War With the Newts

by Karel Čapek

  The process whereby man attempts to organise himself into mankind is as old as civilisation itself, as old as the first laws and the first communities; if now, after many thousands of years, we have reached a stage when the gulf between races, nations, classes and ideologies has become as wide and as deep as it is today, then we can no longer shut our eyes to the fact that our unfortunate historical endeavour to create from the totality of individuals some kind of mankind has finally and tragically failed. Actually we are beginning to realise it; hence those attempts and plans to unite human society in a different way, by making room for one nation, one class or one faith. But who can tell how deeply we are already infected with the incurable disease of differentiation? Sooner or later each supposedly homogeneous entity will inevitably again break up into a heterogeneous collection of different interests, parties and estates, and so on, which will either destroy each other or again suffer by living together. There is no way out. We are moving in a vicious circle; but evolution will not forever go round in circles. Nature itself has seen to this by making room in the world for the Newts.

  It is no accident, Wolf Meynert reflected, that the Newts have vitally asserted themselves at the very time when the chronic disease of mankind, of that badly accreted and forever disintegrating macro-organism, is entering upon its agony. Insignificant deviations apart, the Newts present themselves as a single huge and homogeneous whole: they have not so far developed any greatly differentiated tribes, languages, nations, states, faiths, classes or castes; they have neither masters nor servants, neither freemen nor serfs, neither rich nor poor; admittedly there are differences among them due to the division of labour, but in itself they represent a homogeneous, uniform and, as it were, consistent mass, biologically equally primitive in all its parts, equally poorly endowed by nature, equally subjugated and living at the same low level of existence. The most abject Negro or Eskimo has an incomparably higher standard of living, enjoying infinitely richer material and cultural assets than these billions of civilised Newts. Yet there is nothing to suggest that the Newts suffer by it. On the contrary. We must surely see that they do not on the whole require any of those things which man needs to find relief and solace from his metaphysical terror and existential angst. They manage without philosophy, without life after death and without art; they do not know what imagination is, or humour, or mysticism, or play or dreams; they are absolute existential realists. They are as far removed from us humans as are ants or herrings; these they differ from merely in having adapted to a different living environment, namely human civilisation. They have settled in it as dogs have settled in human habitations; they cannot live without that environment but they do not cease to be what they are: a very primitive and little differentiated animal group. It is sufficient to them to live and multiply; they can even be happy because they are not disturbed by any sense of inequality among them. They are, quite simply, homogeneous. Which is why, one day, indeed any day in the future, they may achieve without difficulty what mankind has failed to accomplish, their worldwide community, in short: universal Newtdom. That day will mark the end of the thousand-year-old agony of the human race. There will not be enough room on our planet for two trends, each trying to rule the whole world. One of them will have to yield. We already know which one that will be.

  Today about 20 billion civilised Newts are living on the entire globe, or about ten times the number of humans; biological necessity as well as historical logic demand that the Newts, being subjugated, will have to liberate themselves; that, being homogeneous, they will have to unite; and that, thereby becoming the greatest power the world has ever seen, they will have to take over dominion over it. Do you believe they are foolish enough to spare man then? Do you believe they will repeat his historical mistake of subjecting defeated nations and classes instead of exterminating them? The mistake that out of selfishness man created ever new conflicts between people so that, out of magnanimity and idealism, he could then try to bridge them? No, Wolf Meynert exclaimed, the Newts will not commit that historical nonsense, if only because they will take heed of my book! They will be the inheritors of the whole of human civilisation; all that we have done and that we have attempted in our endeavours to rule the world will drop into their laps. But they would be defeating themselves if together with that heritage they attempted to take us over as well. They must rid themselves of man if they are to preserve their own homogeneity. Unless they do this we shall sooner or later introduce amongst them our own dual destructive proclivity: to create differences and to tolerate them. But we need have no fear of that: today no creature that will continue the history of mankind will repeat its suicidal madness.

