than diseases themselves. People often think "Oh yeah, people die from cancer" without needing any other reason, but this is not the case with death from alcoholism and bipolar disorder.

>and bipolar disorder

Really? How do you know? Anyone with a major mental illness on their record is never going to get the same medical treatment they would otherwise. It doesn't have to be directly related.

Any complaints will be discounted, and they will know that, so they won't complain as much, and then when they do, it will sound odd, and that will cause people to take them less seriously, and so on.

Also lot of people have no fucking clue what its like to be around alcoholics with mental health issues. Especially men in authority/influencial positions.

There are lot of functioning alcoholics in power, who develop all kinds of survival strategies using their status to the max. Society has poor ways of handling it.

I found the content of the article interesting but am also fascinated by how this kind of clickbait gets published and produced in the first place.

I did a whois lookup for history101.com (partially because I was half wondering if this came from some kind of politically motivated bot farm) but it leads to https://www.novelty.media/ who unlike traditional newspapers seem to be upfront pitching themselves to advertisers specialists at fine tuning articles to keep a high value US audience to keep reading and sharing them.

I guess it's working since this made it to the HN front-page!

The site keeps crashing on iOS. They may be doing stuff.

Flag the article. I noticed this too.

Many journalists abroad, especially war correspondents, worked as assets or spies for their governments. But the assets often volunteer but are not employees. So they are harder to manage and control. Hemingway volunteered to work for the government and then became collateral damage.

The Old Man and the Sea could have been about his struggle with the government and the national security establishment.

Remember, even if you are not paranoid, it doesn't mean they are not spying on you.

Indeed, but it might be better for one's mental health to assume they aren't.

Yep, and it's likely naive to believe that the feds are the only ones spying on you.

That is an incredibly disjointly written article. Something is set up, then next sentence has nothing to do with it. Sentence structure, word choice, just weird.

Seems like (bad) machine written.

Needless Paragraph (ads) filler paragraph (ads) filler paragraph (ads) filler paragraph … I gave up. This should not have been upvoted. We ought not reward content this obnoxious.

A transparent attempt at padding the article. It is written like a modern recipe article with a teaser, 10 pages of filler, then the reveal at the end.

That's the type of thing Google considers to be quality content.

Had Hemingway lived, he could have written a much better one.

Looks good in a text-only browser (links no-g). Easy to consume the bits of information, and download the images if desired. It's funny how something can be so bad when viewed in a popular browser and yet look fine in links. The power of auto-loading images, Javascript and CSS. Note the first two can usually be disabled in popular browsers.

Are there any famous Americans that haven't interacted with the national intelligence apparatus? I'm starting to wonder if American's deep distrust of the government is actually because Americans have been manipulated. If it turns out that basically every American that made it into a big city has been manipulated, tricked, or met and attempted to build trust with false personas that are facade to government operations then that should be both shocking and revealing.

I've been thinking about this as well. Define "Famous". In Hollywood it is possible to be "famous" but not famous enough that you are a countrywide sensation. Is that still "famous"? Examples that are top of mind: Mary Elizabeth Winstead. Respected in her field and successful by pretty much any metric but may not be well known among the whole populace.

I mean even really famous people are not entirely known depending on the group you ask. I have spoken with Senior Citizens who still to this day don't know Elon Musk. Likewise I have worked with immigrant families that also don't pay attention to his antics and so don't have an association with Tesla/That Space company with him.

Now does the CIA have a program that tracks and ensures that that anyone even remotely famous can be dealt with? With their resources why not? But without evidence it is just conspiracy. Did they see someone like AOC coming? She came out the blue because even she didn't expect to win the election that had no national coverage whatsoever. I'm sure they got her under their control now but this begs the question. Maybe it is possible to secretly gather the resources and power to make effective change without getting their attention in the short term.

I'm probably on their radar now though. :P

What they have now probably makes the Snowden revelations seem like Windows 95. I bet they have formed mental models of each American mind and can "predict" the dissenters ahead of time.

