Luigi Galleani Archive
Written: 1914.
Source: From RevoltLib.com
Transcription/Markup: Andy Carloff
Online Source: RevoltLib.com; 2021
According to Pietro Kropotkin the Italians have a particular debt of gratitude to France to absolve, they have with Germany an old account of betrayals and deceptions to liquidate: France came to Italy’s aid when our homeland was fighting with heroism desperately for independence, unity, for its own liberation, while William II’s Germany and Alexander II’s Germany with Russia over France, “on account of her efforts to free Italy” overthrew all her hatred, and to the Italians themselves when “in 1860 sent away the Austrian rulers of Florence, Parma and Modena, and Florence became the capital of Italy”[8] never made a mystery of her obstinate, implacable opposition.
The moment to settle the double match now, and around the situation of Italy cannot be equivocal: it must side for France against Germany.
* * *
If it came from someone else, from historians of the caliber of Luigi Cibrario or perhaps Guglielmo Ferrero, from those who, in the circle of the fiftieth anniversary of the splendors and the evils of the last Italian Revolution, drew on the courtly chronicles and the waged courtiers’ apologies, the call would not surprise us more than much; but from Peter Kropotkin who gave us in the “Great Revolution” the measure of his magnificent aptitudes to criticism and historical investigation, we are entitled to a less reckless interpretation of the national epic.
We will not attempt here, not even in its broad outlines, to reconstruct it, either because it is only an episode of this discussion or because the limitations of this very modest study do not allow it.
We would just like the Kropotkin to refer for a moment to the men of freedom of the historical period to which he mentions, to men to whom everything can be contended except the immense love of the homeland, except the sincerity of the faith created by blood from the sacrifice of martyrdom, to Alberto Mario or Giuseppe Mazzini, for example, sure that he would surprise in the anxieties, doubts, revolts, but all the thoughts of those builders of the Italian homeland, not only the animating spirit of the last revolution, but frank and clear the character of the relations between the people of Italy yearning for independence and unity with their enemies outside....and inside.
* * *
Peter Kropotkin will not make us the insult of believing that we are enemies of France, and we will not offer him the pretext by rehabilitating — from Charlemagne who now eleven centuries ago laid the foundations and principals of the temporal power of the pope in Rome, to the preliminaries of Loeben or the Treaty of Campoformio which gave the hangman of Hapsburg, bound feet and hands, the most generous of the Italian people — the acidic and iridescent ceremonies of traditional myogalies. We’re not even going to send him back to the “Moniteur”, to the speech-- the stormy session of March 7, 1849 in which the Republican Left demanded that the ministry Odillon Barrot be put on trial, who, authorized by parliament to protect Italian freedom in Rome, sent General Oudinot to Civitavecchia “to act as Cossack to the Roman Republic” as denounced by the tribune Etienne Arago, “to restore the Pope” as he deplored scandalized, and it is all to say, Jules Favre.
Napoleon the little one in his message of November 12, 1850 clarified how Bonaparte’s France intended to defend the republican liberty of the third Rome:
“Our arms have overthrown in Rome that turbulent demagogy which throughout the Italian peninsula had compromised the cause of true freedom; and our brave soldiers have had the great honor of putting Pius IX back on the throne of St. Peter[9].
We have no interest in overturning on the other guilt and shame that are at home, in torment of a truth that was then violently suffocated, and even today, with every devious deception, with every more compassionate pretext opposed, has made overwhelming progress now so that in the faith of men like Peter Kropotkin does not find hospitality and citizenship.
And the truth is this: that the contrasts, the worst obstacles to independence’ and to Italian unity did not come to the patriots of the first hour, of the tragic hour in which love for one’s homeland was discounted by the gallows, from Germany or Russia or France; but by the Savoys, but by the Piedmontese statesmen, so that every thought, every act, every step in the liberation of the Italian provinces from the game of the Bourbons or the Pope, the Hapsburgs or the Lorraine was a crime if in generous recklessness it did not lead to the preliminary absence of Vittorio Emanuele II’s sovereign national investiture. Waves that, before being violent contrast of patriots and foreigners, the national epic and unripe struggle, implacable between those who, repudiated all sordid mortgage, want the country frank in its historical borders, and those who want the Piedmontese conquest of Italy; Between those who want independence to be assured on the defeat of the tyrannies rained exotically on the other side of the Alps as well as those grown up and lively in the shadow of their homelands forks, and those who, moved only by lust and greed and robbery, wanted on the kidneys of the good people of Italy to adapt and to strike equally exaggerated and atrociously on their own, their stick.
