Well, that's quite remarkable given it was written in 1901. Twain using the simple but controversial technique of regarding colonized people as real humans with their own interests, politics, and capacity for reason to predict how badly colonialism would turn out. But also some details:
> And later would Germany say to her soldiers: 'March through America and slay, giving no quarter; make the German face there, as has been our Hun-face here, a terror for a thousand years; march through the Great Republic and slay, slay, slay, carving a road for our offended religion through its heart and bowels?' Would Germany do like this to America, to England, to France, to Russia? Or only to China the helpless--imitating the elephant's assault upon the field-mice?
They certainly did have a go at that, twice.
- correctly regarding the Boxer rebellion as an unnecessary fiasco caused by exploitation
- pointlessness and inhumanity of Boer war
- predicting American liberation of Cuba would turn to exploitation, and then revolution
- arguing that America should have liberated the Philippines rather than simply taken over the Spanish colony .. which they eventually did, later, from the Japanese
- pointing out that the colonized will see the need to technologically advance to the point that they can fight, anticipating the Washington Naval Conference and the meteoric rise of Japan (who immediately start their role as colonizing power, rather than colonized, by murdering their way through parts of China)
BTW, if anyone is having trouble reading this article, assume that it is all being said in a tone of extremely heavy sarcasm by Twain.
082349872349872 294 days ago [-]
> given it was written in 1901
Some of it could probably have been written at times earlier than 1901 as well, but:
- the 1823 Monroe Doctrine was sold as being anti-colonial rather than pro-slavery (cf Congress of Vienna 1815 anti-slave-trade language)
- the 1846 Mexican-American war was sold as being pro-Manifest Destiny rather than pro-slavery (cf Texas' secession from Mexico)
whereas:
- the 1898 annexation of the Philippines* had no such idealistic covers (being neither anti-colonial nor anywhere near an "American hemisphere")
> It became necessary to destroy the town to save it —reported by PGA (1968)
* in connexion with the Spanish-American war; I find it amusing that the local Manila term "trabajo" is a loan word.
082349872349872 294 days ago [-]
See also Twain —safely posthumously published— on criteria for getting into heaven[0], and what people wind up doing[1] once they're there.
[0] orvat n tbbq ubfg gb bar'f zvpeborf
[1] abg fgehzzvat ba unecf naq fvatvat cenvfrf, ng yrnfg abg sbe rgreavgl
NemoNobody 288 days ago [-]
Parallel this with White Man's Burden and you have the two sides to the coin of Western Imperialism
kragen 295 days ago [-]
a more complete copy of this essay is at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/To_the_Person_Sitting_in_Dark... — to my mind, leaving off the introductory sections explaining what is being talked about renders the first part of Twain's text needlessly obscure
another useful piece of context is that, as twain mentions, the maxim gun (01884) had already been invented and was being used for warfare throughout the colonial world, upsetting the balance of power in much the same way as the atomic bomb in 01945. centuries before, in 'decline and fall', gibbon had declared that even the worst tyrant required the tacit consent of the governed, because the populace necessarily vastly outnumbered the soldiers¹, so sufficient oppression would lead them to rise in revolt and shake off any tyranny, be they armed only with pitchforks
the maxim gun changed that equation; as long as the ammunition held out, a few englishmen with a maxim gun could hold off any number of charging zulus armed with spears. however valiant the zulus were, they had no steel mills. for three thousand years, battles had been decided by masses of men fearlessly facing death, but in the age of the maxim gun, battles were instead decided by mass production with precision machine tools. so the following century was filled with atrocities even genghis khan couldn't have imagined, as the industrialized nations and their armies ran roughshod over peasant societies the world over. one of these is what twain laments as a 'strange and over-showy onslaught of an elephant upon a nest of field-mice'
twain wrote this essay at the same time that belgium's king leopold was using this new power to perpetrate thitherto unimaginable crimes on the congo free state, crimes which shock the most jaded conscience to this day; but he could not write about them, because it would still be three years until the casement report was released, so he remained blissfully ignorant of the havoc 'civilization' was wreaking in its heart of darkness
