Mark Twain reflects on the folly of trying to civilize barbarians

Winston Churchill's A History of the English Speaking Peoples has a place of honour on Walt's bookshelf. I have been an English-speaking people since the age of five. (Like Stewie Griffin, I at first spoke only to the family dog. But I digress...) I am quietly proud to be a member of the race -- please forgive the term -- which has brought what passes for civilization in its highest form to the nether regions of the world.

The trouble is that what we think of as civilization and civilized behaviour does not always equate or accord with concepts of the same held by the denizens of such nether regions as Africa and the Middle East. We have long eschewed cultural practices such as female circumcision and stoning people to death for adultery or blasphemy, yet these customs are still followed in places like Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan [That's enough backward places. Ed.]

This is not a new thought. Over a century ago, Mark Twain thought and wrote about the failure of the English-speaking peoples to impose their Christian religion and cultural ideals on the natives -- please forgive the term -- of places like... wait for it... Australia. 

As I thought about the idiocy of our "mission" to being civilization and democracy to the Middle East, I recalled a story the great American writer told in Following the Equator (1897). He describes the efforts of one George Augustus Robinson -- "The Conciliator" -- to find and bring in the last remaining natives of Tasmania, to enclose them in a reservation so that they might enjoy the benefits of civilization etc etc. And so he did, with predictable results. From Chapter 27, emphasis mine....

The Natives were not used to clothes, and houses, and regular  hours, and church, and school, and Sunday-school, and work, and the other misplaced persecutions of civilization, and they pined for their lost home and their wild free life. Too late they repented that they had traded that heaven for this hell....

In a very few years nothing but a scant remnant remained alive. A handful lingered along into age. In 1864 the last man died, in 1876 the last woman died, and the Spartans of Australasia were extinct.

The Whites always mean well when they take human fish out of the ocean and try to make them dry and warm and happy and comfortable in a chicken coop; but the kindest-hearted white man can always be depended on to prove himself inadequate when he deals with savages. He cannot turn the situation around and imagine how he would like it to have a well-meaning savage transfer him from his house and his church and his clothes and his books and his choice food to a hideous wilderness of sand and rocks and snow, and ice and sleet and storm and blistering sun, with no shelter, no bed, no covering for his and his family's naked bodies, and nothing to eat but snakes and grubs and offal.

This would be a hell to him; and if he had any wisdom he would know that his own civilization is a hell to the savage -- but he hasn't any, and has never had any; and for lack of it he shut up those poor natives in the unimaginable perdition of his civilization, committing his crime with the very best intentions, and saw those poor creatures waste away under his tortures; and gazed at it, vaguely troubled and sorrowful, and wondered what could be the matter with them.

I wonder  if President Obarmy has ever read more of Twain than the adventures of Tom Sawyer and (maybe) Huckleberry Finn. And what about Kipling? In The Man Who Would Be King, Peachey Carnehan describes the residents of Kafiristan (real place, part of present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan) as "savages, one and all". Do we really think we can turn them into somewhat darker copies of ourselves?