  There is no doubt that the Newt world will be happier than the human world was; it will be unified, homogeneous and governed by the same spirit. Newt will not differ from Newt in language, opinions, faith or demands on life. There will be among them neither cultural nor class divisions, but only the division of labour. There will be no masters and no slaves, for they will serve the Great Newt’Entity which will be their god, their ruler, their employer and their spiritual guide. There will be but one nation and but one standard. It will be a better and a more perfect world than ours was. It will be the only possibly Happy New World. Very well then, let us make room for it; there is nothing that expiring mankind can do now other than to accelerate its own demise - in tragic beauty, unless it is too late even for that.

  We have here presented Wolf Meynert’s views in the most accessible form possible; we are aware that, as a result, they lose a lot of their effectiveness and profundity which so fascinated the whole of Europe in their day, and especially the young who accepted the belief in the decline and impending end of mankind with such enthusiasm. True, the Reich government banned the teachings of the Great Pessimist because of certain political consequences and Wolf Meynert had to seek asylum in Switzerland; nevertheless, the entire educated world received Meynert’s theory of the decline of mankind with satisfaction. The book (632 pages of it) was published in all world languages and many millions of copies were widely read also among the Newts.

  6

  A Warning from X

  Perhaps it was also a result of Meynert’s book that the literary and artistic avant-garde at the centres of culture proclaimed the slogan: After us the salamanders! The future belongs to the Newts. The Newts are the cultural revolution. No matter that they have no art of their own: at least they are not weighed down by idiotic ideals, dry-as-dust traditions and all that bombastic, boring, pedantic old rubbish that went by the name of poetry, music, architecture, philosophy, and culture generally - senile words that turn our stomachs. Fortunate indeed that they have not yet succumbed to regurgitating man’s outmoded art; we shall create a new art for them! We young ones will blaze a trail for worldwide salamandrism: we want to be the first Newts, we are the salamanders of tomorrow! Thus a young poetic movement came into being, the salamandrian movement, and a new Tritonic (tri-tonic) music, and pelagic painting, which drew its inspiration from the plastic world of jellyfish, sea anemones and corals. Moreover, the shore-regulating work of the Newts was seen as a new source of beauty and monumentality. We are sick and tired of nature, the cry went up; let us have smooth concrete banks instead of the old rugged cliffs! Romanticism is dead; the continents of the future will be bounded by clean straight lines and reshaped into spherical triangles and rhombs; the old geological world must be replaced by a geometric one. In short, here was something new again, something futuristic, new spiritual sensations and new cultural manifestos; those who omitted to climb on the bandwagon of the coming salamandrianism early on realised bitterly that they had missed their chance and so took their revenge by proclaiming the pure humanism, the return to man and to nature, and other reactionary slogans. In Vienna a concert of Tritonic music was booed out, in Paris at the Salon of the Independents an unidentified culprit had slashed a pelagic painting called Capriccio en bleu - in short, salamandrianism had begun its victorious and irresist
ible advance.

  Naturally there was no lack of reactionary voices who opposed the ‘Newt mania’, as they called it. The most fundamental in that respect was an anonymous English pamphlet published under the title A Warning from X. This brochure achieved considerable popularity but the identity of its author was never revealed; many people believed him to be a high dignitary of the Church, bearing in mind that in English X is an abbreviation for Christ.

  In his first chapter the author attempted some statistics on the Newts, while at the same time apologising for the unreliability of his figures. Even the estimated total of all salamanders fluctuates at this moment between seven and twenty times the total human population of the world. Equally uncertain is our information on the number of factories, oil wells, algae plantations, eel farms, utilised water power and other natural resources owned by the Newts under water; we do not even have approximate data on the productive capacity of Newt industries; least of all do we have any information on the state of Newt armaments. We know, of course, that the salamanders are dependent on humans for their consumption of metals, machine parts, explosives and numerous chemicals; but, for one thing, all states keep the nature and the quantities of the arms they supply to the Newts strictly secret, and, for another, we know surprisingly little about what the Newts down in the depth of the sea actually manufacture from the semi-finished goods and the raw materials they buy from humans. It is certain that the salamanders do not want us to know these things; too many divers lowered to the sea-bed have perished in recent years, either by drowning or by asphyxiation, for their deaths to have been purely accidental. And this is truly an alarming situation both from an industrial and a military point of view.