kalashnikov changed this significantly when his design enabled the vietnamese and the afghans to rout the colonial powers that occupied them, atomic bombs be damned; but this re-democratization of mass murder was cold comfort to the piles of skulls in kampuchea's killing fields, slaughtered for their privilege by their own indigenous kalashnikov-armed tyranny, in the name of socialism and equality, much as the usa slaughtered surrendering filipinos in the name of civilization
today in ukraine we are witnessing a new phase of the mass-production of death, as ukraine and russia race to bring about the future depicted in 'slaughterbots'. drones have made tanks and icbms obsolete, because although an icbm can strike harder, it cannot strike precisely—it obliterates not only the resistance to your attack but the objective you had hoped to capture. whoever can build drones fast enough, blow up the other guy's workshops and leadership, and conceal their own, will ultimately prevail. whatever public opinion may say about them, they will say, oderunt dum metuant, and answer protests with assassinations
what could be more civilized, after all
______
¹ gibbon's reasoning was that if more than a tenth of the able-bodied men of the country were under arms, fields would go fallow and crops would rot unharvested, and not only the peasants but also the legionaries would starve. he was perhaps unfamiliar with the economic history of peoples such as the mongols and the comanche, and with historical genocides such as genghis's annihilation of the khwarazmian empire, though surely he knew about the fates of melos and thebes, not to mention numerous barbarian tribes who were replaced by romans. still, it's true that, until the 19th century, popular uprisings were frequently successful, even against standing armies
ggm 295 days ago [-]
Hillaire Belloc (1898): "The Modern Traveller"
A Mutiny resulted.
I never shall forget the way
That Blood upon this awful day
Preserved us all from death.
He stood upon a little mound,
Cast his lethargic eyes around,
And said beneath his breath:
"Whatever happens we have got
The Maxim Gun, and they have not."
ebcode 294 days ago [-]
Thanks for adding more context. Twain was a member of the American Anti-Imperialist League, something I never knew existed, and found this essay linked from the Wikipedia entry on that organization.
I found it surprising, and thought others might as well.
hluska 295 days ago [-]
Forget the leading zeroes, what’s with the lack of capital letters? I know that I’m old and accept that, but they help a lot.
omnicognate 295 days ago [-]
I'm with you. This one at least has punctuation, but the lack of capitals makes it materially harder to read and therefore makes me less likely to put the effort in to read it. When people write like this and don't even use punctuation, I stop reading as soon as I encounter the first missing full stop I have to mentally insert myself.
huppeldepup 294 days ago [-]
Could those changes be intended to “poison the well” for llm training?
AnimalMuppet 294 days ago [-]
No. IIRC, kragen uses them as an "idiot filter" - if you aren't willing to wade through the non-use of capital letters and focus on the content, then he doesn't want to bother interacting with you.
Personally, I think that's a bit jerkish when posting on a public forum. And I expect there are two kinds of people who are willing to put up with that, and read it anyway:
1. Those who are such fans of his that they'll read anything he posts, regardless of how difficult he makes it. (I expect this to be a rather small set.)
2. Those who don't care all that much about standard usage. This is not quite so small a set, but it seems to me to be somewhat orthogonal to his intended effect. They may be "only content matters" people, but they also may be just purely antisocial in the areas of communication and grammar.
Personally, I think it's a bummer that he does this. He actually had something decent to say in this post, and we're all talking about the style instead, purely because he insists on doing it this way.
kragen 280 days ago [-]
i think 'asshole filter' is a more accurate term; people who are looking to harangue me about text formatting are distributed all across the multidimensional intelligence spectrum, but have in common that they are very unpleasant people who i do not want to interact with
omnicognate 294 days ago [-]
Unfortunately his idiot filter has triggered mine, so I will have to live without the benefit of his no doubt profound wisdom.
kragen 294 days ago [-]
all?
082349872349872 294 days ago [-]
All the People for whom Capitaliſation matters, is what I would gueſs They may have meant by the Original Pronoun.
