Confronting Imperialism: Essays on Mark Twain and the Anti-Imperialist League By Jim Zwick 246 pages, 57 illustrations, notes, index Infinity Publishing, November 2007 Available at Buy Books on the Web, Amazon.com, Amazon.ca and other bookstores.

From the book:

The U.S. military's use of waterboarding began during the Philippine-American War. Euphemistically called the "water cure," it was said to be a form of torture the U.S. military "inherited" from the Spanish. They had used it since the Inquisition. In his 1902 essay "A Defense of General Funston," Mark Twain wrote:

Funston's example has bred many imitators, and many ghastly additions to our history: the torturing of Filipinos by the awful "water-cure," for instance, to make them confess -- what? Truth? Or lies? How can one know which it is they are telling? For under unendurable pain a man confesses anything that is required of him, true or false, and his evidence is worthless.

Mark Twain and other anti-imperialists were protesting the U.S. military's use of waterboarding and other forms of torture one hundred years before their recent use in the "war on terror."

Confronting Imperialism is history for our times. Created in 1898 to oppose U.S. annexation of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines at the close of the Spanish-American War, the Anti-Imperialist League was the first national anti-imperialist organization formed in the United States. Within months it became the primary organized opposition to the Philippine-American War. The country's first protracted war in Asia and the first that involved subjugation of a Muslim population, it remains one of the most controversial wars in U.S. history. Until his death in 1910, Mark Twain was a vice president of the League and the most prominent literary opponent of the war. In a statement that would be repeated by critics of later wars in Vietnam and Iraq, he described the war in the Philippines as "a mess, a quagmire from which each fresh step renders the difficulty of extrication immensely greater." Drawing upon his childhood in the pre-Civil War South, an early trip to Hawaii and a lecture tour through the British Empire, he linked imperialism with racism and domestic repression in both the United States and Europe. In this book, Jim Zwick, editor of the first collection of Mark Twain's writings on the war, explores the history of the Anti-Imperialist League, Twain's anti-imperialist writings, and their continuing influence and relevance today. He demonstrates that anti-imperialism did not end with the dissolution of the Anti-Imperialist League in 1921. Leaders of the first anti-imperialist organization influenced non-interventionist and solidarity organizations throughout the 20th century. Zwick's essays add depth to our understanding of the American anti-imperialist tradition and Mark Twain's prominent place within it.

Contents

Jim Zwick is the editor of Mark Twain's Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War and has written extensively about the Anti-Imperialist League and Mark Twain's anti-imperialist writings.

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