BS: Mark Twain opposes war in Iraq

Subject: RE: BS: Mark Twain opposes war in Iraq
From: Amos
Date: 16 Jan 06 - 11:48 PM

Great company to share an opinion or two withal....


A

Subject: RE: BS: Mark Twain opposes war in Iraq
From: GUEST,dianavan
Date: 16 Jan 06 - 09:55 PM

Mr. Happy - I would add to that; water, natural gas and hydro electricity. In other words, if you control the energy resources, you control the world.

Subject: RE: BS: Mark Twain opposes war in Iraq
From: Mr Happy
Date: 16 Jan 06 - 09:47 PM

The U. S. of A. has learned absolutely NOTHING in a littleover a century


WRONG!!

The U. S. of A. has learned absolutely SOMETHING in a littleover a century**


** its all about POWER!! + CONTROL!! of Resources: Rubber, Ores, Oil, Strategic Areas, you name it!!

Subject: RE: BS: Mark Twain opposes war in Iraq
From: Wilfried Schaum
Date: 16 Jan 06 - 04:01 AM

Not prophetic, but understanding history. It repeats wars endlessly.

Subject: RE: BS: Mark Twain opposes war in Iraq
From: Little Hawk
Date: 15 Jan 06 - 09:43 PM

Yup. Same old story. Good for Mark Twain. He was a farseeing and honest man with a lot of guts.

Subject: RE: BS: Mark Twain opposes war in Iraq
From: Greg F.
Date: 15 Jan 06 - 06:42 PM

And pathetic. The U. S. of A. has learned absolutely NOTHING in a littleover a century. To whit:

...The Filipinos, who took a jaundiced view of McKinley's "benevolent assimilation,'' proceeded to declare war on the United States in February 1899. By the time the benevolence died down in July 1902, Filipino losses would total twenty thousand soldiers and more than two hundred thousand civilians, against 4,200 Americans dead...

Mark Twain's position on the Philippine war, when it finally coalesced, beggared the Democrats' timidity and the Republicans' bombast. It quickly blossomed into the representative, and prophetic, voice of principled American dissent. It defined the public work of his last ten years:

"We were to relieve them from Spanish tyranny to enable them to set up a government of their own,' Mark Twain had pointed out to his interviewer in London, "and we were to stand by and see that it got a fair trial. It was not to be a government according to our ideas, but a government that represented the feeling of the majority of the Filipinos, a government according to Filipino ideas. That would have been a worthy mission for the United States.
   
"But now--why, we have got into a mess, a quagmire from which each fresh step renders the difficulty of extrication immensely greater· I'm sure I wish I could see what we were getting out of it, and all it means to us as a nation.''...

Dissent from the war or criticism of its aftermath carried a price. The dissenter was likely to be branded as nothing more than a damned antiimperialist, and that was the next thing to being a damned traitor. "There is no reasonable doubt about that," Fred C. Chamberlain would fulminate in the afterglow of victory. "Their work cost the lives of hundreds of American soldiers,--stabbed in the back as they stood out there on the firing line, by their own countrymen... All up and down this great country the Anti-Imperialists made speeches of sympathy for the men who were shooting at our own soldiers." And who were the Anti-Imperialists? They were the damn Masons, the damn women's assemblies, the damn Democrats, the damn inflammatory magazine Farm and Home. Not to mention the damn Anti-Imperialist League. This last was the outgrowth of that "Peace Appeal to Labor," signed in April by William Dean Howells and several of his friends. These activists, who included Andrew Carnegie and William James, founded the League in October 1899. It went approximately nowhere....


From: Powers, Ron: Mark Twain, A Life. NY, Simon & Schuster, 2005, Chapter 45

[ which, by the way is possibly the best book I've read in a decade ]

Subject: RE: BS: Mark Twain opposes war in Iraq
From: gnu
Date: 15 Jan 06 - 04:32 PM

Prophetic, indeed.

Subject: RE: BS: Mark Twain opposes war in Iraq
From: Peace
Date: 15 Jan 06 - 04:26 PM

Battle Hymn of the Republic
(Brought Down to Date)
by Mark Twain c. 1900

Mine eyes have seen the orgy of the launching of the Sword;
He is searching out the hoardings where the stranger's wealth is stored;
He hath loosed his fateful lightnings, and with woe and death has scored;
His lust is marching on.

I have seen him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps;
They have builded him an altar in the Eastern dews and damps;
I have read his doomful mission by the dim and flaring lamps --
His night is marching on.

I have read his bandit gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
"As ye deal with my pretensions, so with you my wrath shall deal;
Let the faithless son of Freedom crush the patriot with his heel;
Lo, Greed is marching on!"

We have legalized the strumpet and are guarding her retreat;*
Greed is seeking out commercial souls before his judgement seat;
O, be swift, ye clods, to answer him! be jubilant my feet!
Our god is marching on!

In a sordid slime harmonious Greed was born in yonder ditch,
With a longing in his bosom -- and for others' goods an itch.
As Christ died to make men holy, let men die to make us rich --
Our god is marching on.

Subject: BS: Mark Twain opposes war in Iraq
From: Bev and Jerry
Date: 15 Jan 06 - 04:21 PM

Initially, he had supported the war. "I said to myself, here are a people who have suffered," Twain explained, echoing the White House's rationale for action. "We can make them as free as ourselves, give them a government and country of their own, put a miniature of the American constitution afloat... start a brand new republic to take its place among the free nations of the world."

"But I have thought some more, since then," he said. Upon reading the 1898 Treaty of Paris and questioning the official motives for war, Twain concluded: "We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem."

"And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land."

Actually, he was opposing the U.S. policy in the Philippines following the Spanish-American War but, apparently, things haven't changed all that much in a century.

more

Bev and Jerry