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
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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
> 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.