The model of what needs to be done by dissenters was established in the last year of the nineteenth century. Over a hundred years ago, Mark Twain, shocked by the chauvinist reaction to the Boxer Rebellion in China and the US occupation of the Philippines, sounded the tocsin. Imperialism was the problem. It had to be opposed. The result was a mommoth gathering in Chicago in 1899 to found the American Anti-Imperialist League, whose membership had grown within two years to half a million...
The magazines and pamphlets of the League contained contributions from some of America's most gifted writers and thinkers. These included Henry and William James, W.E.B. DuBois, Charles Elliot Norton, William Dean Howells and Fredrick Douglass, Jr. They wrote essays and short stories and poems and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Twain to oppose imperial wars. In November 1916, on the eve of US entry in the First World War, Harper's Monthly, which was then, as now, an outlet for sane voices inside the asylum, published a scathing essay by Twain. The 'loud little handful' of whom Twain wrote are still with us:The loud little handful -- as usual -- will shout for the war.
The pulpit will -- warily and cautiously -- object -- at first; the great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, 'It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is no necessity for it.'
Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will out shout them, and presently the anti-war audiences will thin out and lose popularity.
Before long you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers -- as earlier -- but do not dare to say so. And now the whole nation -- pulpit and all -- will take up the war-cry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest man who ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease to open.
Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.
* Quoted in Mark Twain: Social Critic by Philip S. Foner, New York 1958.
I found it at the end of Tariq Ali's introduction to the paperback edition of his The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity
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