War
Foretold: Mark Twain
And The Sins Of Our Race
By Ramzy Baroud
18 June, 2007
Countercurrents.org
When
I resorted to Mark Twain’s writings I attempted to escape, at
least temporarily from my often distressing readings on war, politics
and terror. But his “The Mysterious Stranger”, although
published 1916, still left me with an eerie feel. The imaginative story
calls into question beliefs that we hold as a “matter of course”
– a favorite phrase of his. It summons the awful tendencies of
“our race”: our irrational drive for violence, be it burning
‘witches’ at the stake or engaging in wars that only serve
the “little monarchs and the nobilities.”
As the Iraq war rages on,
Twain’s words ring truer by the day. “The loud little handful
will shout for war…Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair
men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech
and pen, and at first will have hearing and be applauded; but it will
not last long; those others will out shout them and presently the anti-war
audiences will thin and lose popularity. Before long you will see the
most curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free
speech strangled by hordes of furious men. And now the whole nation
will take up the war-cry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest
man who ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease
to open.
“Next the statesmen
will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked,
and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and
will diligently study them and refuse to examine any refutations of
them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just,
and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after the process
of grotesque self-deception.”
Twain, whose genius undoubtedly
surpasses time and space, wrote the above passages nine decades before
the world’s leading statesmen, President George Bush and Prime
Minister Tony Blair forged their case for war, based on falsities and
refused to examine any refutations; they rallied millions, investing
on their ignorance and blind patriotism to carry out a war whose outcome
is akin to genocide. The text was also written long before the thousands
who stood for human rights, rallied and organized against the war, defended
the constitution and civil liberties were “shouted out”
and “stoned from the platform”; thousands of those “fair
men” and women have endured such a fate, the latest being Cindy
Sheehan, the bereaved American mother who lost her son, Casey, in Bush’s
war for oil, strategic repositioning of the empire and the neoconservatives’
ceaseless hunt for Israel’s illusive ‘security’. She
too was shouted out, and in a heart-wrenching letter, she reached the
conclusion, most difficult for any mother to reach, that her son, Casey
died for nothing.
But Bush is adamant to carry
on with his costly endeavor that has espoused so many new chasms within
his country, and in the world at large: religious contentions and political
turmoil, damage that neither Mr. Bush, nor his most luminous advisors
have the will nor the brains to remedy.
“But what does it amount
to?” says Twain, using one of his story’s characters, an
angel to convey the idea: “nothing at all. You gain nothing. You
always come out where you went in. For a million years the race has
gone on monotonously propagating itself and monotonously re-performing
this dull nonsense – to what end? No wisdom can guess! Who gets
a profit out of it? Nobody but a parcel of usurping little monarchs
and nobilities who despise you; would feel defiled if you touches them;
would shut the door in your face if you proposed to call; whom you slave
for, fight for, die for, and are not shamed of it, but proud.”
Sheehan couldn’t get
an answer for why Casey was killed; many more might want to live with
the illusion that their loss didn’t go in vain; but dead American
bodies continue to arrive back to US soil only at night; the wounded
are maltreated and hidden from the public eye, only occasional courageous
reports manage to break the silence and the perfected propaganda. In
Iraq, the sheer number of dead and dying defies belief; the entire country
is now gripped in an endless strife that shall define the cultural and
social disposition of future generations; it’s often easy to comprehend
and come to terms with a total number of deaths when they are presented
in a neatly packaged chart or a website, no matter how harrowing; but
once you learn of the individual stories, you wonder whether the days
of burning witches at the stake were better times: a young girl raped
before her own family and later killed with her own baby; entire families
massacred in broad daylight; militants chopping off limbs and ears and
noses under the watchful eye of the Iraqi police, for their victims
belonged to the wrong sect and stood on the wrong side of the war.
“The Mysterious Stranger”
ended up being a figment of a little boy’s imagination –
or was it? - its meaning is overreaching and very much real. The war
is real and frightening and hurtful; it’s not an intellectual
argument; it cannot be reduced to a few images and captions and editorials;
nothing can ever capture a moment where a mother receives the corpse
of a son or the scene of a father kneeling before the shattered body
of a daughter. It’s all real, and it’s all our own doing,
whether by supporting, financing and fighting the war, or by staying
silent as it rages on.
Ramzy Baroud
is a Palestinian author and journalist. His latest volume: The Second
Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle (Pluto
Press: London) is available at Amazon.com. He is the editor of PalestineChronicle.com
and can be contacted at [email protected]
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