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CounterPunch
March 19,
2003
A History of
War
By MARK TWAIN
Excerpts from The
Mysterious Stranger (Harper & Brothers, 1916).
One day, a little while after this, Satan appeared
again. We were always watching out for him, for life was never
very stagnant when he was by. He came upon us at that place in
the woods where we had first met him. Being boys, we wanted to
be entertained; we asked him to do a show for us.
"Very well," he said; "would
you like to see a history of the progress of the human race?
-- its development of that product which it calls civilization?"
We said we should.
So, with a thought, he turned the place
into the Garden of Eden, and we saw Abel praying by his altar;
then Cain came walking toward him with his club, and did not
seem to see us, and would have stepped on my foot if I had not
drawn it in. He spoke to his brother in a language which we did
not understand; then he grew violent and threatening, and we
knew what was going to happen, and turned away our heads for
the moment; but we heard the crash of the blows and heard the
shrieks and the groans; then there was silence, and we saw Abel
lying in his blood and gasping out his life, and Cain standing
over him and looking down at him, vengeful and unrepentant.
Then the vision vanished, and was followed
by a long series of unknown wars, murders, and massacres. Next
we had the Flood, and the Ark tossing around in the stormy waters,
with lofty mountains in the distance showing veiled and dim through
the rain. Satan said:
"The progress of your race was not
satisfactory. It is to have another chance now."
The scene changed, and we saw Noah overcome
with wine.
Next, we had Sodom and Gomorrah, and
"the attempt to discover two or three respectable persons
there," as Satan described it. Next, Lot and his daughters
in the cave.
Next came the Hebraic wars, and we saw
the victors massacre the survivors and their cattle, and save
the young girls alive and distribute them around.
Next we had Jael; and saw her slip into
the tent and drive the nail into the temple of her sleeping guest;
and we were so close that when the blood gushed out it trickled
in a little, red stream to our feet, and we could have stained
our hands in it if we had wanted to.
Next we had Egyptian wars, Greek wars,
Roman wars, hideous drenchings of the earth with blood; and we
saw the treacheries of the Romans toward the Carthaginians, and
the sickening spectacle of the massacre of those brave people.
Also we saw Caesar invade Britain -- "not that those barbarians
had done him any harm, but because he wanted their land, and
desired to confer the blessings of civilization upon their widows
and orphans," as Satan explained.
Next, Christianity was born. Then ages
of Europe passed in review before us, and we saw Christianity
and Civilization march hand in hand through those ages, "leaving
famine and death and desolation in their wake, and other signs
of the progress of the human race," as Satan observed.
And always we had wars, and more wars,
and still other wars -- all over Europe, all over the world.
"Sometimes in the private interest of royal families,"
Satan said, "sometimes to crush a weak nation; but never
a war started by the aggressor for any clean purpose -- there
is no such war in the history of the race."
"Now," said Satan, "you
have seen your progress down to the present, and you must confess
that it is wonderful -- in its way. We must now exhibit the future."
He showed us slaughters more terrible
in their destruction of life, more devastating in their engines
of war, than any we had seen.
"You perceive," he said, "that
you have made continual progress. Cain did his murder with a
club; the Hebrews did their murders with javelins and swords;
the Greeks and Romans added protective armor and the fine arts
of military organization and generalship; the Christian has added
guns and gunpowder; a few centuries from now he will have so
greatly improved the deadly effectiveness of his weapons of slaughter
that all men will confess that without Christian civilization
war must have remained a poor and trifling thing to the end of
time."
Then he began to laugh in the most unfeeling
way, and make fun of the human race, although he knew that what
he had been saying shamed us and wounded us. No one but an angel
could have acted so; but suffering is nothing to them; they do
not know what it is, except by hearsay.
More than once Seppi and I had tried
in a humble and diffident way to convert him, and as he had remained
silent we had taken his silence as a sort of encouragement; necessarily,
then, this talk of his was a disappointment to us, for it showed
that we had made no deep impression upon him. The thought made
us sad, and we knew then how the missionary must feel when he
has been cherishing a glad hope and has seen it blighted. We
kept our grief to ourselves, knowing that this was not the time
to continue our work.
