Luigi Galleani Archive
Written: 1914.
Source: From RevoltLib.com
Transcription/Markup: Andy Carloff
Online Source: RevoltLib.com; 2021
And the more you remember!
From every trivium, from every bilge, from every bilge, from every lair, from every parchment, from every lips, from the desolate lips of the people in their own way, from the obscene mouth of the assassins, from the obtuse soul of the crew, from the mocking sneer of the pusillanimous, full of flattery, of pity, of threats, of schemes, of ostracisms, of fears, the range of the vicious and of the abomination was fierce, implacable: Lost for one, bastards for the other, naive for those, sold for them, aberrantly obstinate or reckless for the rest, the painful slow indefectible justice of things and time we have in the bedlam we have sighed for twenty months, in the fierce faith of intimate conscience and painful experience, yearning for the windy dawn of the incoercible truth, which now dawns.
Barely, barely; but when it is enough to wish for the day, to penetrate the plot of the horrendous paradoxical fraud, to illuminate its frightening warp of calculations, of windings, of irony and cynicism, to build the wretched ones who expected the immaculate labors of a greater civilization, the serto of the greatest homeland, the blood orifice of freedom, all the benefits of abundance and well-being, the palingenesis vaticinata of mankind in the hyperbolic bloodbath that had to rebuild the fiber, will, hope and purpose; consoling himself at the worst Tarfuto, that if war and the supreme of misfortunes, this at least had the unusual advantage of being the last of history.
If the progress of civilization is measured by the victories of law over arbitrariness, of reason over violence, of will over renunciation, of conscience over prejudice, of pride over sloth, of man over beast or beast of burden, there is no doubt: war, of law, of reason, of truth, of truth, of dignity, of every intimate, legitimate pride has made mass conscription, forced comebacks, systematic slaughter, blind destruction, closure. schools, with the violent arrest of every life of thought, with the meditated restoration of the church and barracks, the only repositories and arbitrators of the common destinies; the war has plunged us in every country into the darkness of the Middle Ages, in the darkest hour of its barbarism.
And if the nation is no longer the rape of the vassals “corveables et taillables d merci” of the ancient regime, of the abolished monarchical nobles, but of the great revolution and the universality of the citizens who have in common origin, tradition, history and customs, it cannot be in doubt here either: war and everything less national you can imagine.
Because of the two Tuna: either these anthropological sophistications are repudiated — and it would not be unreasonable in the face of the impossibility to trace today, after millennia of various crossbreeds and widespread promiscuity, the differential characteristics of particular ethnic groups; and then the warrior invocation in the name of the people and ruffled and idiotic. Or you accept, and then you must also accept the conclusion, and recognize that from the highlands of Punjab for all of southern Russia, for Hungary, Bavaria, Lorraine, northern Italy, the eastern departments of France and most of Belgium, we have only Celts, All of them, as we have in the North Prussians, Scots, Irish, who are all Teutons, all brothers in the lineage, as far as, by chance from one or the other side of the border, they are slaughtered today in Flanders, in the Vosges or in Trentino, in the name of the lineage with the most fraternal enthusiasm.
So that Sir Ray Lankester — an anthropologist of the best authoritative — could conclude in one of his recent studies that “if ambitions and interests of various kinds weighed heavily on the Great War, it exaggerated the instinct of race completely”[15].
We also exhale ourselves from a field so uncertain, so badly trustworthy, squeezing ourselves within the borders of the homeland that was born with the “Declaration of Human Rights” together with the citizen who was to form its cornerstone, building its history and glory.
Of the homeland, which — like the citizen in the free exercise of his recognized rights, always saving the equal rights of his neighbor — claims, in the territorial integrity of the boundaries assigned to it by nature and history, the right to govern itself, according to its traditions, according to its laws, according to its customs, without foreign interference, save only the homage due to the equal rights of other peoples, other nations.
Because, only in this reciprocity of equal rights is the foundation of the homelands. Break this bond, humiliate yourself in your neighboring right by claiming a less numerous, less strong homeland, and your right to integrity in your own national existence will be invalidated, abolished.
Italy, to refer to a current and practical example, is claiming the restitution of Trento and Trieste from Austria, all right. But Italy has Eritrea, Benadir, Tripolitania, Cyrenaica, Italy has one foot in the Dodecanese, another in Albania: That is to say, it tramples on those populations the right that encamped on Austria, sends up the Julians and the Rhaetians to claim the national integrity of our children, who yesterday were challenged by the Muslim populations of Africa or the Greek populations of the Aegean hills that have in common neither the origin, nor the tradition, nor the language, nor the faith — the rights and aspirations that would be recognized on Trento and Trieste. It is obvious that when one says Italy one can with equal and sometimes greater reason say Austria, Germany, England, Russia, France, whose power is exercised in hatred of a hundred different nations equally enslaved and ferociously bled out. And it is exuberant to demonstrate that the determinant causes of war must not only exclude race antagonism, but above all the civil concerns and the “liberating” sincerity of the many and various governments that for years have been brooding over it and have unleashed it in all its wild fury.
