LONDON — 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, left me with an eerie feeling. 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 antiwar 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.