Paterino, adventurer or brigand who dared the wicked enterprise; better in Sicily the Bourbon than Garibaldi, better in Rome the Pope and the temporal power that the republic of Saffi and Mazzini, better Austria in Venice than the red shirts in Trentino, and an authoritative Italian newspaper of moderate part[10] was pleased days are to remember the words that Camillo Cavour repeated to the great king in Bologna on May 2, 1860, Ier days before the departure of the Thousand from Quarto: If no one goes to get Garibaldi from the collar, I’ll go myself; and with greater satisfaction the words with which Visconti-Venosta inaugurated the first sitting of the Italian Parliament in Rome: “We did not come to Rome neither with the revolution nor in its wake, but by preventing it. We want to remain there, not with revolution, but with a spirit of freedom and broad and tolerant consideration that intends to heal the Pontiff’s right and freedom of conscience and to assure him of respect in such conditions that no other country can offer him either more secure or more worthy[11].
It was the revolution Giuseppe Garibaldi who, by raising the flag ”‘Italy and Vittorio Emanuele” in Palermo, had not succeeded in disarming the mistrust and fears of the Savoy Camorra, Giuseppe Mazzini exiled to the homeland of whose independence and unity had been the confessor the herald the soldier of the first hour, of all the intact and glorious life.
The liberator brecciaiolo was Vittorio Emanuele II of Savoy who had missed on the yokes of Aspromonte the honest intention of assassinating Garibaldi on the road to Rome, but in agreement with Napoleon’s France, to whom he had denounced Garibaldi’s revolutionary genes, the bruises or pinzocheri had been able to satiate in the massacres of Monterotondo, Villa Glori and Mentana.
* * *
The contrast was as natural and logical as the mistrust of democratic elements towards French intervention in things of Italy.
Both tradition of the free communes, pride of its glorious Old Republics, and instinctive awareness of the ethnic variety of its constituent elements, complicated by the geographical eccentricity of its regions. Our people — in whose history the monarchic tradition, with the exception of Sicily, has violent and frequent solutions of continuity — could not conceive that in a republican sense the national reconstruction, and this aspiration could not but be irreconcilable on the Piedmontese hegemony.
And this one, which lacked the suffrage of trust and popular cooperation, necessarily had to look for foreign alios, to Napoleon Bonaparte, to France, as Kropotkin writes, the help he could not find at home. Pietro Kropotkin will certainly not spend a word in defense of the man of December 2, and however you judge his work, he will certainly not tell me that he was a man to worry about the independence of Italy, if not because in Italy he could realize the ill-concealed ambition to remake to the Neapolitans dispersed by the restoration the kingdoms of Etruria or the Neapolitan.
”The alliance of France with Piedmont makes the effectiveness of the national will derisory, it disturbs Italians’ conscience of themselves and their duties, it has made them forgetful of their decorum”, wrote Alberto Mari in October 1859; and he added: “Before that alliance Italy was dominated by Austria, after that it was in-balia at the same time as Austria and France. Two emperors are fighting over it; the Austrian wants the body; the French want the soul... and the moral dependence... d modified by fifty thousand soldiers that God knows if and when they will rival the Alps”.
And he made no secret of the French Emperor’s intentions.
“Napoleon III has an embryonic emperor: he possesses the crown without the gems, and he seeks them. Napoleon’s uncle found them first and the best water in Italy: his nephew... went down to Italy to fish them out, lost in 1815. Uncle has set them by his own hand in the golden crown without ceremony, the nephew leaves this. care to the compatriots of Benvenuto Cellini goldsmith. Later the Neapolitans will learn the art too”.
The “Moniteur” of 28 September 1859 felt the obligation to reassure the Italians; but the malice of the “Moniteur” was in the commitments of Villafranca and in the word of the executioner of 2 December.
More brutal was Mazzini, to whom even every form of violence was repugnant: “That man,” he wrote from London in 1858, “and the murderer of Rome; and he keeps there without a shadow of right an army, almost an outpost to one day embody designs of great ambitions; and he conspires concealedly for a Muratian insurrection in Naples...”.