Community organizer that went to a school that literally brags about having former CIA agents as staff on its faculty? Yeah, I think AOC was on their radar.

I heard this conspiracy theory coming from Bernie supporters who are burned out as well as Trump supporters. Its quite a stretch.

The intelligence agencies have a fairly rich history of infiltrating the far left and far right. How influential they were in any events is unknown, but they almost certainly kept tabs on what every group was doing.

Agreed. I bet they were looking into Justice Democrats as soon as they started. I just wonder how serious they were taking it before one of their candidates actually won. It certainly seems like as AOC got more popular, she seems to have gotten co-opted. I followed her extremely closely in the the run up to her win. Her personality has completely changed. Part of this I attribute to her party constantly being on her neck but there might be something else at play.

The conspiracy theory is that she actually worked for the CIA, I'm very much not claiming that. I don't think it's even remotely conspiratorial to think that she was known to them.

She came out of the blue because she ran against an old school, Irish political machine family candidate (Crowley) who didn’t notice that his district was no longer Irish/Italian, as they have moved away or died. My grandma loved Crowley in the early 80s when he was a city council guy kissing babies at catholic events. Fast forward 30 years, and younger Hispanics voted for the Hispanic candidate.

If the CIA has some magic power to make arrogant political people act like political people, they must have been around since Ancient Greek times.

Clickbait tripe. It begins: "Hemingway’s friends and loved ones believed he was insane when he told them the FBI was following him, but the truth turned out to be far worse than anyone could’ve expected."

But the big reveal is that a 1980's FOIA request showed that the FBI was indeed surveilling him and conducted 50 unspecified "searches" over the last ~14 months of his life.

The article also shares that he:

-was an FBI asset for a long time circa WW2

-that he went eventually parted ways with them after a period of going out of his way to talk shit about them and troll them

-that he moved to Cuba, got close to Castro and loudly proclaimed support for the rising communist faction

Take all this together and it's pretty easy to understand why, particularly in that era, the FBI was surveilling him.

So what's "the truth" that turned out to be "far worse than anyone could’ve expected"? His last days were sad, but there's no scandal here.

I agree this is clickbat trash, but the only thing that doesnt make this a scandal is the sad fact that we implicitly accept the extra-political power (and cruelty) of US intelligence agencies at large.

If it wasnt a scandal, why did it take FOIA request to reveal the measures the FBI were applying to a huge American citizen cultural figure?

How else would the information come to light? I don’t expect the FBI to periodically dig up old data to publicize without a reason.

The article drops this in, "At the time the United States was neck-deep in the Red Scare, and communism was like atheism to the US government and the FBI." without comment, as if everyone just knows that atheism is the worst thing ever.

> atheism is the worst thing ever

Perhaps “anathema” got butchered? I’m trying to make sense of that too…

That, or maybe they only got out part of their analogy; that communism was to western government what atheism was to the church.

It's not paranoia if they really are out to get you! Note: article is from 2020.

Parts of the FBI file are available online:

https://vault.fbi.gov/ernest-miller-hemingway/ernest-hemingw...

I’ve never read so many ads in one news story. Incredible!

I hit the back button immediately after getting the notification permission popup after 3 paragraphs. It makes me think on how wrong the web design profession has gone when every site hammers me with 2-4 popups and no doubt a dozen ad trackers, mindlessly implemented as a must-do best practice checklist. I would have finished the article and maybe even left with a positive impression of the site and noted to check out their site later. Instead I'm left with attention abuse overload and a mental note to skip over that site in the future.

The web has become a pathetic failure. My god, what have we done to it?

doesn't everyone just use an adblocker these days?

I suppose, but I am on mobile.

Doesn't everyone use ad blocker on mobile these days?

Like what?

If you’re on iOS, check out Adblock and Hush. I didn’t see any ads.

On Android, dropping chrome and switching to Firefox should fix the problem.

On mobile, reading this article without ad blocking was incredibly difficult. Flashing animations, sudden page reorientation, and incredible nonsense made finding the actual text of the story quite a challenge.

It certainly seems like an important story. I’ll be damned if I could read it.

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