Mark Twain Quotes
If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came always together, who would escape hanging?
Twain, Mark. Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World. American Publishing Company, 1897.
Mandelstam was later sent to a Soviet gulag for writing a poem denouncing Stalin. He died there.
Until very recently common law derived from this law allowed a thief on someone else’s property to be killed even with no danger to the property owner. In Texas and other jurisdictions the “unwritten” law would not convict such a killer for murder even if he came upon a trespasser who was stealing nothing. Today, the legal principle is that deadly force may only be used if the person reasonably believed his life was in danger and had no other means of escape.
This proverb only makes sense in the light of understanding the Arab concept of revenge—“blood.” In a rural desert environment where little can be expected of government, the Arabs have developed a law enforcement and peace keeping mechanism which while primitive from modern standards, nevertheless worked to some degree. It is that revenge—“blood” is a moral necessity and obligation of all people, and revenge is not limited by time or to the individuals involved in the first incidence. The immediate family are the first to extract revenge, but the extended family follows and often the entire clan. Sometimes revenge is tribal or even national. Anyone who fails to revenge a member in his group is not only a disgrace, but is a clear and present danger to the group because then they can be attacked with impunity. So revenge is a strong obligation of the group members and blood must be paid with blood no matter how many generations it may take. The only thing that keeps me and my family safe, is the surety what whosoever kills one of us will themselves be killed or if they die a natural death we will take revenge on one of the evildoers relatives. Crime must never pay!
Nathaniel Bacon had led a rebellion in Virginia and had routed the Governor’s troops and caused him to flee leaving control of Virginia to Bacon and his followers who were far more democratic and advanced. However Bacon succumbed to swamp fever, and his followers could not hold the colony together giving the Governor a chance to establish his authority. He then went on a vengeful reign of terror, executing all of Bacon’s followers he could get his hands on. With no danger to the authority of the Crown, King Charles felt that Berkeley had gone too far. The King’s father Charles I had been executed in the aftermath of the English Civil War, but he had executed far fewer than Berkely had done in Virginia.
This sura on retaliation for murder is behind the Saudi Arabian law which allows the male relative of a murder victim to personally wield the sword in the beheading of the murderer.
Reacting after reading parts of the Pentagon Papers, a study on the history of the Vietnam war he had ordered:
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. He was lauded as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced," and William Faulkner called him "the father of American literature". His novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), the latter often called "The Great American Novel".