And Count Camillo di Cavour, to whom the intervention was due, unmasked the devious windings shouting outragedly:
“We believe in the initiative of the people of Italy, you fear it, and you study to remove it... We want the country, once it has emerged, to choose freely the form of institutions that will have to sustain it; you deny popular sovereignty and make the monarchy an overbearing condition of all help in the enterprise. We seek our help among the peoples who have with us communion of purpose, of pain, of struggle, you seek it among our oppressors, among the powers deliberately, necessarily contrary to our unity. We consecrate time, means, soul, life to persist in a war that through an inevitable series of defeats educates our people to fight... you consecrate time, means, politics to cross the road, to persecute us everywhere... to denounce us to the police of absolute governments...”.[12]
One could abound, but it seems to us that the summary quotations above are enough to persuade the Kropotkin that, if he is subjugated by his democratic return to collective symbols, and justice be more exact, that is, to speak of the alliance of the Empire with the Monarchy of Piedmont, and absolve us from the debt of gratitude as Italians, even without thinking about the territorial compensation that the Empire was paid at the time, even without deepening the hidden purposes for which the last Bonaparte had, in addition to the garrison of Rome, brought to Italy many legions of infantrymen and horses. And without reminding us above all of the disasters of 1866, which Napoleon and Victor Emmanuel’s deliberate intention to prevent Prussia ruining from Shadow to Vienna from becoming the terrible Germany that four years later was supposed to crown Versailles with the imperial crown.
* * *
Without stopping at 1866, which marks the most murky and gloomy deception in Italian history over the last fifty years, and the most infamous betrayal of which the Savoy dynasty has been stained, in which betrayal and cowardice are tradition and history; betrayal of the most fervent Italian hopes, and of the only allies from which it could, from which it has really had the cause of Italian independence, true effectiveness of cooperation and help.
A Custoza and Lissa wanted, imposed by the fearful complicity of Bonaparte and the Father of the Fatherland so that Austria would be free to face its enemy from the North, not Germany has betrayed Italy, good friend Kropotkin, if it does not veil the unfortunate crisis of feeling in your serenity, but Victor Emmanuel and Napoleon III have betrayed Germany and Italy.
We would appeal to your loyalty of which we have never doubted, of which we do not doubt even now that our enemies will inhale you against us, all the more painful that it is undeserved, if around this outdated moment of history the discussion had other value than to clarify a negligible contingency.
Because if in the historical episode of the controversy we have lingered on, the abstractly collective and symbolic names of France, Germany, Germany, Russia, Austria, Italy, which we stole from you for a moment, there is no controversy left but a gimmick that does not infirm our impenitence to distinguish, under the fraudulent veil of ethnic unity, the double homeland of those who oppress and those who are oppressed, those who create in pain under the cross of bloody passion, and those who in the sloth make cynical torment of proletarian blood and sweat; And we persist in believing that war, wherever it rages, is the most wretched form of that class collaboration against which with your every word, with your word and example, with your every gesture, With the marvelous fervor of your youth that survived every heartbreak at every flattery at all the corrosive pitfalls of the years, you have awakened distrust and disdain, protests and revolts, arousing among the humble people of every land from Angiolillo to Bresci, from Vaillant to Masetti, in the Holocaust, the nostalgia for justice and social revolution.
After having wiped away the sweat of every fiber as if it were the damned, in the mines, in the workshops, in the construction sites, in all its industrial baths, blood and sweat, the bourgeoisie asks us in the paradoxical carnage on the Vistula and on the Rhine for the extreme salvation from the failure that the court of adult reason, of the inexorable reason, has inexorably pronounced against its abominable regime.
We would be much less able to indulge you that those who would like to be in your language the terms of a syllogism are reduced to a deplorable ambiguity, not to say an oblique inversion.
To the France of Diderot, of Voltaire, of Beaumarchais, to the France of the Revolution, of the Declaration of Rights, of the Commune, you place, irreconcilable antithesis, the medieval Germany of the divine right of the Kaiser of Krupp, invoking for that one the arms of the men of liberty, of the proletarian international, proclaiming on the latter the destruction and death necessarily.
The logic is only apparent; we are navigating in full sophistry, in a wretched misunderstanding.
To the France of Lamark and Pasteur, to the France of the Encyclopedia and Freedom, don’t you logically, honestly oppose the Germany of Goethe and Schopenhauer, Lassalle and Marx, Wirchow, Haeckel, Kock?
And to the Germany of the Kaiser, of divine law, of the Krupp, don’t you find France the correspondent of the Congregations, of the Major State, of Schneider, of the Compitori National d’Escompte, which yesterday renewed the Sambartolomeo of Dominican anti-Semitism and today plays on the stock market the blood of the workers massacred at Ypres?
