Gulliver and his horse-men, who depict war so well

Had he been asked for his opinion, Swift would have strongly advised against a war against Iran, and even more emphatically against a war with China. Not to mention a Russian war against Ukraine. In the very last chapter of "Gulliver’s Travels", Gulliver defends himself against the possible accusation that he had failed in his duties as a subject by not claiming the lands he had discovered for the British Crown. “As for the Lilliputians, I do not think it is worth raising a fleet and an army to subdue them, nor would it be prudent or without danger to attack the inhabitants of Brobdingnag [the giants]. And the English army would certainly not feel at ease beneath the flying island […]’. This last reference is to one of the most science-fiction-like inventions, ‘the flying or floating island’ from which the Emperor of Laputa governs his territories. It operates by magnetic levitation. “If a city rebels, or splits into factions prone to violence, or refuses to pay the usual tributes, the King has two means of subduing it. The first, and milder, consists of hovering the island over the city and the surrounding countryside, depriving them of sun and rain, and thus causing famines and epidemics. […] If they hold out and threaten violent uprisings, the King resorts to a second and extreme remedy, which is to let the island fall upon their heads, causing the total destruction of men and houses’ (I viaggi di Gulliver, Parte terza, ‘Viaggio a Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib e nel Giappone’, cap. III). But this does not work when Lindalino, the kingdom’s second city, rebels. A technological counter-move even puts the flying city at risk. “Since his punitive measures had been rendered ineffective, the sovereign—to avoid dwelling on further details—was forced to accept the conditions set by the city.”

Asked to describe the state of Europe as best he can, Gulliver speaks of trade and manufacturing, of laws and constitutions. But above all, of wars. Wars that seem never-ending. Like the one then underway, declared by his own England against France, but ‘now extended to all the great powers’. ‘Weapons had not yet been laid down”, despite the fact that “a rough estimate suggests that no fewer than a million Yahoos had been killed in this war, more than a hundred cities had been conquered, and more than three hundred ships had been set on fire or sunk”. Gulliver’s interlocutor in the land of the Houyhnhnms is his master, a superior being, a talking horse. ‘Yahoo’ stands for ‘humans’. In the local language, it is also synonymous with ‘savages’, ‘beasts’ and ‘servants’. We would call them foreigners, immigrants, or those who are different. Even Gulliver is, in the eyes of his horse master, a yahoo. Just a little bit more distinguished.

“He asked me what the most common causes were that led nations to go to war,” Gulliver recounts. “I replied that there were countless reasons; I would therefore confine myself to listing the principal ones. Sometimes it is the ambition of princes, who never believe they have enough territory or enough subjects to rule; sometimes it is the corruption of ministers, who urge kings to go to war in order to stifle or divert discontent over poor governance. Mere differences of opinion have at times cost millions of lives […] Indeed, differences of opinion on matters of no importance are what give rise to the most bitter and bloody wars’. Furthermore: ‘Sometimes a dispute arises between two sovereigns over how to divide the territories of a third party, to which neither can lay claim. There is also the case where one prince wages war against another simply because he fears the other might wage war against him. Sometimes war is waged because the enemy is too strong; sometimes because he is too weak. Sometimes because our neighbours want the things we have, or because they have things that we want. So we fight until they take our possessions, or we take theirs […]. It is justifiable to wage war against our closest ally if one of its territories is of strategic value to us […]. If a poorer and more backward country is invaded, it is permissible to kill half its inhabitants and enslave the rest […]. This is what statesmen do; it is an honourable thing, and a common practice, that when a prince asks for assistance against an invasion, the one who lends him assistance, having repelled the invasion, should take possession of that territory […]” (Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, Part IV, Chapter V).

Humanity is ugly, filthy and wicked. Gulliver is ashamed to belong to the race of the Yahoos, that is to say, humans. He admires the race and civilisation of the Houyhnhnms, the noble horse-men, governed by reason. They know nothing of war. They never force anyone to do or not to do anything. They have no political parties or factions that glare at one another. In their assemblies, decisions are almost always unanimous. There is no dissent amongst them. Apparently, the only issue they have ever debated was whether the Yahoos should be ‘wiped off the face of the earth’. Everyone agrees that they are ‘the filthiest, most troublesome and misshapen animals that nature has ever produced […] but also the most obtuse, rebellious, harmful and wicked’. There is also a legend about their origin, according to which ‘they had not always been in the country’. They are, in short, foreigners – immigrants. Many centuries ago, two of these brutes had appeared on a mountain-top. Having come from the sea and been abandoned by their companions, they had become feral. They had been tamed and put to work at the most menial tasks. However, they had the flaw of multiplying. What was to be done with them? The proposed solution – the most obvious one – is extermination, castration, genocide (Gulliver, Part IV, Chapter IX). One might think they were discussing the events in Ceuta. So much for the most rational civilisation in the world. There can be no doubt: the civilisation of the horse-men is the Nazi Third Reich.

