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The War Prayer
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Mark Twain wrote “The War Prayer” in 1904 but it went unpublished until November 1916, six years after his death. This was his response to the Philippine-American War of 1899-1902.
I feel obligated to point out that Mark Twain was a satirist. Sometimes people misunderstand satire and mistake it for the actual thing itself.
The point of satire is to hold up the object of scorn and expose its dark underbelly to ridicule.
The difficulty with “The War Prayer” seems to be the lack of caricature or other exaggeration that would have made the indictment of war unavoidably obvious. In todays world blind patriotic and religious fervor as motivations for war are a matter of course.
Generally people tend to do whatever they wish in pretended ignorance of the possibility of unconsidered, ignored or unintended consequences.
It doesn’t stop there.
People then go ahead and ascribe the authorship of their desires to a higher power and the victims of the aftermath become demonized as targets of a higher power’s wrath.
The twisted logic goes on and on.
A security state reduces our liberty and freedom, not protect it. There is no freedom in slavery. There is no strength in ignorance. There is no peace in war.
Our government as parroted in mainstream media “Newspeak” would have you believe otherwise. The predictions George Orwell made in his book “Nineteen Eighty-Four” just seem to have arrived a generation late.
Once again literature thought to be exaggerated to the point of satire today seems routine.
George Orwell didn’t foresee depleted uranium weapons. He never imagined that our body fluids would be subject to scrutiny nor that our personal genetic code become the basis of criminal convictions.
The same can be said of “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley and “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury. Books written to shock and warn, intended to rings bells and raise flags of warning, went unheeded by too many. Today reality itself causes those dire predictions to pale in comparison.
So if you are shocked by “The War Prayer” then that is a good thing. It was meant to be shocking. But do not miss the satire.
“The War Prayer” is from the very rare collector’s DVD “Peace” by Willie Nelson, Family and Friends.
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April 3rd, 2008 at 5:50 am
Twain must have right-wingers in his day too to wait after his death to publish the poem. The peom is appropriate for any war.
April 7th, 2008 at 3:40 am
There is ‘attempt’ and there is ‘result’, which always seems to veer from the ‘expected’. Why is that? Without forethought, aka ‘the pause’, shame accumulates. Because it is within this moment that you are in your true stance before God, humbled, not arrogant and powerful. All other attempts at being are mis-steps.
April 15th, 2008 at 3:47 pm
Thank you for posting this brilliant poem. I wish every child in an American school was required to read this, for context, before studying history and current affairs.