Restored equally, logically the contradictory terms of your proposition, you could not ask, of course, the libertarian sympathies for this France, the only one that, like Germany on the other side of the Rhine, wanted the great war, the sad war that we must not support even if we did not know how to avoid it; but you, our greatest and dearest brother, in the anguish of these days, would not derive from it the bite of conscience — which to the overwhelming madness of the insane hour can indulge, but is not dead and does not forget and will resume its dominion tomorrow — you who gather under every heaven, in every heart, so much sincere confidence, so deep affection of humble people, the strength to tell the proletarians here and there on the frontier: In your hardened hands are the destinies of civilization and progress, among the workers of the world has its inviolate refuge the civilization that does not look to flags, frontiers, liveries, idioms, ephemeral extinctions, fleeting barriers under the agile foot, on the luminous path, in the face of incoercible progress; do not abandon it, do not plunge it beneath the iron paws of the ulans or dragons or Cossacks, do not prostitute it to the stock market players, nor coin or twist it, coin for yourself, logs for you; oppose the coalition of oppressors and exploiters to the coalition of the oppressed and exploited, and in the fiery circle of the frontier homeland drown the secular enemy, the common enemy forever, for your salvation. for the salvation of all!
Vox clamantis in the desert?
From the Baptist of the legend to the last Montjuich shot in the clamorous voices about the desert, the hope for the future.
Against the war,
for the social revolution![13]
— What does every man, every animal, every threatened organism do, attacked in things, in the person, in his right, in liberty, in security, in life?
— It defends itself; and natural, it is in the very instinct of its own preservation, and the fundamental condition on which all the evolution of life, every form of progress and civilization, rests.
— And what does a man of heart, a man of liberty, a man of justice, do when he sees the overwhelming power of the strongest overwhelmed the law, threatened the life of the weakest?
— He rushes with all means, with all weapons in defense of the weakest, and helps him to rebuild the beastly arrogance of the overwhelmer, less in obedience to the commandments of Christian morality than to the concerns of his own salvation: the unpunished overwhelmer and incentive to the violent who, finding no restraint, rage upon all; and it may come our time.
— And tell us, then, how can one be against war, if in every war there is a threat, a provocation, an aggression? Tell us, then, what was little Serbia threatened in its independence to do, what was Belgium to do, threatened in its integrity, threatened with iron, fire and sack? And tell us again, in the face of the unequal duel between Austria and Germany on the one hand, fortified by a dozen million armed men and little Belgium, badly supported in the defense of its territorial integrity by less than half a million, what should the nations that pretend to be civilians do if not take the weakest side against the strongest, for Serbia, for Belgium against Austria and against Germany?
Could France, England, Russia act differently? Could the men of justice and freedom in every country — in Italy, for example, where foreign violence is so much and so long suffered that the bruises are always in the flesh and the torment and always in the memory — disinterested in the conflict, not take part in it with enthusiasm nourished by noble worries and civilized welfare, when at stake are the same things, the same rights, the same independence, the same freedom that you recognize, that you demand are defended, protected, claimed in every body, in every threatened and overwhelmed individual?
Would not the freedom, independence, security of a lineage, of a nation, be worth that of the faintest organism, that of a man, yours?
Subtract, if you can, from the contradiction on which your doctrinaire horror of war nails you; reconcile it, if you can, with the consequences that break irrecusable from the premises in which you allow.
* * *
— We reaffirm — we are opposed to any war other than class war, other than social revolution — that any organism threatened in its security, undermined in its development, in its existence, has, more than the right, the duty to defend itself, to rein insidiousness and aggression by all means, the extremes; and we do not intend at all to evade the consequences that descend from this explicit premise. On the contrary, to the responsibilities that those consequences imply, we recall you who try to escape from them with a sophism, with the abused sophism of the proletarian homeland, of class imperialism, of revolutionary war and other warlike aberrations of congenital warfare, invoked as a safe-conduct of a desperate lack of convictions, of faith, of ideality; a safe-conduct ruffled, many times, by the calculations of the turncoat arriism.
— With sophistry?
— By defeating sophistry; If and sophistry every fallacious argument that from true premises, arrives, through the logical appearance of its propositions, to erroneous conclusions, typical sophistry and yours that in Serbia, Belgium, France, England or Germany, abdications, abjurations, hasty apostasies, reconstructs solidarity of interests, Identity of feelings, common destinies, rights, aspirations, and intentions that you have until yesterday denied, that you have until yesterday endeavored to distinguish and destroy as the most foul of frauds, as the most untrue of conventional lies, as the most serious obstacle to the ascension of the proletariat towards its integral emancipation. You were yesterday against the homeland, for the International?
— One thing is the remote ideology, another, very different, the concrete reality.
— I’m not arguing the fallback. The exhausted, tired, exhausted, by Andrea Costa Benito Mussolini, and the pusillanimous hymns that the hymn anarchy has always held back from some providential utilitarian reserve: when all the workers will agree, we will be more revolutionary than the rest of you! and more anarchic than you will be when it will be anarchy! For now, the bourgeoisie dominates
the pot doesn’t boil
to dream of Biuto impetus and form.
But I know concrete immanent practices the reasons that had raised you against the homeland for the International.
