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Title: War Foretold: Mark Twain amd the Sins of Race
Source:
Information Clearing House
URL Source: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17898.htm
Published: Jun 19, 2007
Author: Ramzy Baroud
Post Date: 2007-06-19 07:42:29 by Zoroaster
Keywords: None
Views: 109
Comments: 6
NEWS YOU WON'T FIND ON CNN Send Page To a Friend War Foretold: Mark Twain and the Sins of Our Race By Ramzy Baroud 0-6/17/07 " ICH" -- -- 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 http://Amazon.com. He is the editor of http://PalestineChronicle.com and can be contacted at editor@palestinechronicle.com
Poster Comment: The "Mysterious Stranger" is Mark Twain's darkest work of fiction, which may explain why, for the most part, it was ignored by the publishing houses of his day and is virtually unknow among the reading public today.
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#1. To: Zoroaster, *Black Ops - Psyops* (#0)
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; I've always enjoyed Twain. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Stranger The Mysterious Stranger is an unfinished work written by the American author Mark Twain that was worked on periodically from roughly 1890 up until his death in 1910. The body of work is a serious social commentary by Twain addressing his ideas of the Moral Sense and the "damned human race". A "complete" version was published posthumously in 1916 by Twain's biographer Albert Bigelow Paine under the name The Mysterious Stranger, A Romance, but this version is under scrutiny concerning the extent of editing performed on Twain's manuscripts by Paine. The published version is a novella. Here it is online for free: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/TwaMyst.html
"I know your race. It is made up of sheep. It is governed by minorities, seldom or never by majorities. It suppresses its feelings and its beliefs and follows the handful that makes the most noise." -Twain
-Twain Wow! Another new Twain for me.
We just have to learn not to take a chimp-out as seriously as if it came from one of us.
McCarthy is dead and McGinny don't know it; McGinny is dead and McCarthy don't know it; They're both of them dead and they're lying in bed and neither one knows that the other is dead.
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/TwaMyst.html Thanks for posting it. I just read it. It's GREAT.
The illegal we do immediately. The Unconstitutional takes a little longer. - Henry Kissinger.
From the very ending of "The Mysterious Stranger", the character of "Satan" speaking here.... "And you are not you--you have no body, no blood, no bones, you are but a thought. I myself have no existence; I am but a dream--your dream, creature of your imagination. In a moment you will have realized this, then you will banish me from your visions and I shall dissolve into the nothingness out of which you made me.... "I am perishing already--I am failing--I am passing away. In a little while you will be alone in shoreless space, to wander its limitless solitudes without friend or comrade forever--for you will remain a thought, the only existent thought, and by your nature inextinguishable, indestructible. But I, your poor servant, have revealed you to yourself and set you free. Dream other dreams, and better! "Strange! that you should not have suspected years ago--centuries, ages, eons, ago!--for you have existed, companionless, through all the eternities. Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane--like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell--mouths mercy and invented hell--mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!... "You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks--in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present; you should have recognized them earlier. "It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream--a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought--a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!" He vanished, and left me appalled; for I knew, and realized, that all he had said was true.
"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."
Ron Paul for President
#2. To: Zoroaster (#0)
#3. To: JiminyC (#2)
"I know your race. It is made up of sheep. It is governed by minorities, seldom or never by majorities. It suppresses its feelings and its beliefs and follows the handful that makes the most noise."
Ron Paul for President
#4. To: JiminyC (#2)
It suppresses its feelings and its beliefs and follows the handful that makes the most noise.
#5. To: robin (#1)
Here it is online for free:
#6. To: robin (#1)
 | Capitalism is NOT an economic system, it's a RELIGION for ASSHOLES! |
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