A review by korrick
War with the Newts by Karel Čapek

5.0

Never has mankind experienced a greater upsurge to its life than today; yet find me one person who is happy, show me one class that is content, or one nation that does not feel threatened in its existence.

Over the years, I have caught on to and subsequently grown entirely sick of the whole 'one hit wonder' complex that status quo contrivers of literary 'canons' force entire ethnicities, genders, and countries into when they assign every book written by a white dude between the years of 1680 to 1790 and leave the entire rest of existence to fight over the scraps. Thus, many of the works I first enthusiastically committed to myself due to never before having engaged with the language/culture/etc in reading previously became an onerous, even vaguely threatening presence on my TBR, their aged presence behooving me to actively consider them while my previous experience with their ilk further warning me off with visions of middling banality at best and noxious incompetency otherwise. A case in point: eleven years after committing to this work of Čapek's here, I still have only four works originally composed in Czech on my digital shelves, and with dystopias being cheaply churned out by the dozen these days and only a handful, if any, hitting any of the marks of true horror that the auspicious 2020s have thus far being plagued with, I wasn't in any mood to take a chance on an older piece being little more than an older example of similarly overhyped dreck. Now that I've finished, while I would have preferred Čapek to leave off that last chapter for the sake of the quality of the text as a whole, I'm not surprised that, not only was he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Lit a total of seven times, he never got it in the end. The briskly diverse yet brilliantly holistic choices in viewpoint and prose, the scathingly satiric yet undeniably compassionate analysis and tone, the brave insistence on staring a not only logical, but inevitable future given the course our world has taken nearly a century after this piece was published: if Čapek hadn't met his untimely end via illness on the brink of WWII, someone would have taken him out, whether it was the Nazis looking to cart him away in 1938 or the CIA twenty years later. I don't blame anyone for not wanting to tackle that kind of read during these times of ours, but these times have been going on for a long while and have only been getting worse, and eventually you have to ask yourself whether this book is worth reading for the kick in the pants that it'll give you that you so desperately need.

We are offering you peace. You will supply us with your manufactures and you will sell us your continents. We are willing to pay a fair price for them. We are offering you nothing but peace.

My disappointment with the majority of works that call themselves 'satire' is a consistent theme in a number of my reviews of the genre. I've had spots of good fortune here and there, but in every case, the latest read couldn't quite compare to Swift's [b:A Modest Proposal|5206937|A Modest Proposal|Jonathan Swift|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348659670l/5206937._SX50_.jpg|6627040], experienced in high school and setting a monumentally high order for any brash newcomer looking to hurl themselves at the rocks of my tastes and successfully navigate to the harbor of my good estimation. Every case, I say, until now. For the world Čapek builds is just as greedy, just as inhumane, just as short-sighted and just as egotistically grotesque as ours is today, and while we aren't nosediving into the Holocaust and co., I imagine that our climate change would fulfil even the most catastrophic scenarios the author could have dreamed up. What's especially genius and raises this book above many of its kind is how it looks at so many different aspects of human reality, from the religion and the academics to the politicians and the CEOs to the journalists and the scientists, and showcases how the moneymaking of a few are justified by the conspiracy of the nations in a prelude to the disaster capitalism of today. It's exactly the sort of wide ranged reading into I find myself stuck in if I'm not too careful about regulating my intake of daily doomscrolling, so while this certainly wasn't any sort of uplifting material, it was extremely satisfying to see my more than logical concerns vindicated in such an explicit, engaging, and even entertaining manner. Whether it stops the Powers That Be from continuing their subscription service to the coming apocalypse remains to be seen.

That is why I advise you, nay, implore you: sell your continents while there is time! You may sell them in their entirety or in lots of individual countries.

I'm not much one for sci-fi. As was the case with [b:The Dispossessed|13651|The Dispossessed (Hainish Cycle, #6)|Ursula K. Le Guin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1353467455l/13651._SY75_.jpg|2684122] by [a:Ursula K. Le Guin|874602|Ursula K. Le Guin|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1244291425p2/874602.jpg], my favoritism comes a grasp on history, capitalism, and the airless conjunction of the two at which humans supposedly reside, not from any sort of hope for super uber technology or a new frontier for rapacious shitlords to hurl themselves upon and call their atrocities one huge step for mankind. When it comes to this work, I acknowledge how it went a little long with some of the more onerous mimicries, as well as laid it on a tad too thick to maintain the quality of show amidst all the telling. However, when I look down at these pages and look up at the negotiation of my union with the fat cats, the tantrums of frat boys breaking apart the communications of billions, the mewling and puking of politicians who wouldn't have a platform if they couldn't fundraise off of the human rights that they neglect into nonexistence, I see the same thing worked out in my life that this text works out with humanoid newts. It just so happens that this is no hardcore social justice treatise, nor does it plant itself in any sort of emotive, crowd-pleasing, feel-good trough for its audience to briefly feed at and then forget with all the rest. As such, it may hold water with much of the crowd who proudly crows out their ignorance in the face of the realities of others and believes that they can pay their way to immortality. And if it doesn't, well. I wish those types the best in their gallivanting off to Mars; as Čapek clearly demonstrated, there's no room for them here.

Everybody always had a thousand perfectly sound economic and political arguments why this wasn't possible. I'm not a politician nor an economist; how could I convince them?

P.S. One textual claim I must quibble with: "You cannot own or rent any part of the sea-bed." As expressed in an excerpt clipped from recent news: "Queen Elizabeth['s] holdings include most of the seabed encircling the United Kingdom, out to 12 nautical miles from shore." Such has sizably interfered with conservation efforts, among other things.