Why did you deny your country?
Because by relegating across the border between archaic mistrust and insane hatreds — as foreigners - servants, oppressed, exploited like you, like us, and expiring within the borders of the Alps and the sea, love, brotherhood, solidarity and exploitation of which we have fallen, Servants aware of the iniquity and the abbomination you had proclaimed the wreckage and destruction, the homeland had, on the one hand, appeared outdated ideology, absorbed by the radiant aspiration to the universal homeland, and was twisted on the other in the fraud aimed at hiding from us that
enemies, foreigners
they’re not long, but they’re here;
and I know that of night choirs and beetles to mitigate was, monotonous to boredom, the obligatory refrain
war on the kingdom of war
death to the kingdom of death!
and that in the choir was your voice.
Reality is fine, the tragic reality that everyone subjugates that overcomes, erases, annihilates every other feeling, every other vision; but it also has an aspect that does not escape any of you, a contrast that is of every hour and every earth so that you may refuse to see it: pickpockets, merchants, freebooters who confess without scruples — without even the hypocrisy of veiling their libido of surrender with rancid sentimental idealisms — to seek in the war only triumph, over their competitors from the other side of the Alps and overseas, of greedy fortune, of dividend raptors, while to the fate of the desperate stock market game — referred to the extreme reason of the weapons on the fields of Flanders, in the gorges of the Carpathians or in the tidal waves of Memel — they sacrifice to millions in his most galliard youth the crowd of servants that for the weapons so much and worn out anemized exhausted during half a century of fasting; and to the war now comes drunk with lies and fanfare while predicting that among the weapons will restore more formidable the pyramid of the master and the State, reaffirming ^ more exaggerated on the fate of children the yoke of servitude and misery and abjection.
Is it not the lot of the herd, that the shepherd should be tame with the wool until it is time to give the carcass to the gravedigger?
— The digression doesn’t interest me. It would perhaps be curious to see how much logic both in Cerretans and for the subversive beasts of the old and new world, in exchange for the contempt and disdain with which they repay him, they ask the people - almost as if they themselves were not the lousy rabble, the least Dionysian, the least sincere and the least heroic — the most incoherent and most absurd miracle: the alliance with the Cossacks of the little father and the blessing of the pontiff, for the studded salvations of the order of freedom of civilization... bourgeois. But it pushes us another way.
To highlight at this point the fallacy of the reasoning with which you deceive or deceive yourself: you cannot apply to a non-existent entity the duty of defense, the human obligation concerned revolutionary or civil of solidarity invoked by you, by us without reservation allowed, of solidarity4 with every weak oppressed by the strong, with every organism threatened in its security, threatened in its becoming, assaulted in its freedom or its integrity.
— But Belgium...
— It is not an organism, if of each organism the parts are not solidary and harmonious. The conflict between the belly and the arms is only in Menenius Agrippa’s cunning apologists; any disturbance of any of the functions of an organ inevitably brings with it the perturbation of the whole economy of the organism which has fallen to ruin and death if the balance and harmony of functions are not promptly restored.
Now, there is a reality that goes beyond the reality of war and is at least as tragic: In Belgium, as in Serbia, as in Italy, they are exploited and exploitative, they are oppressors and oppressed, they are producers of wealth who die of exhaustion, of media, and parasites that the useless existence encloses in idleness and orgy; they are, irreconcilable, two classes; and none of you, even though you are tired today of mocking the International, are even, I think, denying that, if the Belgian or French or German or Italian bourgeoisie disappeared tomorrow, the proletariat of each of these so-called nations would be much better off not staying today; not only, but that the liberation of the Belgian proletariat, as well as of the German or Italian proletariat, and conditioned to the disappearance of the Belgian German or Italian bourgeoisie, of the International bourgeoisie; and it will have to conclude that where, in place of harmony, and mortal implacable antagonism of current and future interests, economic and political, material and moral, the talk of organisms, of harmonic unitary solidarity entities, and of the intimate civil or revolutionary necessity of their protection, of their preservation, and at least reckless.
Whether the Flemish or English or French or Russian bourgeoisie has a vital interest in joining forces to face or surpass the German or Austrian bourgeoisie in the field of industrial or political financial competitions, it is explained; that for one or another of the contending groups, for the war itself, all the conservation parties, from the clerical to the democratic to the socialist, perhaps, made like the unanimous jackals on the carrion, can still be understood very well. In the violent regurgitation of dying, suspicious, defiant nationalism; in the gloomy choreography of the war between the crashes of the machine gun around the flags erect on millions of corpses, while horrible insatiable monstrous grinning death from the abysses of the air and sea, and a violent diversion to the reckless imprints, to the iconoclastic turbulence of the international proletariat that slowly but irresistibly rises beyond all frontiers, to the awareness of the common interests of the common claims of common destiny, of the common universal integral emancipation: it explains itself.
