Motley of Satire

 I was writing in the previous post about what I called the "counter-tradition" of European and American writers who criticized imperialism. What strikes me though about reading the examples of this counter-tradition in Sven Lindqvist's book—and in the separate examples I assembled—is how often these writers felt the need to present their criticism in the indirect form of sarcasm. 

The result is that I need to provide a whole paragraph of context, lest the contemporary reader get the false impression that Mark Twain actually meant it, say, when he wrote that "the world belongs to [...] the white man." 

The great anti-colonial writer Multatuli, in his classic Max Havelaar, recognized and deplored this tendency (though he could himself wield sarcasm and humor with the best of them): "The devil! Why must indignation and sorrow so often masquerade in the motley of satire? The devil! Why must a tear be accompanied by a grin, in order to be understood?" (Edwards trans.)

Perhaps part of the explanation for this phenomenon is that the pretensions of European colonialism just particularly lent themselves to satire. Many other would-be conquerors and aggressors have rained war and bloodshed on humanity through history, after all—but few others have had the gall the insist all the while that they are doing so for the victims' own good. 

But doubtless part of it too is that it was a mechanism of psychological defense. The fact that one's own segment of humanity was exterminating whole irreplaceable civilizations, cultures, languages, and branches of the human family was a thought too monstrous to be faced directly. And so, the "motley of satire" was required. 

Mark Twain in particular—throughout his work—had a clear sense of just how much motley was generally required to disguise his "indignation and sorrow." His was a grin that was nearly always hiding tears—at least in his final decades. 

As Multatuli (Eduard Dekker) himself knew and practiced—the "motley" of humor is necessary sometimes. To quote Stephen Spender: "Comedy often consists in saying what—if said seriously—would seem almost unsayable." The reality of European colonial genocide might have been one of those things that was practically unsayable if said directly. 

But occasionally writers even at the time it was occurring could drop the role of jester and simply cry from the heart with "indignation and sorrow." Before I started in on Twain's Following the Equator, I was reading Moncure Conway's travelogue from the same era—My Pilgrimage to the Wise Men of the East—which covers many of the same themes and locales. 

Conway offers a summation in one paragraph of the history of aggressive U.S. foreign policy that appears particularly relevant as we are now bombing Iran, attacking civilian infrastructure, threatening to wipe out Iran's "whole civilization," bombing Somalia, and governing Venezuela from afar as a neo-colonial protectorate. Here are "indignation and sorrow" unmitigated by any filter of irony: 

The gentlemen whom I have mentioned as having met in New York, some of my early friends, had like myself memories of the years when as boys we lit patriotic bonfires for our country’s criminal victories over Mexico; we remembered well the glories gained by our flag by the massacres of our poor aborigines; and how patriotism had summoned us to run with the bloodhounds to hunt men and women escaping from slavery and return them to bondage. It could not occur to any of them that in a few years that same kind of patriotism would summon us to rejoice in a repetition on Spain of the outrage on Mexico, or to be elated when, after freeing four millions of coloured people, we should proceed to purchase ten millions of them,  [in the Philippines] and slay and torture them into submission. Still less could any of us imagine that the artificial cultivation and cult of flag-worship could blind our nation as a whole to the monstrous absurdity that we should assume control over any foreign — especially any coloured — race when we are unable to protect our own negro citizens from being freely slain and even burned alive. 

No "motley" of satire is used there to hide the author's true feelings. Here are hard facts baldly stated, and inescapable. And they remain inescapable to this day. As Harold Pinter would put it, no less bitterly, "America's God" marches on—leaving just as many corpses in its wake as ever.