(an uncharitable reading of the events of that day suggests that Custer's plan had been to Do Unto the Villagers And Then Run, but it ran into two problems: (a) the village's warriors became aware of his presence, and (b) they were mounted as well —or better— than Custer had been:
Gha mit em Schiff über ds Meer
Choufe mir äs Ross u nes Gwehr
Schliesse mi de Indianer a
U kämpfä gägä bös wiss Maa
kragen 294 days ago [-]
i suspect that custer would have been victorious had he had maxim guns, but they hadn't been invented yet. (he didn't even bring the gatlings that were available.) that battle is notable as being one of the last significant battles the us armed forces lost to indigenous americans, and maxim's invention eight years later is, i think, a major reason for that
082349872349872 294 days ago [-]
Agreed, just pointing out that the import of "Bring Packs" repeated twice is that even had he had gatlings or maxims (or even brownings or vulcans), he lacked the requisite ammunition for sustaining high rate of fire: that was all with Benteen in the baggage train.
kragen 294 days ago [-]
indeed! and perhaps the reason the colonialist industrial military juggernaut spared some of the world for decades (and never quite reached, for example, ethiopia or the andaman islands) was the outdated tactics of officers like custer, whose deaths opened up the ranks to younger officers who intuitively understood industrialized warfare
baud147258 294 days ago [-]
Indochina didn't need many kalashnikovs to remove the French, just the support of a powerful ally that the French didn't dare directly attack, just like Afghanistan was helped by the US. On the other hand kalashnikovs didn't really help the Chechen during the second Chechen war.
> drones have made tanks obsolete
Considering how the Ukrainians are still asking for tanks and other armored vehicles, I'm not sure it's the case already, at least in that current conflict.
kragen 294 days ago [-]
these are fair points. kalashnikovs didn't help the cambodians much either, as i said
keep in mind, though, that when afghanistan routed the usa at the end of their long occupation, they didn't have the support of a powerful ally (unless you count al qaeda, or certain factions within pakistani intelligence agencies)
it's true that tanks aren't completely obsolete—and probably won't be. (a tank can still grind an unarmed protester into red goo under its tracks, after all.) they've only been made obsolete in the same way that the maxim gun made spears obsolete; every infantryman still carries a bayonet into battle. he just mounts that spear point on the end of his fully automatic rifle¹
¹ miniaturized by kalashnikov to the point where it is the soldier's instrument rather than the other way around
CoastalCoder 295 days ago [-]
What's with the leading zeros on the year numbers?
vundercind 295 days ago [-]
As far as I can tell its main purpose is to ensure half of any thread that features someone using it is about that instead of the actual topic.
In that sense, what’s “with” it is poor writing.
kragen 294 days ago [-]
matthew 7:6
AnimalMuppet 294 days ago [-]
If you're invoking that, you might keep an eye on Matthew 7:1...
294 days ago [-]
bumbledraven 295 days ago [-]
In many ways, it would make more sense to use a leading 1 for A.D. years instead of a leading 0. This way, 1984 would become 11984, and the year when Caesar died, 44 B.C. (which is astronomical year –43) would be the year 09957. With this system, which is known as the Holocene calendar, we can specify any year during the period of history for which we know actual year numbers without having to distinguish between B.C. and A.D. (and deal with quirky off-by-one errors due to skipping the year 0) or use negative numbers.
That's the dumbest shit I read today, but I just woke up. Changing one arbitrary date for another. There where humans and civilizations 12kya (kilo years ago). I much prefer the 'kya' notation. It doesn't matter if you're 50 years off when taking about things 8kya.
you're in for one hell of a ride these next 30 years
what happens exactly is up to you, but the 20th century will be nothing by comparison
the_gipsy 294 days ago [-]
can you tell me anything substantial?
nullhole 295 days ago [-]
The better question is: why only one leading zero.
southernplaces7 294 days ago [-]
>was filled with atrocities even genghis khan couldn't have imagined
Excellent comment. My only quibble was this. Genghis Khan could have easily imagined the mega genocides of the 20th century, since he did the same. Under his own rule and systematic conquests he had roughly 30 to 40 million people slaughtered according to many estimates. That goes beyond even the ballpark of Hitler and Stalin.
Earlier still, fairly credible estimates of the death toll behind Ceasear's conquest of Gaul claim roughly a couple million killed by the future dictator's military forces. Nothing like Khan, but well into the range of some of the larger genocides from the 20th century
Of course, the Nazi holocaust was rather unique in all human history for how systematically and industrially part of it was done but deliberate mass death is ultimately the ame thing regardless of how it's executed.