It is no longer understandable that after fifty years of meditated, laborious theoretical and practical splitting from the ruling class, from all the parties that guard their fate with less or more prudence, the anarchists — who perhaps do not hold the class struggle constant among the factors of history, but would not know how to disown its atrocious constancy in life, of every day, and do not conceive the emancipation of the proletariat than on the definitive defeat of the ruling class, nor the future harmonies without the leveling of the classes on the earth made instrument and climate to the joy, to the liberty, to the well-being of all — can under any pretext, in whatever contingency, be reconciled with the abhorrent social order without denying the painful passion for which they have risen to consciousness, to the pride of their proud and luminous ideal, without denying themselves.
All the more so since reasoning has been reestablished in its logical terms, the premise has been reconciled with the consequences, and the task is defined, clear and precise, a task more worthy of their faith, their courage and their action.
***
If there is, in this case, threatened in the security, in the existence, in the development of its historical becoming, in each of the cells that compose it and in its rhythmic, harmonic, solidary whole, an organism worthy of our interest, of our sympathy, of our defense, this body and the proletariat, identical yesterday, today, tomorrow, always, in spite of the flags and latitudes under which it camps, identical in pain and misery, aspirations and fate, in Belgium as in Germany, Italy, as in Austria, England or Russia.
And if it is of mediocre interest to ask us what the bourgeoisie or the Belgian government, which are suffering with the German invasion their solidarity with the bourgeoisie and with the government of France and England, solidarity of interests and interests freely elected, freely allowed, too long meditated on, The attitude of the workers must be foreseen, calculated, weighed up in its risks and its consequences, in the hardships of today as well as in the lavish prizes of tomorrow, so that they do not have the shame or the merit, all and conscious of their responsibilities.
We were with the proletariat yesterday, against all its enemies; with it, and for it, we attacked every bastille, every lie, every fraud, every property, in the name and in the interest of which war is waged; alio State, which the war has unleashed and infused with savage hatreds and hyperbolic carnage; to the Church, which, on the insane fratricidal torment, is fortunately tending the nets of the coveted Catholic restoration of its spiritual and temporal dominion; against the Patna, which the wise deception covers with its banners; Against the militarism, which, having burnt our sons to the barracks, immolated them in the premeditated slaughter unto fortune and the glory of the capital; And now that the fraud, the lie, the ambush are clawing him from all sides, now that histrionics, demagogues and redeemers are pushing him back into agreement under the yoke, can we abandon him without protest, without revolt, shirking the frightening but irrecusable responsibilities that our pertinaceous theoretical insurrection, our iconoclastic attitude, all our propaganda are achieving?
* * *
Not us, not at this hour of his atrocious Gethsemane where Pilate’s cowardice and Judas’ treachery drive him up the steep slope of the bleeding, ineffable passion.
War is and if in every war and a provocation, an aggression, in the great war — as in the dark war of every day — the proletariat must be the anarchists with the vibrant affection of noble worries and civilized foresight. With the proletariat only, because while the bourgeoisie of the uncertain of the war will easily make up for itself in the division of the spoils at the good hour, and reconciling itself to the fleeting competitions of today on the renewed plebeian devotions, it will have in the lamp of its destiny, in everything, the oil of another century of life and of empire, the proletariat will reap on the battlefields only death, misery and servitude today, which threatens it and threatens its ransom tomorrow.
With the proletariat everywhere, because the different language, the different faith, the tradition, the homeland, the different flag, cannot break — indeed, they will put in a better light — the fundamental harmony and commonality of the interests and aspirations that remain identical even where the aberrated attitude of some of its factions about this essential commonality has passed with the blind fury of its superstitious and bestial domesticity.
* * *
With the proletariat that in the warp of the millennial and fallen fraud, fratricidal hatred in the poisoned heart, the murderous weapon in the convulsive fist, in Germany or Belgium, in Austria or Serbia, as with the proletariat that blinded by the same superstitious fury, on the cote of the same hatreds, in Italy, in Greece, in Romania, in Bulgaria, sharpens its knives to the fratricidal slaughters of tomorrow; for the most human, the most revolutionary, the most civilized of all endeavors; to honor a commitment that we have solemnly contracted in the face of the proletariat, to cry out a truth that trembles in the soul of all, and that everyone, all of them knee-deep in fear, scruples, religiously eunuchs, strive to evade and suffocate.