Any reference to the wars waged and the political conflicts of the 1700s is by no means coincidental. Nor is any association with events of our present day. The parallels between Swift’s world and the imaginary ‘civilisations’ encountered by Captain Lemuel Gulliver on his four fantastical voyages are deliberate. And, needless to say, conversely, there is nothing coincidental about the way in which Reverend Samuel Swift’s sarcastic fantasies, three hundred years after the novel’s first publication, resonate with today’s news. It was published in London by Benjamin Motte in October 1726, under the title "Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships. A parody of the travelogues and maritime adventure novels that were all the rage at the time (to name but one, Daniel Defoe’s "Robinson Crusoe" had been published just a few years earlier). Gulliver’s Travels is attributed to a fictional character, but with no indication of the author’s name. For the simple reason that political satire risked landing him in prison, or worse. It is by no means a children’s book. Just as Rabelais’s "Gargantua" is not a children’s book. Both are full of hilarious witticisms. But they also contain obscenities and cruelty enough to make one’s skin crawl. It is not merely entertainment, designed for the reader’s amusement. It is provocation. Fierce, deliberate. “The chief end I propose in all my works is to vex the world, rather than to divert it,” writes Swift in a letter to his friend Alexander Pope.

He does it to perfection. There’s something for everyone. Enemies and allies. Political opponents and party colleagues. Aristocrats and commoners. Gentlemen and scum. It’s a goldmine, a dazzling display of ideas, barbs and insinuations. Swift is Irish; he was born in Dublin. But he belongs to the Protestant elite, a minority surrounded by the Catholic majority. He lives in England and feels English. He deplores the repressive – indeed, genocidal – treatment to which the English subject the Irish. Yet he despises the Irish. He regards them as brutes. He is constantly torn when it comes to belonging and identity. A bit like an Israeli, horrified by what his own people are doing to the Palestinians, and at the same time horrified by the Palestinians’ genocidal impulses towards his own people. Or vice versa. The most famous of his satirical writings on the Irish question, A Modest Proposal to Prevent the Children of the Poor from Being a Burden to Their Parents and Country, and to Make Them Useful to Society, is appalling both towards the Irish and their English masters: the proposed solution is that children whom the Irish are incapable of raising properly should be slaughtered and sold as meat for the dining tables of the wealthy.

In “about sixteen years and seven months” – the duration of the four voyages – Captain Gulliver visits many unknown countries, in the four corners of the globe. In reality, we know that Jonathan Swift never set foot outside England and Ireland. Although his work is a work of fiction, he speaks of events in his own country. He was involved in politics. He held government posts. He was a partisan. Indeed, a party man. He made his career under a Tory government, still translated today as ‘Conservative’. When the king changed and the Whigs came to power – translated from the nineteenth century onwards as ‘Liberals’ – he found himself excluded from all office and, as often happens to men who are too partisan and unable to adapt to changing circumstances, he had been marginalised even by his own party. His bête noire was the reformist Prime Minister Robert Walpole, in whose government he was led to see the source of all corruption and political intrigue. George Orwell, another outsider, a lone rider in the political landscape of his time, described him as ‘certainly not of the left’, but a ‘conservative anarchist’. ‘One of the many who are driven towards a sort of perverse conservatism by the follies of the progressive party of the moment’ – in short, someone who ends up on the right because of the excesses of the left. The author of "Animal Farm" evidently felt a certain affinity with his predecessor. He was a fan of "Gulliver’s Travels". He had read or reread it at least half a dozen times. He wrote that if he had to save just six books from destruction, he would have included it.

In foreign policy, Swift could be considered a pacifist through and through. He denounces the wars currently being waged as arising from the ambition of politicians and profiteers. For profit and power, they would sell their own mothers. They do not hesitate to sell out and betray their allies. Swift does not go so far as to wish for England’s defeat. He advocates for compromise and moderate peace agreements. In the first part of Gulliver’s Travels, Lilliput and Blefuscu are said to represent England and France respectively. What they have in common is their smallness in relation to their ambitions of grandeur. Just as small and petty are the reasons for which they wage war. The metaphor applies to major international politics as much as it does to domestic politics.