  It is, of course, difficult to imagine, X continued in subsequent paragraphs, what the Newts could or might wish to take from man. They cannot live on dry land, and we cannot on the whole prevent them from living the way they want under water. Their habitat and ours are precisely and permanently separated from each other. It is true, no doubt, that we require certain labour performances from them, but then we very largely feed them and supply them with raw materials and commodities which but for us they would not have at all, such as metals. But even though there are no practical grounds for any antagonism between us and the Newts, there exists, I would suggest, a metaphysical revulsion: surface creatures are confronted by creatures of the deep (abyssal creatures); creatures of the night are opposing the creatures of day; the dark watery pools against the bright dry earth. The demarcation line between water and land is somehow sharper than it used to be: our land is lapped by their water. We could survive perfectly well and forever in separate spheres, merely exchanging certain services and products -yet it is difficult to avoid the uneasy feeling that this is probably impossible. Why? I cannot give you definite reasons, but the feeling is there; it is something like a premonition that one day the watery world itself will turn against the dry land to settle the question of who rules whom.

  I have to admit to a rather irrational anxiety, X continued, but I should feel a lot easier if the Newts came out with some demands on mankind. At least then one could negotiate with them, one might conclude various arrangements, agreements and compromises with them - but their silence is terrifying. I fear their incomprehensible reserve. They might, for example, demand certain political advantages for themselves: to be perfectly frank, Newt legislation everywhere is somewhat obsolete and no longer worthy of creatures as civilised or numerically as strong as they are. It would be proper to redefine afresh the rights and duties of the Newts, in a manner more favourable to them; one might consider some measure of autonomy for the salamanders; it would be only equitable to improve their working conditions and to recompense them more appropriately for their work. In many respects it would thus be possible to improve their lot if only they would request it. We could then make a number of concessions to them and bind them to us by compensatory agreements; at least we should be gaining a number of years. But the Newts do not request anything; they merely increase their productive performance and their orders; the time has come to ask ourselves where both these trends will stop. There used to be talk of a yellow peril, a black or a red peril - but those at least were humans and we have a more or less clear idea of what humans can want. Yet even though at present we have no inkling of what mankind will one day be forced to defend itself against, one thing is clear already: that if the Newts will be on one side, then the whole of mankind will be on the other.

  Men against the Newts! It is high time the issue was put this way. After all, to be perfectly honest, a normal person instinctively hates the salamanders, he is nauseated by them - and afraid of them. Something like a chilling shadow of fear is descending on mankind everywhere. What else is that frenetic indulgence, that insatiable thirst for amusement and pleasure, that orgiastic licence that has seized present-day humanity? There has not been such moral decadence since the days when barbarian invasion was about to fall upon the Roman Empire. This is not just the fruit of unprecedented material prosperity but a desperate drowning of the voice of fear of disintegration and annihilation. One last cup before we meet our end! What shame, what delirium! It seems that God in his awful mercy ig allowing nations and classes first to deteriorate as they rush to their ruin. Do you wish to read the fiery Mene-tekel written up above mankind’s great feast? Just look at the luminous inscriptions which throughout the night shine on the walls of our dissolute and profligate cities! In that respect we humans are already approaching the Newts: we live more by night than by day.