When to the rough proletarian soul, redeemed from the begging customs and the lying flattery of the otherworldly redemption, torn even more laboriously from the protection of the demigods of the earth, from the naive faith in the protection of the law and the State, we have on the ruins of the great conventional lies shown survivors a right and a strength, the strength of the minds bending over the mystery, the strength of the arms bowing in the furrow, the strength of labor which is its intent to bring back to the earth, fellow citizens, together with equal wealth, truth and freedom; The right for those who surround life with security, wellbeing, joy, to freeze equal to its own lives, haven’t we a hundred times said and repeated that neither that strength nor that right would ever see the auroras of triumph until they were wiped from the earth, banished forever, the privilege source of all inequality, the lie guard of all servants?
And to the wavering, uncertain, doubtful proletarian soul beneath the fall of our iconoclastic recklessness, have we not with inexhaustible pertinence inculcated that, more than vigor and proper law, the enemy was strong with faith, with the arm, with the weapons that we deny or unconsciously bring to him ourselves? And that, reduced by now to having to rely only on our own strength, it was urgent to free from the mud and from the resigned abjection of the slave the indocile awareness of the creator of life, to unleash his will, to activate and converge his energies that would have asked the warnings of experience for the hope of free pacts, the irresistible harmony and the audacity of the supreme resolutions, as soon as the bells of the dies irae rang in flocks?
And that with them, with the workers of every country, in the vanguard, we would be in the hour of the extreme ciment?
* * *
The time is up. And among us are those who throw weapons and baggage to hurry among the ranks of the enemy, soldiers of the homeland, crusaders of bourgeois civilization, thugs of the emperor, the king, the republic. It is not Serena, nor is the hour of responsibility easy; blessed are the sophisms that free us from it.
* * *
Without sophistry, what should we say to the workers of countries at war, to those who will be overwhelmed tomorrow, to those who are watching from every country in dismay and deserting the immense carnage? “Long before the hirsute ulans of the Kaiser crossed the Rhine and the Mossa, long before the scourge of war passed over your hovels, and the scourge of war passed over your hovels, and the scourge of war was taken away from your children, and the crust of bread was skimped on, and the right, and the women, and the liberty, and the drunken cachinno of the victor’s drunken cachinno, in the homeland, in the homeland which you contend for today, fell upon the ruin. Your foreigner’s breast, the whims of your masters in life imprisonment, in the shipyards, in the mines panting of your generous toil, have torn your flesh, your sweat, your blood, your right, your children, have repaid your wealth with a crust of bread, a kick in the belly, a handful of baiocchi and. When you have made the effort, you have begged for rest, when you have made the bread suitable for sweat, when you have made the sacred task suitable for gratitude, respect, for the squares, the streets, the gorges of the mountains, the fields, the gendarmes of the king, the soldiers of the fatherland, on the cobblestones, on the furrows, with a burp of lead, have reclined you in a puddle of blood, inexorable as they dare not, even broken to all the ignominy of the trade, the peckers of the emperor; the king’s justice in the galleys of the fatherland has stifled the rale of the survivors; and tomorrow, when the fugitive king shall restore the throne to the throne, tomorrow he shall restore the fatherland to the regained borders, against your bare breasts, against your unarmed children, against the exhausted and starving, against your right to life, will be times the weapons which you have taken up in defense of the king, and of the fatherland against the invader.
Wasn’t it always like this? In Paris in May 1871 after the heroic self-sacrifice of the siege, in Petersburg in January 1905 after the Port Arthur holocausts?
It is bleeding to see you prey to the enemy in an hour of an hour; in the month of a year the pious valleys of Flanders and Brabant, the cathedrals, the universities, the marvelous workshops, the museums, the gleaming delusions of the faith, the wisdom, the industriousness of the art of the genius of your glorious Flemish lineage; and to take them away from you, you tend every anxiety, every daring, every tenacity, up to heroism, up to sacrifice.
Take them back, for whom?
“For the enemy of every day, of every time, for the enemy of the lineage as far as memory goes up through the ages, for the enemy of the offspring as far as the fearful gaze and resigned prediction peer into the mist of the future; for the age-old and unchanged enemy.
Not for you! Not for you, the pious lands of Brabant, which also sprinkled with your blood and sweat; not for you, the workshops which bore the miracle under the titanic grip of your arms in the wise rhythm of your work; not for you, the academies, the universities, the museums, the proud pride of knowledge, the divine ecstasy of art and beauty: for the secular enemy, inexorable and unchanged.