In Lilliput, two irreconcilable religions and factions are at loggerheads: those who believe eggs should be cracked at the widest end and those who believe they should be cracked at the narrowest end. It is a battle to the death between the high-heel faction and the low-heel faction. “The animosity between these two factions has reached such a point that those belonging to the former refuse to eat, drink or converse with anyone belonging to the latter.” There is no dialogue between the majority and the opposition. Defeated, barred from public office and threatened with death, one of the two factions has taken refuge in exile in the enemy kingdom, which, incidentally, had sown discord and continues to foment the dispute. Gulliver does the Emperor of Lilliput a great service by stealing part of the enemy’s naval fleet. Having let success go to his head, the emperor wishes to reduce the rival empire of Blefuscu to a province, exterminate the exiles, and force everyone to crack their eggs whichever way suits him best. “Thus he would have become the sole monarch of the whole world.” Gulliver tries to dissuade him, to convince him that it is not in his best interests. Unable to reason with the Trump of the moment, Gulliver says: “I would never have allowed myself to become the means of enslaving a free and valiant people.” This comes back to haunt him. The emperor does not tolerate dissent amongst his advisers. Condemned as a traitor, Gulliver is forced to take refuge on the other side as well.

In Gulliver’s world there are more nations, more political systems, more judicial systems, ‘more things than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio’, I am tempted to say, echoing Hamlet. It is a crackling succession of hilarious ideas. No one is spared. Not kings, not MPs or prime ministers. Not despots, not reformers. Not lawyers, not judges, not philosophers, not scientists. The most damage of all is caused by the ‘projectors’, selfless inventors. More than any others, the ‘political projectors’ – the manipulators of constitutional laws. At Lagado’s Academy, they have found a foolproof method for uncovering conspiracies against the government: examining the colour of their poo. And an equally ingenious remedy for reconciling the parties when they turn violent against one another: take a hundred leaders from each party, pair them with leaders from the opposing party, and saw off their temporal lobes so that their brains may mix (Part III, Chapter VI). Several of the imagined kingdoms seem, at first glance, more to Swift’s liking than his own England. They have all the hallmarks of marvellous utopias. But they then reveal themselves to be governed by bogus systems and customs, more dystopian than those we know, or than our own. ‘Swift’s greatest contribution to political thought is his aversion to what we would today call totalitarianism,’ notes Orwell, who knew a thing or two about the totalitarianisms of his own era, be they Nazi or Stalinist (Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels, 1946). Among the Houyhnhnms, Gulliver seems happy. “I no longer needed to defend myself against fraud and oppression; there were no doctors there to kill me, no lawyers to ruin me, no paid informers to spy on my words or actions, or to bring charges against me. There were no mockers, fault-finders, slanderers, pickpockets, highwaymen, burglars, solicitors, pimps, buffoons, bookmakers, political schemers, wits, busybodies, polemicists, rapists and murderers, brigands, or singing virtuosos; there were no party leaders, nor even their followers” (Part IV, Chapter X). They are paranoid totalitarians, worse than the rest. They decide on the preventive expulsion of Gulliver, the foreigner, castaway and would-be immigrant.

It is pointless to seek one-to-one correspondences between fiction and reality (whether our own or that of three centuries ago). There are entire libraries on this subject. Swift prefers that ‘the sensible reader reflect and draw their own conclusions’. The classics always have something to say. Think of the Odyssey. They are designed to provoke, to make us think, to stir emotions. Swift does not set out to make people laugh. He wants to strike low, where he can do the most harm to the indifferent. He does so by wielding the absurd like a club. He is a professional indigner, angry at his world and the politics of his time. "Saeva indignatio", ‘savage indignation’, are the words he chose – and bequeathed in his will – for his funeral epitaph. He is a reactionary through and through, exasperated by his own political failures. He is utterly politically incorrect. He is misogynistic—indeed, misanthropic. He hates women. But above all, he hates and despises the whole of humanity for its irredeemable inhumanity. His own species—both human and political—disgusts him. Expelled from the land of the horse-men, Gulliver can no longer even bear to stay at home with his wife. He cannot stand the stench of humans. He goes to sleep in the stable, with the horses. One need not agree with Swift to enjoy reading his masterpiece.