  If only those salamanders weren’t so terribly mediocre, X rather unhappily blurted out. Yes, they are more or less educated - but that makes them even more blinkered because they have acquired from human civilisation only that which is mediocre and utilitarian in it, mechanical and repeatable. They stand beside mankind as the famulus Wagner stands beside Faustus: their learning comes from the same books as that of the human Faustuses but with the difference that to them they are sufficient and that they are not gnawed by any doubt. The most terrible thing is that they have multiplied that half-educated, brainless and smug type of civilised mediocrity on a vast scale, in millions and billions of identical specimens. But no, I am wrong: the most terrible thing is that they are so successful. They have learned how to use machines and numbers, and it became obvious that that was enough for them to become masters of their world. They have omitted from human civilisation everything that was aimless, playful, fantastic or ancient; as a result they have omitted everything that was human in it and adopted solely its practical, technical and utilitarian side. And that pitiful caricature of human civilisation is doing splendidly: it is building technological miracles, renewing our ancient planet, and eventually fascinating mankind itself. From his disciple and servant Faustus will learn the secret of success and of mediocrity. Either mankind will face up to the Newts in a history-making life-and-death conflict or it will be irrevocably salamandrised. For my part, X concluded sadly, I would rather see the former.

  Well, take heed of X’s warning, the unknown author continued. It is still possible to shake off that cold and slimy grip in which we are all held. We must rid ourselves of the salamanders. There are too many of them already; they are well armed and capable of turning on us war material of whose overall strength we know virtually nothing. But a more terrible danger to us than their numbers and strength is their successful, and indeed triumphal, inferiority. I do not know which we should fear more: their human civilisation or their insidious, cold and bestial cruelty; but the two together represent something unimaginably terrifying and almost diabolical. In the name of culture, in the name of Christianity and humanity we must free ourselves from the Newts. And here the anonymous apostle exclaimed:

  You fools, stop feeding the Newts! Stop employing them, dispense with their services, let them emigrate to wherever they can feed themselves like other marine creatures! Nature itself will deal with their excessive numbers: if only man, human civilisation and human
history will at last stop working for the salamanders]

  And stop supplying the Newts with arms, put an end to supplying them with metals and high explosives, stop sending them machines and human manufactures! You would not supply teeth to tigers or venom to snakes; you would not light fires under a volcano or breach flood-protection dams. Let an embargo be imposed on supplies to all the oceans, let the Newts be put outside the law, let them be accursed and excluded from our world, let a Union of Nations against Newts be set up!

  Let all mankind be ready to defend its existence weapon in hand; let a world conference of all civilised countries be convened on the initiative of the League of Nations, the King of Sweden or the Pope of Rome, to form a World Union or at least a Club of all Christian nations against the salamanders! This is the fateful moment when, faced with the terrible pressure of the Newt danger and human responsibility, we may succeed in achieving what the world war with its countless victims failed to achieve - the creation of a United States of the World. May God grant it! If that were achieved then the Newts would not have come in vain but would have been the instrument of God.

  This eloquent pamphlet produced a lively echo among broad circles of the public. Elderly ladies agreed chiefly with the point that an unprecedented decline of morals had set in. Business columnists in the daily press, on the other hand, pointed out that it was impossible to restrict deliveries to the Newts since this would cause a huge drop in production and a serious depression in numerous branches of human industry. Agriculture, too, relied heavily on vast orders of maize, potatoes and other crops for Newt feeding stuffs; any reduction in the number of salamanders would result in a serious decline in the foodstuffs market and reduce farmers to the brink of ruin. The workers’ trade unions suspected Mr X of being a reactionary and announced that they would not tolerate any restrictions on the export of goods destined for the Newts; no sooner had the working people achieved full employment and performance bonuses than Mr X wanted to take the bread out of their mouths; the working class sided with the Newts and repudiated any attempt to reduce their living standards and to surrender them pauperised and defenceless to the mercy of capitalism. As for the Union of Nations against Newts, all responsible political bodies objected that this would be unnecessary; after all, there already was the League of Nations and the London Convention under which the maritime states had undertaken not to supply heavy armaments to their Newts. Naturally one could not very well expect any state to disarm unless it had a guarantee that another maritime power was not secretly arming its Newts and thereby increasing its military potential at the expense of its neighbours. Nor could any state or continent compel its Newts to emigrate elsewhere because this would increase not only the industrial and agricultural markets of other states and continents but also their military strength; and this would be most undesirable. And there were many more such objections of a kind that any reasonable person would have to agree with.