Luigi Galleani Archive
Written: 1914.
Source: From RevoltLib.com
Transcription/Markup: Andy Carloff
Online Source: RevoltLib.com; 2021
Let us immediately make a statement as sincere as necessary; we have no idolatries, no stagnant devotions, no blind fetishes; But we do not even have the remotest nostalgia for the Inquisition and we do not know what to do with the skin of those who, in the midst of the more or less subversive phalanxes of the international proletariat, have been overwhelmed by the river and unable to stand upright, to recommend their heads on their shoulders, and, inside, free their reason, serene their judgment, they have in the drunken chorus pitied their hymn to war, their fervent appeal to the great civil crusade against the intrusive feudal Teutonic barbarity. To interfere would be unfair: not only is it not for everyone, but it is not even of all hours, it is not of all problems, even less of the problems that appear impetuous, flattering with irresistible pride, threatening with ineffable horrors, fraught with painful contradictions, the mental independence, the moral courage, the anguished insurrection against the blaze of an epic conventional lie and the dazzling reenactment of a traditionalism warped in martyrdom and self-denial, daring and heroism; against the sudden regurgitation of collective states of mind just overtaken, always vibrant, always alive under the hot ashes; against the cry of the flock that burst out blind, violent, incoercible at the call: courage and independence tempered by intimate doubt before the brutal outward overwhelming, and a fundamental condition of judgment that will be dispassionate and serene as much as the passion will be extraneous if not superior.
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Because we are not particularly touched by the grace, we who today can effortlessly escape from the abyss into which others have thrown the shaggy baggage of their convictions into a desperate eclipse of the densest, most galliard, brightest, though painful pin of their lives. Those are not worse than us, we are not better, we are just more alders, in a less turbulent atmosphere; and from afar the set of landscapes and phenomena is surprised in the broad outlines and essential relationships without shadows and without deviations, while on the mind, on the soul, the wave that over there boils with all the passions and is clouded with every anxiety, dense with every disturbance and every aberration, is weak, tired, harmless, as if purified across the two continents of all its bitterness, all its ungrateful bitterness.
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They can twist your lips in a grimace of supreme disgust, the disgust, the disgusting lug, the impudent somersault” of the histrionics that yesterday from the Dionysian cusps of egoist-anarchism mocked the sloppy, oblique audience of Nazi and democratic hybridizations, and today, for fear or for the tip, to the democratic war and the triumphs of Christianity, rebelled under the barbaric menace, alio Stato — yesterday’s ludibrio and mockery, today’s area and unmarketable garrison — conscript sycophant and warrior royal prefectures.
But if it appears to you suddenly before you, magnificent ruin of an era that in history has become light through martyrdom and heroism, exuberant with all the strength, vibrant with all the faith, when faith confessed in the gallows between the rope the iron and lead, if it appears to you tomorrow white, white, engraved with wrinkles, the wrinkles of Noumea di Porto Longone and Regina Coeli, serene in the big lion’s eyes, the figure of Amilcare Cipriani too wide to be forced into the short and sullen creed, too high to be forced into the short and sullen creed because he can be closed under the hood of the coven, and Amilcare Cipriani who has numbered the dianas of every war for half a century, has lived the anguished trials, has always had in his retina the horrendous flash, in his heart the fratricidal thrill; And he tells you, he tells you, that beyond the immense massacres beyond the immense ruin of every war, of every battle, he glimpses, bloody, distant, and though fatal, the dawn of the great Eucharist of brotherhood and love, that you must take back the sack, the carbine, give again the enthusiasm, the youth, the life, to save the conserved destiny of civilization and France from the conserved threat of Germany and imperial feudalism, you can neither disdain nor pity.
— No one dares her, no one could, without sacrilege, because she easily understands everyone who does not desert France today the man who in Garibaldi’s red phalanxes shielded her chest between Montretout and Autun, forty-three years ago. He would not desert France, he would not desert the republic today Amilcare Cipriani, he would deny all his past running between the victorious propitiations of Dijon and the communal atoning; and of that past he h. the perpetual and resigned prisoner. He is bound to you more firmly than any bond of his impenitent magnanimity in Romagna, so that to the abandonment, to the ingratitude to baseness, one can only respond with the irresistible, impetuous and oblique spontaneity of sacrifice: in Bordeaux he repays the self-sacrifice, the disinterest and the heroism of the red shirts, the rogue republican clergy, with their mockery and banishment. It’s only natural. Can the rogue clergy do anything else? But to the appeal of the threatened republic, of the adoptive homeland in distress, the survivors of Satory and Pere Lachaise tomati from New Caledonia, can only respond by marching in the vanguard; can a Garibaldian do anything else?
And the only regret of the old Amilcare Cipriani in this hour of passion, and that the wound of Domokos takes away from him today “as in 1870, he was the embankment of his breast to republican France against militarist imperialism”.
