Good Reads Library
Twain Wrote This More Than 100 Years Ago, But It Could Have Been Written This Morning
For those of you who are like the Man and myself and can't stand to listen to El Shrubbo in sound bites, never mind a State of the Union speech, I bring you the words of one of my own personal heroes: Samuel Clemens a.k.a. Mark Twain. He was writing about the Spanish American War and what was done to the Phillipines, but it sounds eerily familiar.
"We were to relieve them from Spanish tyranny to enable them to set up a government of their own....and we were to stand by and see that it got a fair trial. It was not not to be a government according to our ideas, but a government that represented the feeling of the majority of 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 what it means to us as a nation"
Clemens went on to write a savage piece of sarcasm he titled "Sitting In Darkness". And what he writes sounds a lot like the reasonings of the current regime:
"There have been lies; yes, but they were told in a good cause. We have been treacherous; but that was only in order that real good might come out of apparent evil. True, we have crushed a deceived and confiding people; we have turned against the weak and the friendless who trusted us; we have bought a Shadow from an enemy that hadn't it to sell.... we have invited our clean young men to shoulder a discredited musket and do bandit's work under a flag which bandits have been accustomed to fear, not to follow; we have debauched America's honor and blackened her face before the world; but each detail was for the best. We know this. The Head of every State and Sovereignty in Christendom and ninety per cent. of every legislative body in Christendom, including our Congress and our fifty State Legislatures, are members not only of the church, but also of the Blessings-of-Civilization Trust. This world-girdling accumulation of trained morals, high principles, and justice, cannot do an unright thing, an unfair thing, an ungenerous thing, an unclean thing. It knows what it is about. Give yourself no uneasiness; it is all right."
Sad to think how little things have changed in 110 years......
