ONE of Bermuda's favourite adopted sons, Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens, 1835-1910), came to anti-imperialism by way of a prior understanding of race. The author of Huckleberry Finn had from an early age begun to understand racism in the United States in a way that few of his Anglo-American contemporaries did.

As a young newspaper reporter in San Francisco during the Civil War, Mark Twain wrote often about the brutalities visited upon the Chinese population of that city by the police. In 1865 he startled fashionable San Franciscans, including those of more pronounced Northern and abolitionist sympathies, by strolling arm-in-arm along Montgomery Street with the editor of the Elevator, the city's newly established African-American newspaper.

His early acts of egalitarianism and solidarity with the victims of race hate were unusual enough. In his mature writing life, however, Mark Twain began to lay bare truths about racial oppression with a particular vigor, using a new and democratic literary language that would forever change American prose.

Mark Twain faced the onset of European and American imperialism at the end of the 19th century with an acute understanding that white racism denied the very humanity of people of darker skin.

He was aware that vile theories were then either being generated or revived by the educated hirelings of the European and American ruling classes, to justify their piratical conquests in Africa and Asia. These depraved bourgeois scientists posited that the single human race was actually comprised of several different "races," and that these "races" could be ranked in a hierarchy based upon intelligence and culture. Not surprisingly, they placed their own "race" -the "white race" - at the top of the hierarchy and therefore deserving of world domination.

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) typified the view of the British ruling classes in that he not only embraced the racial hierarchy wholeheartedly, but believed the Anglo-Saxon imperialists were at the pinnacle of the white race. Kipling admitted the American ruling class, descended from British settlers, into his racial sanctum sanctorum. He sought an Anglo-American alliance dedicated to world conquest, and penned his infamous bit of doggerel, The White Man's Burden (1899), in the service of this alliance. Subtitled The United States and the Philippine Islands, the poem instructed the Filipinos to enslave themselves voluntarily to their new American masters.

And in 1899, just after the Spanish-American War, the United States was indeed determined to become conqueror of the Philippines.

When the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898, Mark Twain was living in Austria, and was only able to summon a fuzzy picture of its causes. He was painfully aware of the imperialism of the European powers, which were just then engaging in a frenzy of world conquest. Since sentiment in Austrian ruling circles ran in favour of Spain, Mark Twain initially supported the United States, which he thought might bring democracy to Cuba and the Philippines. However, he soon changed his views, as events revealed the true aims of the American rulers. The war provoked by the McKinley administration was a one-sided slaughter designed to make the United States a world imperial power. In a few short months the US destroyed Spain's decrepit navy and seized much of its tottering empire, occupying Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Manila in the Philippines.

The Philippines were clearly the most important of US imperialism's new conquests, owing to their strategic location in Asia. But the American forces there had still to reckon with the native Filipino Independence movement, which had spread across the islands in several diverse groups during the twilight of Spanish occupation. In 1899, after Spain's surrender to the U.S., the Americans, who paid Spain $20 million for the Philippines, opened direct hostilities against the Filipinos, beginning a brutal war of conquest which would last well beyond 1902, the year the US. declared it over.

Mark Twain arrived in New York in October 1900, and at once announced his anti-imperialism: "I have read carefully the treaty of Paris (between the United States and Spain), and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem.... And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land."

The author's powerful statements at once came to the attention of the "Anti-Imperialist League" (1898-1920), a politically heterogeneous organisation founded in Boston to oppose the American seizure of Spain's empire. Its officers included former abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson; Mark Twain's best friend, novelist and self-described socialist William Dean Howells; reformist labour leader Samuel Gompers, and capitalist Andrew Carnegie. The league's liberal founders sought to use the names of prominent Americans to influence the foreign policy of the McKinley administration; however, the organisation soon burgeoned into a nationwide mass movement with a half-million members, and its literature included articles by socialists as well as African-American leaders such as Frederick Douglass Jr. and Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois. The League invited Mark Twain to become a vice-president in 1901; he accepted, and would hold this office for the remainder of his life. He consistently opposed any compromise with imperialism, an attitude not shared by many of the league's leaders.

In the February 1901 North American Review, Mark Twain published To the Person Sitting in Darkness, perhaps his most popular and influential anti-imperialist essay. It was an acid indictment of the brutalities the British, French, German, Russian and American capitalist governments were committing all over the world. The "Person Sitting in Darkness" is Mark Twain's ironic term, borrowed from the Gospel According to Matthew and used by the Christian missionaries when referring to the "savage," "heathen," "uncivilised" populations of the lands the imperialists were conquering. The author condemned the casual atrocities of Lord Kitchener's British troops in South Africa, who routinely bayoneted unarmed surrendering Boers, as well as those committed by the American forces in the Philippines, which did the same to the Filipinos.

At the same time, Mark Twain denounced the multinational plundering and dismemberment of China, which had provoked the Boxer Rebellion - the mismatched attempt of the Chinese people to drive the imperialists who introduced mass opium production and trafficking, out of their country. (In a November 1900 speech he had already proclaimed "I am a Boxer.") The author charged the American Board of Foreign Missions with looting pauper peasants in China, and condemned the missionaries as part of the "Blessings-of-Civilisation-Trust," that deals in "Glass Beads and Theology, and Maxim guns and Hymn Books, and Trade Gin and Torches of Progress and Enlightenment (patent adjustable ones, good to fire villages with, upon occasion)." At the end of his essay, Mark Twain proposes a flag for the United States' new "Philippine Province": "we can just have our usual flag, with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones."

The reaction among the missionaries, generals and politicians of imperialism was swift and predictable:they charged the author with treason. However, Mark Twain had considerable popular support, and he did not budge from his positions, but forthrightly defended them in speeches and articles over the next several years. Uncounted thousands of Filipino civilians were butchered by the American imperialists as a result of this order, carried out in retaliation for a Filipino attack on the U.S. garrison at Balangiga, on the large island of Samar in the central Philippines. Mark Twain remained a "traitor" to imperialism for the rest of his life, raising his voice and his pen to oppose American and European savagery frequently and with unwavering resolve. In 1905 Mark Twain wrote King Leopold's Soliloquy expressly to raise money for the Congo Reform Association. The essay exposes the depraved crimes of the Belgian imperialists in Africa; it was published as a pamphlet illustrated with photographs of some of the shackled and mutilated Congolese victims of European racist barbarity.

Mark Twain struggled against powerful opponents on behalf of humanity and justice, as he understood them. He was not entirely consistent in the views he expressed.

Nevertheless, in his regard for the humanity of the millions upon millions of Asians and Africans who were just then being victimized by imperialism, he eclipsed even most socialists of his day, owing in part to his profound understanding of racism in America. The brutal realities of colonial subjugation inevitably recalled for him the legacy of slavery in the United States.