Satan laughed his unkind laugh to a finish;
then he said: "It is a remarkable progress. In five or six
thousand years five or six high civilizations have risen, flourished,
commanded the wonder of the world, then faded out and disappeared;
and not one of them except the latest ever invented any sweeping
and adequate way to kill people. They all did their best -- to
kill being the chiefest ambition of the human race and the earliest
incident in its history -- but only the Christian civilization
has scored a triumph to be proud of. Two or three centuries from
now it will be recognized that all the competent killers are
Christians; then the pagan world will go to school to the Christian
-- not to acquire his religion, but his guns. The Turk and the
Chinaman will buy those to kill missionaries and converts with."
By this time his theater was at work
again, and before our eyes nation after nation drifted by, during
two or three centuries, a mighty procession, an endless procession,
raging, struggling, wallowing through seas of blood, smothered
in battle-smoke through which the flags glinted and the red jets
from the cannon darted; and always we heard the thunder of the
guns and the cries of the dying.
"And what does it amount to?"
said Satan, with his evil chuckle. "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 reperforming 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 touched them; would shut the door
in your face if you proposed to call; whom you slave for, fight
for, die for, and are not ashamed of it, but proud; whose existence
is a perpetual insult to you and you are afraid to resent it;
who are mendicants supported by your alms, yet assume toward
you the airs of benefactor toward beggar; who address you in
the language of master to slave, and are answered in the language
of slave to master; who are worshiped by you with your mouth,
while in your heart -- if you have one -- you despise yourselves
for it. The first man was a hypocrite and a coward, qualities
which have not yet failed in his line; it is the foundation upon
which all civilizations have been built. Drink to their perpetuation!
Drink to their augmentation! Drink to --"
Then he saw by our faces how much we
were hurt, and he cut his sentence short and stopped chuckling,
and his manner changed. He said, gently:
"No, we will drink one another's
health, and let civilization go. The wine which has flown to
our hands out of space by desire is earthly, and good enough
for that other toast; but throw away the glasses; we will drink
this one in wine which has not visited this world before."
Never a Just War (From
Chapter 9)
"Oh, it's true. 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. Sometimes
the noisy handful is right, sometimes wrong; but no matter, the
crowd follows it. The vast majority of the race, whether savage
or civilized, are secretly kind-hearted and shrink from inflicting
pain, but in the presence of the aggressive and pitiless minority
they don't dare to assert themselves. Think of it! One kind-hearted
creature spies upon another, and sees to it that he loyally helps
in iniquities which revolt both of them. Speaking as an expert,
I know that ninety-nine out of a hundred of your race were strongly
against the killing of witches when that foolishness was first
agitated by a handful of pious lunatics in the long ago. And
I know that even to-day, after ages of transmitted prejudice
and silly teaching, only one person in twenty puts any real heart
into the harrying of a witch. And yet apparently everybody hates
witches and wants them killed. Some day a handful will rise up
on the other side and make the most noise -- perhaps even a single
daring man with a big voice and a determined front will do it
-- and in a week all the sheep will wheel and follow him, and
witch-hunting will come to a sudden end.
"Monarchies, aristocracies, and
religions are all based upon that large defect in your race --
the individual's distrust of his neighbor, and his desire, for
safety's or comfort's sake, to stand well in his neighbor's eye.
These institutions will always remain, and always flourish, and
always oppress you, affront you, and degrade you, because you
will always be and remain slaves of minorities. There was never
a country where the majority of the people were in their secret
hearts loyal to any of these institutions."
I did not like to hear our race called
sheep, and said I did not think they were.
"Still, it is true, lamb,"
said Satan. "Look at you in war -- what mutton you are,
and how ridiculous!"
"In war? How?"
"There has never been a just one,
never an honorable one -- on the part of the instigator of the
war. I can see a million years ahead, and this rule will never
change in so many as half a dozen instances. The loud little
handful -- as usual -- will shout for the war. The pulpit will
-- warily and cautiously -- object -- at first; the great, big,
dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make
out why there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly,
"It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is no necessity
for it." 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 a hearing and be applauded;
but it will not last long; those others will outshout them, and
presently the anti-war audiences will thin out and lose popularity.
Before long you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned
from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious
men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned
speakers -- as earlier -- but do not dare to say so. And now
the whole nation -- pulpit and all -- 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 this process
of grotesque self-deception."
Yesterday's
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