B1069 <=> B1071 (BTG XLIII Beelzebub’s opinion of war, p. 1070)

“And regarding the same question it happens there just as our dear Mullah Nassr Eddin has already once said, namely: ‘This is the highest punishment: pull at the tail the mane gets stuck, pull at the mane and the tail gets stuck.’

“Whatever might have been, yet as I have already said, your favorites at the present time again wish to find possible ways and means for the abolition of this terrible property of theirs which has become inherent in them and fastened on their psyche as strongly as the consequences of the properties of the organ Kundabuffer.

“And, of course, these members of the contemporary society, the League of Nations, will endeavor to attain this abolition by all kinds of regulations and various agreements devised by them, by which means those ancient beings also endeavored to attain it, that is to say, by those ways and means by which in my opinion it is now already absolutely impossible there to attain anything ‘effective.’

“From this contrivance of your contemporary favorites some advantage might be derived, even quite a great one, but only for their inevitable newspapers, for drawing-room conversations, and, of course, for the various Hasnamussian manipulations of the terrestrial as they are called ‘stock-jugglers.’

“The state of affairs in regard to this terrifying evil there is at the present time already such that to attain the immediate total destruction on the surface of their planet of this, as I said, hideous property which has already entered their flesh and blood, is not only a meaningless task for their miserable Reason, but is in general almost impossible.

“However, my boy, even these contemporary beings of this contemporary common-planetary society the League of Nations, might perhaps – in spite of the fact that impartial Reason, proper to the presence of all three-brained beings who have already attained responsible age, is absent in them – also achieve positive results in the fundamental aim they have set themselves, if they occupy themselves with the solving and actualizing of only those questions which are in the sphere of their competence and powers.