The reality is quite different.
In fact, the homeland is not in the very recent history of the last century more than a blaze: it is no longer there for anyone.
By freeing property from noble privileges, elevating the third state to the hegemony of the country; and the peasant, the craftsman to the dignity of citizen, the revolution, the Declaration of Rights, the Terror, the great wars of the republic, had created the nation, the homeland; and, brought by the sanculottos for every land, the princes of 1789 began there the cycle of national claims and revolutions of which flashes the nineteenth century which saw, particularly dear to our memories, between 1848 and 1870, the epilogue of the constitutional uprisings of 1821, the assumption of free Italy and one in the Capitol.
In the homeland our old people, who cemented the building with blood, all the aspirations of freedom and well-being.
But, born as soon as she was born, she was dissolving her homeland in the mockery of one and the disillusionment of the other.
The bourgeoisie find its boundaries anglicist to the exuberance of its products, to the needs of its traffic, and I bypass them to the conquest of the markets of the world; it dispersed the homeland everywhere, I find it again under every heaven that blessed with unexpected profits its resourcefulness, its fervor: the world was its homeland. The proletariat, for its part, after having demanded indarno to the intermittent political convulsions a liberation that cannot be separated from the contemporary redemption of the instrument of production, did not see in the homeland if not the most exaggerated reorganization of privileges that it had deluded itself to have buried forever among the ruins of the Bastille, at the foot of the guillotine. He rejoiced, experiencing that every country is similar, that language and customs are sometimes different, but that they are everywhere masters and servants, oppressors and oppressed, rich and poor, chosen and damned; damned above all, with whom he had common pains, chains, miseries. And the frontiers of the homeland moved, where by the sweat of the fronts, I search for the poor bread beyond the short term that tradition had walled up between the cradle and the flag, farther and farther every day, beyond the Alps, beyond the sea to the extreme horizon, surprising in its desolate pilgrimages a single, steep, ancient, unchanged frontier; the frontier that rises between those who lazy and those who work between those who gallivanting and those who moan; the world was its homeland.
The little country is dead: the truth is on the march!
They always fight over there, at the various fronts, twenty-one million proletarians. Without faith, however, out of order and fear.
To slaughter them, they ignore.
The German people, who — according to General von Bernhardi, who glories in it, and the allies who vilify him — would have been for forty years with wise obstinacy in kindergartens, schools, clubs, churches and barracks, educated, fierce in the great contention, that über alles must hoist old Germany to dominate, continue to wonder through the mouth of his best interpreters, of the “Worwaerts!“Why? What does he give his blood for? What is the goal of the war?”[16] so insistently that the imperial chancellery certainly suppresses the indiscreet daily socialist indiscretion. The English Parliament is forced, in order to avoid the debacle and disaster, to exclude the Irish subjects from the Compulsory Act and to machine gun the Hindus garrisons in Egypt; the French soldiers shout in Poincaré’s face that the war “ils en ont assez soupe”; from the irredentist frenzies of the first days we are in Italy arrived to the armed insubordination and to the block shootings that do not arrive however to galvanize them; while in the streets of Vienna or Petersburg the hungry people cursing the war plundered the ovens defying the bestiality and the lead of the imperial Cossacks.
Twenty-one million men still fight from various fronts; but without faith, by order and fear. If they fight! It is in the statistical reports of the “Peace Society” of London a couple of figures that make a comparison.
The victims of the war of the last century, from the English War of the Indies in 1800 until the Transvaal wars in 1899, add up to ten million; while the total expenditure of the various nations participating in it is summed up in one hundred twenty-three billion francs.
The victims of these twenty months of war, on the official figures of the allied governments and on those estimated by the central empires, today reach fourteen million nine hundred and sixty thousand men, while the total debt, the new debt, the one that for the war yes and in these twenty months encountered, draws on the total figure of one hundred and forty-five billion franc.
And we’re not halfway there?
Without faith! Where would they draw it from?
Quos vult lose dementat deus! cried the poet a di: “the good lord takes away the wits of those who wish to lose.” While the courtly historians, the courtly poets, the pontiff in encyclicals, the ravenous ascars of nationalist arrivism toil in classrooms, festivals, fairs and sacred shops, to proclaim for the faith and homeland and civilization threatened, for the greatness and future of the lineage, tributes and holocausts, and every homeland the pelagus of fierce racing wars.
Do you want to be beyond all modest discretion? And you can estimate at six percent only the commission that the bankers have taken out on the various national loans, and you will have that three billion francs at least — thanks to the fascination war — have gone to hide in their pockets.
Do you want to open one eye only to the truth that shines through from the daily news of the great newspapers? And you must allow public indignation now knows and denounces no more than a crime, and the courts of the different countries are no longer concerned with anything else: supply fraud, cardboard shoes, limed milk, limed timber, cracked wood, nettle blankets, centuries-old canned goods sold to soldiers at war with the complicity of commanders-in-chief, senators, deputies, and gallons who, like jackals on carrion, appear at all times of crisis and public calamity. And while everyone tightens their belts and skips lunch or dinner to feed the homeland’s fortunes, the stock market bulletins sing in billions of notes about Krupp’s and Krupp’s profits. Schneider, from General Navigation, Terni, Barklay Co., Capital & County Bank, who have never had such a languid and blissful vineyard!
