Mark Twain Preface (2005)

from Chosen (2004-05)

The next piece is by Mark Twain, and is called The War Prayer. In it, Twain suggests that every prayer has an unspoken twin, a shadow prayer that completes the first, warning us, to be careful what we pray for.

He wrote it a century ago in response to the invasion and occupation of the Philippines. In two short years, between 1899 and 1901, the US military, without airplanes, killed over 500,000 Philipinos in a program called Benevolent Assimilation, ushering in an era of political instability and subservience to US economic interests that has continued to this day, and been replicated in various countries around the world.

In the perverted genius we might call the American High School of Historical Revisionism we are not taught that the invasion and massacre in the Philippines ever happened, nor that their existed an Anti-imperialist League, of which all-American author Mark Twain was a member, that actively protested that war.

Twain said, "I have seen that we do not intend to free but to subjugate the Philippines. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the Eagle put its talons on any other land ... I have a strong aversion to sending our bright boys out there to fight with a disgraced gun under a polluted flag."*

This is the shadow prayer to “God bless our troops and make safe our home.”

*Twain cited by Philip Foner in the book, "Mark Twain: Social Critic", p. 260.

The War Prayer by Mark Twain

from Chosen (2004-05)

written 1905 during Philippine-American War, published 1923

Listen!
O Lord our Father,
Our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle - be Thou near them!
With them, in spirit, we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe.
O Lord our God,
Help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells;
Help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead;
Help us to drown the thunder of their guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain;
Help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire;
Help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief;
Help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags, and hunger and thirst,
Sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter,
Broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -
For our sakes, who adore Thee, Lord,
Blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet!
We ask it, in the spirit of Love, of Him Who is the Source of Love,
and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts.
Amen
(Shalom, Salaam)