War Foretold: Mark Twain and the Sins of Our Race

By Ramzy Baroud

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 .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)