So I watched this incredibly long titled thing "Conan O'Brien The Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for American Humor." I'm familiar with Conan and I think him getting an award for comedy is well deserved. I'm not posting about it to comment on the comedic content of the ceremony and other comedians doing a mixture of jokes, roasting, and praise before he receives the award at the end. A lot of it is fine as comedy and had me laughing at times.
What I do want to comment on is the political content of it and the limits of liberalism. Some of it was alright, all things considered, for a bunch of well-off comedians of the US making political comments. But at the end, among other things, Conan praises Mark Twain for his views; his opposition to racism, bullies, the kind of stuff that even a well-meaning liberal and a communist could agreed on, at least in spirit (whether they'd agree on how to make, for example, anti-racism a reality is another matter). Now there's a point in it where he goes on to quote Mark Twain and it's a very particular quote, from (I had not known this until writing this post, I went and researched it) The Czar's Soliloquy. The quote is famous, but somehow I doubt the rest of it is well known. It seems a case similar to those who would quote MLK talking about liberation and then tout him as a "peaceful protester".
The original quote is this:
...the true patriotism, the only rational patriotism, is loyalty to the Nation all the time, loyalty to the Government when it deserves it.
But a quick skim of The Czar's Soliloquy would indicate this is not intended as some universalizing quote about mindless loyalty to one's country as an institution.
Here is the quote in context:
How little the academical moralist knows of the tremendous moral force of massacre and assassination! .... Indeed there are going to be results! The nation is in labor; and by and by there will be a mighty birth — Patriotism ! To put it in rude, plain, unpalatable words — true patriotism, real patriotism : loyalty, not to a Family and a Fiction, but loyalty to the Nation itself !
.... There are twenty-five million families in Russia. There is a man-child at every mother's knee. If these were twenty-five million patriotic mothers, they would teach these man-children daily, saying : " Remember this, take it to heart, live by it, die for it if necessary: that our patriotism is medieval, outworn, obsolete; that the modern patriotism, the true patriotism, the only rational patriotism, is loyalty to the Nation all the time, loyalty to the Government when it deserves it."
See this for source: https://archive.org/details/jstor-25105366/page/n3/mode/2up?view=theater
In context, it would appear that Twain is talking about the Czar-ruled Russia, the conception of a Russia without a Czar, and is in fact chastising the kind of moralizing about political violence that liberals get shy around:
It is not for me to say it aloud, but to one on the inside — like me — this is naively funny; on its face, illogical. Our Family is above all law; there is no law that can reach us, restrain us, protect the people from us. Therefore, we are outlaws. Outlaws are a proper mark for any one's bullet. Ah ! what could our Family do without the moralist ? He has always been our stay, our support, our friend; to-day he is our only friend. Whenever there has been dark talk of assassination, he has come forward and saved us with his impressive maxim, "Forbear: nothing politically valuable was ever yet achieved by violence." He probably believes it. It is because he has by him no child's book of world-history to teach him that his maxim lacks the backing of statistics. All thrones have been established by violence; no regal tyranny has ever been overthrown except by violence; by violence my fathers set up our throne; by murder, treachery, perjury, torture, banishment and the prison they have held it for four centuries, and by these same arts I hold it to-day. There is no Romanoff of learning and experience but would reverse the maxim and say: "Nothing politically valuable was ever yet achieved except by violence."
Further digging led me to this: http://www.twainquotes.com/Revolution/revolution.html
In particular, this part is interesting:
UPDATE: MAY 2018
It is always a special discovery to be contacted by someone who is related to a person I have previously written about. In this case Michele Bonder, who is the great niece of Zinovy and Yakov Sverdlov, wrote this week with more information on her family. Zinovy met Mark Twain when he accompanied Maxim Gorky to the United States in 1906. His brother Yakov Sverdlov issued the orders to assassinate the Romanoff family during the Russian Revolution in 1918. Michele writes:
April 28, 2018
I appreciated reading about the encounter with Maxim Gorky on his tour, his correspondences, interviews, and writings regarding the tumult surrounding this event. I thought I would contribute a very minor point, because I believe Mark Twain would cherish the irony. He never lived to see the overthrow of the Czar. The article ponders whether Lenin would have read Twain's writing.
V.I. Lenin was not the one who ordered the execution of the Romanoffs, it was Yakov Sverdlov, the President of the Secretariat of the newly formed U.S.S.R. acting in tandem with Lenin as an adviser. Yakov Sverdlov, was the brother of Gorky's ''adopted son'' Zinovy Peshkoff, who accompanied him on his trip to America. Gorky was extremely close to the Sverdlov family, and adopted Zinovy so he could pursue a higher education, and mentor his aspirations as playwright and author at the time. Peshkoff was inspired by Twain's writing, and so was his brother, the one who dispatched the telegram which sealed the fate of the family.
Twain had started losing hope in the success of overthrowing the monarchy in Russia, and was photographed with Gorky, his mistress and adopted son. Little could he imagine how in 11 years, Gorky's affiliation with a revolutionary family contributed in doing what Twain came to believe would take generations or was futile.
Zinovy Peshkoff had another brother, who came to America, around 1913. He listed his address as the Bellclaire in NYC, which evicted Maxim Gorky and his scandalous wife. He was far more successful in obtaining funds for the revolution. That man was my grandfather.
Take care,
M. Bonder
To what extent the above part is verifiable, I don't know, but in general what I find here is a man who wanted monarchies destroyed and had no shyness about the violence required to do so, who may have even inspired others in that direction. Not a man who is taking some empty liberal position about loyalty to an existing country but not its leaders, as some sort of universal principle that would even apply to a country founded on genocide.
P.S. If anyone is more familiar with the context of Twain in this regard, feel free to add info. I only did a cursory investigation here, but even at that, it seems sufficient to say the quote is bogus in the way it was used by Conan; and in general, bogus in the way it is typically used by USian people.