Well, it is today, for a moment in the enemy camp the discord, and within the circle of patriotic boundaries, the truest and greatest enemy has in his cowardly soul the thrill of fear, and bends down, cowardly and beggar — he who never had for our pains, for our right, for our miseries that gall and schemes and lead — to ask us in the king’s edicts for the salvation of the dynasty and the homeland, in the pastoral care of his bishops for the victory and for the glory of the ancestral faith, in the ruffled lie of his epigones for the defense of fields and mines, workshops and markets, for the custody of the turgid Flemish prosperity — a necessary bulwark for the threatened triple dominion — the chest, is blood of subjects, outcasts, the faithful. And he gives us for the glorious crusade the viaticum, the blessings, the weapons.
Weapons! Weapons sighed and waited for: the hour, the hour announced and longed for the resurrection! The hour that does not toma twice on the quadrant of history, the weapons that, retreated tomorrow on defeat or victory, will once again be flattened on our chests against our destiny!
If we would take them to take back the land that is ours, the house that is ours, the bread, freedom, rest, love, joy, the future, to take back our place in the sun, our place in life, our place in history, to those who have usurped and contended for them, for centuries, pin harshly, more ferociously than the invader who emerged from beyond the Rhine or perched on the yokes of Trentino and the cliffs of San Giusto, rising in the name of law and justice, rather than prostitute ourselves to the whim of the king or the calculations of the pickpockets: would we not begin that work of revolution and regeneration which in heroic defeats matures and hastens victory, which intises the hope, the seers, the sterile invocations of the tribunes and poets?”
* * *
Isn’t this the commitment that in the face of the stray proletariat between its tenacious illusions and the cunning duplicity of its ruffles we have taken on and every day sincerely renewed?
Isn’t this the voice that shouts even today incoercible at the bottom, in the best and healthiest part of each of us?
Doesn’t this unavoidable necessity every day reiterate every episode of the paradoxical carnage at the tragic end of which the international masquerades of the great thieves, on our back, demand hegemony?
And it is not the hour that, thrown out sophisms, folds, quibbles, deceptions, obliquities idiotic and unworthy, in every homeland where the war has passed with its massacres with its anguish with its waves of leaded blood of tears, in every homeland where it hastens to burst into tears in the mines in the shame of tomorrow, must the libertarians of every faction rediscover the necessary Concordia of intentions of action to which the vast field that illuminates the war of its sinister flashes opens unusually, unexpectedly propitious?
* * *
Stone me with ostracisms, anathemas, and vicissitudes: what is inside you is not weakened by calculation, by fear, has only consent for my heresy, has only one echo, one vote, one cry: against the war for the social revolution!
Against war, against peace,
for the revolution![14]
La verità est en marche et rien ne backward
E. ZOLA
He ascends and holds in the purest hands the faces and palms of justice. But then, even if it does not rise up on the fronts of Galileo’ or Bruno corrusca, ruthless against the divine majesty of dogmas and councils; even when humble, discreet, modest, it does not welcome and does not guard other masses than the daily experience and universe, for the steep of Golgotha it must ascend! it finds no other path.
Oh, you remember!
We warned our comrades, disrupted in conscience, in faith, in expectation, by the cyclone that swirling between the Danube and the Scheldt threatened to overwhelm them in the delirium of extreme perdition, how vast the continent is, we warned them twenty months ago, at the first outbreak of war, simply, fraternally; “If a ray of truth in the gloomy limbo of squalid servitude has come to kiss you, that joy, that pride, do not barter with the absinthe of the morbid enthusiasm that beyond the fleeting intoxication of the hour drowns in the most bitter, the most wretched of disillusions; To that joy, to that pride, do not abdicate, even if the loneliness of abandonment is around every side, and the dark phalanxes deserting, passing to the enemy, duchies and heralds; even where on the pale fronts roar the blind fury of the vulgos, the anathema of the haughty popes....if a ray of truth in the bleak limbo of squalid servitude has come to kiss you.
Not the fist of men can hold the world’s fortune! Our hour will return, do not despair, do not abandon the outposts with so much pain reached, with so much care guarded; do not betray for the restoration of the regime against which you have risen the holy cause of common liberation; do not betray for war the revolution!
It’s the obscene surrender of pirates, the fury of jackals, the rage of purse-snatchers enraged at usury, of shopkeepers’ shopkeepers of gamblers’ suppliers, who are panting at the dividend, at the tenth, at the suffered gains, the war! Civilization, homeland, liberty, progress are but the flag of which the smuggling is covered, with which the shameless fraud is hidden, to reap for the sack, for the size, for the fortune of the great thieves, the necessary tribute of energy and blood that the proletariat alone can give, and — though docile, though late — would not give otherwise with the ardor, self-sacrifice, the blind impetus that remains the essential condition for success. Isn’t that what we wrote, almost two years ago, at the first outbreak of the war?