Do not torment him with hateful questions that would not crush his immovable devotion. Don’t ask him, who escaped yesterday from the pincers of the Republican Inquisition and from the revenge of French militarism, whether imperialism as minting and gallows, the imperialism that arm itself only for the pickpocketing of high finance is not on the ruins of the Bastille camped sly cynical voraciously so solidly at least that in the Frankfurt ghetto, in the steelworks of Essen or in the barracks of Strasburgoo in Berlin. Do not ask him if he has ever dared to Piombi, alio Spielberg the imperial and royal Austrian Chancellery what the seasoned ethereal homelands of Villa Ludovisi have dared to Regina Coeli, searching the heart and brain of the poor Acciarito to madness; he has not despaired of his homeland at Aspromonte in Mentana in Porto Longone; France did not despair in front of the firing squad, did not despair in Noumea, and France and for him the republic guillotining with Capeto the noble monarchies and shouting the declaration of rights, while Germany remained in him in spite of John Leyda and communist Anabaptism, in spite of his 1848, in spite of Fichte, Marx or Haeckel, the Germany of Barbarossa and Bismark, the grace of God and exceptional laws: “va ‘n po’ la, burdlass that the Germans, boja d’...
Twenty-five years of swirling existence spent on the ideal when the ideal was the homeland, his or others’; twenty-five years he spent in jail. Returning to the world, after a quarter of a century of eclipse, he sees in the enemy — who in the five turbulent and changed lusters — the legendary features and returns to the implacable traditional phobias.
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How can you stone him if the little garzoncelli of subversive estheticism who in their seminars have wasted their intellect and health looking at their navel, the center of the universe gravitating modestly around the immense vanity of their erudite misery, draw the horoscopes of the people, and they close you in the same garibaldine simplicity — with less sincerity — that, in every house, and from whatever point of view the European conflict wants to judge itself, strength will be to recognize that the struggle is between feudalism and industrialism, between imperialism and intellectualism. Feudalism and imperialism set aside between the Kaiser’s howlers, industrialism and intellectualism garrisoned by George V’s Indus, the Czar’s Cossacks and the dragoons of the bourse republic.
As if feudalism, moving from the first of the orders, from the neghittous, corrupt, imbecile aristocracy, to the restless, greedy, corrupting third state, had changed more than skin and rituals, and to a more wicked vassalage than the saddest days of the ancient regime had not subjugated every order of society where big industry, high finance has more agile the instrument of production and more racist, more ancient, more experienced the accomplice organization.
“Even the most ignorant man in financial matters cannot escape a legitimate apprehension thinking that France’s eight billion metal reserves are in the coffers of a few large banks, which is to say at the discretion of a very small number of financiers who, apart from any question of probity or dishonesty, have at their disposal, without the slightest control, the most formidable means of action that exists from the economic, political and social point of view”.
So, not a subversive, but a former president of the Council of Ministers, a ruffled financier, a conservative shrewd to all caution, even if rusty of all prejudices, a patriotic maniac, Meline, outlines in the “République Francaise”, the new feudalism much more inauspicious than that of the Kaiser, just as disastrous to vassals — and the most wretched vassals, we are the servants, always, unchanged — when across the frontier the feudalism of the Krupps, the Bayers, the Deutsche Banck and the various Discount Gesellshaft consecrating in Germany, as elsewhere similar institutions of privilege, the monopoly of the new lords, the lords of the dollar, the lords of the dividend, the lords of usury and the billion, who succeeded the lords of the earth, the grace of God, the crusades, equally idle, equally voracious; equally exaggerated to those who work, to those who sweat, to those who create, to those who groan in every country, among every people, in the shadow accomplice of every flag, so that today we can say France or Germany or England or Italy, because to the glory of a name to which reality does not correspond, which indeed screams the most violent of antinomies; because to the triumph of a symbol of ideal commonalities and traditional solidarity that dissolve in the most ferocious antagonism, enthusiasm and the holocaust are invoked on this side of the barricade.
There is no more France-, there are, beyond Cenisio, the Bank of France, Rotschild or Schneider, and their lax artisans and peasants dying of hunger, drowning, fattening them, in ignorance, in abjection and pain; There is no more Germany, there are shameless gangs of great corsairs on the other side of the Rhine or the Moselle, who compete for the race on the beach, on the beach, on the market, on the sack, and who want from the ankylosed miners, from the smiths, from the anemic weavers, from the pellagrous peasants of Silesia of Westphalia, the last drop of blood and the last wheeze. They have created with their work, with their sweat, with their fasting, too abundant the starving, too much unpaid wealth, they must now give their skin to tear into the ranks of other servants who guard them ignorant and jealous, the markets of the world.
And so, it is everywhere, across the Vistula, across the Channel, across the Alps, across the ocean.
There’s no more homeland.
Their lords sell it to those who pay the most: the outcasts, the derelicts, the bastards of every country want to build the universe and free homeland, without hatreds or borders where love and freedom find refuge, radiate joy.
No one has the right to remain silent, to hide the iconoclastic truth from the wretched, and the heralds of international brotherhood have no right to disturb, to divert the proletarian conscience at its first steps from the harsh path that is uncertain and unsafe.
It is their task to enlighten it, to support it by the steep steepness; and Cyprian and Kropotkin are wrong to sacrifice to the ephemeral fever, full of disenchantment, of feeling, the teaching of reason and history.
Kropotkin mostly.