Modern weapons are emphatically not necessary for genocide. One could ask the tutsis and hutus of today what they think of that idea too.
kragen 294 days ago [-]
indeed, the death counts are not what genghis couldn't have imagined (though he only beats hitler and stalin if you take operation barbarossa off the table)
> And later would Germany say to her soldiers: 'March through America and slay, giving no quarter; make the German face there, as has been our Hun-face here, a terror for a thousand years; march through the Great Republic and slay, slay, slay, carving a road for our offended religion through its heart and bowels?' Would Germany do like this to America, to England, to France, to Russia? Or only to China the helpless--imitating the elephant's assault upon the field-mice?
They certainly did have a go at that, twice.
- correctly regarding the Boxer rebellion as an unnecessary fiasco caused by exploitation
- pointlessness and inhumanity of Boer war
- predicting American liberation of Cuba would turn to exploitation, and then revolution
- arguing that America should have liberated the Philippines rather than simply taken over the Spanish colony .. which they eventually did, later, from the Japanese
- references to a MacArthur in the Philippines, which made me check, and of course they're father and son: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/macarth...
- pointing out that the colonized will see the need to technologically advance to the point that they can fight, anticipating the Washington Naval Conference and the meteoric rise of Japan (who immediately start their role as colonizing power, rather than colonized, by murdering their way through parts of China)
BTW, if anyone is having trouble reading this article, assume that it is all being said in a tone of extremely heavy sarcasm by Twain.
Some of it could probably have been written at times earlier than 1901 as well, but:
- the 1823 Monroe Doctrine was sold as being anti-colonial rather than pro-slavery (cf Congress of Vienna 1815 anti-slave-trade language)
- the 1846 Mexican-American war was sold as being pro-Manifest Destiny rather than pro-slavery (cf Texas' secession from Mexico)
whereas:
- the 1898 annexation of the Philippines* had no such idealistic covers (being neither anti-colonial nor anywhere near an "American hemisphere")
> It became necessary to destroy the town to save it —reported by PGA (1968)
* in connexion with the Spanish-American war; I find it amusing that the local Manila term "trabajo" is a loan word.
[0] orvat n tbbq ubfg gb bar'f zvpeborf
[1] abg fgehzzvat ba unecf naq fvatvat cenvfrf, ng yrnfg abg sbe rgreavgl
another useful piece of context is that, as twain mentions, the maxim gun (01884) had already been invented and was being used for warfare throughout the colonial world, upsetting the balance of power in much the same way as the atomic bomb in 01945. centuries before, in 'decline and fall', gibbon had declared that even the worst tyrant required the tacit consent of the governed, because the populace necessarily vastly outnumbered the soldiers¹, so sufficient oppression would lead them to rise in revolt and shake off any tyranny, be they armed only with pitchforks
the maxim gun changed that equation; as long as the ammunition held out, a few englishmen with a maxim gun could hold off any number of charging zulus armed with spears. however valiant the zulus were, they had no steel mills. for three thousand years, battles had been decided by masses of men fearlessly facing death, but in the age of the maxim gun, battles were instead decided by mass production with precision machine tools. so the following century was filled with atrocities even genghis khan couldn't have imagined, as the industrialized nations and their armies ran roughshod over peasant societies the world over. one of these is what twain laments as a 'strange and over-showy onslaught of an elephant upon a nest of field-mice'
twain wrote this essay at the same time that belgium's king leopold was using this new power to perpetrate thitherto unimaginable crimes on the congo free state, crimes which shock the most jaded conscience to this day; but he could not write about them, because it would still be three years until the casement report was released, so he remained blissfully ignorant of the havoc 'civilization' was wreaking in its heart of darkness
kalashnikov changed this significantly when his design enabled the vietnamese and the afghans to rout the colonial powers that occupied them, atomic bombs be damned; but this re-democratization of mass murder was cold comfort to the piles of skulls in kampuchea's killing fields, slaughtered for their privilege by their own indigenous kalashnikov-armed tyranny, in the name of socialism and equality, much as the usa slaughtered surrendering filipinos in the name of civilization
today in ukraine we are witnessing a new phase of the mass-production of death, as ukraine and russia race to bring about the future depicted in 'slaughterbots'. drones have made tanks and icbms obsolete, because although an icbm can strike harder, it cannot strike precisely—it obliterates not only the resistance to your attack but the objective you had hoped to capture. whoever can build drones fast enough, blow up the other guy's workshops and leadership, and conceal their own, will ultimately prevail. whatever public opinion may say about them, they will say, oderunt dum metuant, and answer protests with assassinations
what could be more civilized, after all
______
¹ gibbon's reasoning was that if more than a tenth of the able-bodied men of the country were under arms, fields would go fallow and crops would rot unharvested, and not only the peasants but also the legionaries would starve. he was perhaps unfamiliar with the economic history of peoples such as the mongols and the comanche, and with historical genocides such as genghis's annihilation of the khwarazmian empire, though surely he knew about the fates of melos and thebes, not to mention numerous barbarian tribes who were replaced by romans. still, it's true that, until the 19th century, popular uprisings were frequently successful, even against standing armies
I found it surprising, and thought others might as well.
