Richard Hayse, I felt compelled to copy/share your post; Im using the old adage that its better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission TBT ==> Friday, June 22, 1906 For two years now, Christianity has been repeating, in Russia, the sort of industries in the way of massacre and mutilation with which it has been successfully Christendom in every century for nineteen hundred years, that it is the only right and true religion—the one and only religion of peace and love. For two years, now, the ultra-Christian Government of Russia has been officially ordering and conducting massacres of its Jewish subjects. These massacres have been so frequent that we have become almost indifferent to them. The accounts of them hardly affect us more than do accounts of corners in a railroad stock in which we have no money invested. We have become so used to their described horrors that we hardly shudder now when we read of them. Here are some of the particulars of one of the latest efforts of these humble twentieth century disciples to persuade the unbeliever to come into the fold of the meek and gentle Savior. {Insert} Horrible details have been sent out by the correspondent of the Bourse Gazette, who arrived in Bialystok in company with Deputy Schepkin on Saturday, and who managed to send his story by a messenger Sunday afternoon. The correspondent, who accompanied Schepkin directly to the hospital escorted by a Corporal’s guard, says he was utterly unnerved by the sights he witnessed there. “Merely saying that the bodies were mutilated,” the correspondent writes, “fails to describe the awful facts. The faces of the dead have lost all human resemblance. The body of Teacher Apstein lay on the grass with the hands tied. In the face and eyes had been hammered three-inch nails. Rioters entered his home, killing him thus, and then murdered the rest of his family of seven. When the body arrived at the hospital it was also marked with bayonet thrusts. “Beside the body of Apstein lay that of a child of 10 years, whose leg had been chopped off with an axe. Here also were the dead from the Schlachter home, where, according to witnesses, soldiers came and plundered the house and killed the wife, son, and a neighbor’s daughter, and seriously wounded Schlachter and his two daughters. “I am told that soldiers entered the apartments of the Lapidus brothers, which were crowded with people who had fled from the streets for safety, an ordered the Christians to separate themselves from the Jews. A Christian student named Dikar protested and was killed on the spot. Then all the Jews were shot. “From the wounded in the hospital the correspondent heard many pitiable stories, all of the same general tenor. Here is the account of a badly wounded merchant named Nevyazhiky: “’I live in the suburbs. Learning of the pogrom, I tried to reach the town through the fields, but was intercepted by roughs. My brother was killed, my arm and leg were broken, my skull was fractured, and I was stabbed twice in the side. I fainted from loss of blood, and revived to find a soldier standing over me, who asked: “What, are you still alive! Shall I bayonet you?” I begged him to spare my life. The roughs came again, but spared me, saying:”He will die; let him suffer longer.”’ The correspondent, who adopts the bitterest tone toward the Government, holds that the pogrom undoubtedly was provoked, and attributes thee responsibility to Police Lieutenant Sheremetieff. He declares that not only the soldiers, but their officers, participated, and that he himself was a witness as late as Saturday to the shooting down of a Jewish girl from the window of a hotel by Lieut. Miller of the Vladimir Regiment. The Governor of the Province of Grodno, who happened to be passing at the moment, ordered an investigation.{/Insert} The pulpit and the optimist are always talking about the human race’s steady march toward ultimate perfection. As usual, they leave out the statistics. It is the pulpit’s way—the optimist’s way. Is there any discoverable advance toward moderation between the massacre of the Albigenes and these massacres of Russian Jews? There is one difference. I elaborate cruelty and brutality the modern massacre exceeds the ancient one. Is any advance discoverable between Bartholomew’s Day and these Jewish massacres? Yes. The same difference again appears: the modern Russian Christian and his Czar have advanced to an extravagance of bloody and bestial atrocity undreamed of by the crude brethren of three hundred and thirty-five years ago. The Gospel of Peace is always making a good deal of noise with its mouth; always rejoicing in the progress it is making toward final perfection, and always diligently neglecting to furnish the statistics. George III reigned sixty years, the longest reign in English history, up to his time. When his revered successor, Victoria, turned the sixty-year corner—thus scoring a new long-reign record—the event was celebrated with great pomp and circumstance and public rejoicing in England and her colonies. Amoong the statistics fetched out for general admiration were these: that for each year of the sixty of her reign, Victoria’s Christian soldiers had fought in a separate and distant war. Meantime, the possessions of England had swollen to such a degree, by depredations committed upon helpless and godless pagans, that there were not figures enough in Great Britain to set down the stolen acreage and they had to import a lot from other countries. There are no peaceful nations now, except those unhappy ones whose borders have not been invaded by the Gospel of Peace. All Christendom is a soldier-camp. During all the past generation, the Christian poor have been taxed almost to starvation-point support the giant armaments which the Christian Governments have built up, each to protect itself from the rest of the brotherhood and, incidentally, to snatch any patch of real estate left exposed by its savage owner. King Leopold II of Belgium—probably the most intensely Christian monarch, except Alexander VI, that has escaped hell this far—has stolen an entire kingdom in Africa, and in fourteen years of Christian endeavor there has reduced the population of thirty millions to fifteen, by murder, mutilation, overwork, robbery, rapine—confiscating the helpless native’s very labor, and giving him nothing in return but salvation and a home in heaven, furnished at the last moment by the Christian priest. Within this last generation each Christian power has turned the bulk of its attention to finding newer and still newer, and more effective ways of killing Christians—and, incidentally, a pagan now and then—and the surest way to get rich quickly, in Christ’s earthly kingdom, is to invent a gun that can kill more Christians at one shot than any other existing gun. Griffin, Benjamin and Smith, Harriet, eds. “The Mark Twain Papers –Autobiography of Mark Twain: Vol 2.” University of California Press, 2013; pp.132-134.
Posted on: Fri, 03 Oct 2014 00:26:50 +0000
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