Personally, I think that's a bit jerkish when posting on a public forum. And I expect there are two kinds of people who are willing to put up with that, and read it anyway:
1. Those who are such fans of his that they'll read anything he posts, regardless of how difficult he makes it. (I expect this to be a rather small set.)
2. Those who don't care all that much about standard usage. This is not quite so small a set, but it seems to me to be somewhat orthogonal to his intended effect. They may be "only content matters" people, but they also may be just purely antisocial in the areas of communication and grammar.
Personally, I think it's a bummer that he does this. He actually had something decent to say in this post, and we're all talking about the style instead, purely because he insists on doing it this way.
see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy_and_Mehitabel#:~:text=Be...
"als ich eines morgens aus unruhigen träumen erwachte fand ich mich in meinem bett zu einem unaussergewöhnlichen ungeziefer verwandelt"
At Greasy Grass, Custer learned this caveat the hard way: https://www.nps.gov/libi/learn/historyculture/custer-s-last-...
(an uncharitable reading of the events of that day suggests that Custer's plan had been to Do Unto the Villagers And Then Run, but it ran into two problems: (a) the village's warriors became aware of his presence, and (b) they were mounted as well —or better— than Custer had been:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Little_Bighorn#R... )
> drones have made tanks obsolete
Considering how the Ukrainians are still asking for tanks and other armored vehicles, I'm not sure it's the case already, at least in that current conflict.
keep in mind, though, that when afghanistan routed the usa at the end of their long occupation, they didn't have the support of a powerful ally (unless you count al qaeda, or certain factions within pakistani intelligence agencies)
it's true that tanks aren't completely obsolete—and probably won't be. (a tank can still grind an unarmed protester into red goo under its tracks, after all.) they've only been made obsolete in the same way that the maxim gun made spears obsolete; every infantryman still carries a bayonet into battle. he just mounts that spear point on the end of his fully automatic rifle¹
keeping that in mind, compare the relative prominence of armored vehicles vs. drones/missiles/carbombs in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Russian_invasi...
______
¹ miniaturized by kalashnikov to the point where it is the soldier's instrument rather than the other way around
In that sense, what’s “with” it is poor writing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar
you're in for one hell of a ride these next 30 years
what happens exactly is up to you, but the 20th century will be nothing by comparison
Excellent comment. My only quibble was this. Genghis Khan could have easily imagined the mega genocides of the 20th century, since he did the same. Under his own rule and systematic conquests he had roughly 30 to 40 million people slaughtered according to many estimates. That goes beyond even the ballpark of Hitler and Stalin.
Earlier still, fairly credible estimates of the death toll behind Ceasear's conquest of Gaul claim roughly a couple million killed by the future dictator's military forces. Nothing like Khan, but well into the range of some of the larger genocides from the 20th century
Of course, the Nazi holocaust was rather unique in all human history for how systematically and industrially part of it was done but deliberate mass death is ultimately the ame thing regardless of how it's executed.
Modern weapons are emphatically not necessary for genocide. One could ask the tutsis and hutus of today what they think of that idea too.