It does not fertilize other fortune and other future than that of the pirates of finance and industry, the blood shed by the wretched, in rivers, in the gorges of the Alps, in the dunes families, on all the fields of Europe.
It would take faith!
They’re still fighting!
It is humiliating; and, let us be frank, anger mounts at our throats when we think of the enormous rape of gladiators who — like their ancestors in the Colosseum — without reason and without hatred, by calculation, whimsy or the kilo of rulers and pickpockets, slash their throats with blind fury on every frontier of the old continent.
But in the throat, it stays.
Why wouldn’t they fight?
For the love of life? Freedom? Peace?
I’ll remember as long as I live. Exploring the years I was with a companion, an old miner, one of the vast mines of Illinois and on the threshold of the “square” I stopped to watch one of the support beams that under the enormous pressure of the rock hinted at breaking.
— Looks to me like he wants to leave in two.
— Not today. It will last until tomorrow, of course.
— But if you skip ahead a few hours, who would come to dig us up?
— Oh, as for that, don’t get your hopes up, it must end like this one day or another! I grumble my companion lying down in the beauty of his pickax to kick the rock. He said nothing more, but the pickax had resumed the interrupted dialogue, and hammered in my soul:
“Is it really worth living, being guarded, the blind, reclusive, monotonous existence to which we are condemned? The life that does not know the caresses of love, nor the fevers of knowing, nor the proud of freedom, nor the tremblings of rest, nor the promises of tomorrow? The life that is darkness, misery, anguish, passion alone, and rode slow, inexorable the hookworm of tuberculosis? or suffocated by the silent landslide or the crash of its whirlwinds of flame the firedamp?
Does that count? If it’s not a smile of joy in our lungs, die in war or on the road, die of an outlet of blood or a handful of lead, and all one. The rigors and mutilations of discipline are no more humiliating than the prison regime of the factory and labor: we have never known it to be freedom. The discomforts, the trials, the risks, the horrors of war are neither greater nor more serious than the horrors of peace, the anxieties of the old men, the bitter ones. The anguish of children, nor the threats of tomorrow: we have never known what peace is!”.
And they fight.
* * *
Why wouldn’t they fight? If those who know more, those who have studied, known, discerned in the millenary sediments of history the wretched root of evil, glimpsed beyond the bruised mist of the wretched present the flashes of the happy future; And in the midst of the humble they raised up, against all tyranny, curses and disdain, and against all the tyranny, and against the generous levies they had studded their arms and hearts and impetus, and of the promethean revolts they had blazed God, the king, the master; denying — Pharisees inverse — the indocile apostleship, in league with the enemy, they called them under the flags? If those who had camped among the humble had given the blood of the soul and the flames of the brain and the heroic self-sacrifice and burning passion of every day, giving always and everything, without asking for anything, never, in the tragic hour that at the impetuous fury of lies, of fraud, of abjuration, of betrayal, was it urgent to lift up the bank of the recklessness that had been preserved, dismayed, lost, divided, divided, and embellished, but they have also folded up, abject wreckage at the mercy of the irresistible and wicked cyclone?
They fight; and it is a baker every valley every dune, a puddle of blood every gorge, a charnel house every peak; But the twenty months have not gone by unnoticed, if the wretches of all the homelands have reaped an experience, if in the colluvias that stagnate and ferment among the disputed trenches, under their barred pupils, they rotten the ironic impotence of God, the hypocritical mask of civilization, the ark of peace, the superstition of the redeemers, the majesty of the demigods, all the caryatids of the social order; If from the horrible trial emerges the surviving proletariat with the desperate certainty that it did not fight for the salvation of the undigested and the wretched, for glory or for bread, for civilization or for freedom; that it fought only to rebuild the golden calf the temple and fortune, and to repeat on the hovels, on the necks of the most atrocious wretches, more exaggerated the yoke of arrogance and robbery.
If in his soul, lacerated by the last betrayal an echo will find the expletives that mount from the desolate fields, from the city in ruins, from the convulsive bellies of bleeding hearts, thickening so sinisterly on the fronts of the crowned murderers and venturi the new hurricane of history, that Nicholas II of Romanoff and Victor Emmanuel of Savoy and William II of Hohenzollern find no other refuge than the Headquarters, between the bayonet forest and the ranks of the pretorians, while Joffre, wishing well from his own tenacity to the final victory of the republican eagles d forced to tell you with lips and bitter words that “he does not know whether the proletariat in England, France, Italy, the same firm ground; what is essential.”[17]
I don’t know.
Experience leaves the furrow, and in that furrow the weed of inertia vigorously weeds only because no one has sown any more seed; and despair and torment, anguish, resignation and sloth only because responsibilities evade, energies and forces are ignored, and ends are not seen; But give responsibility a semblance, give awareness to strength, give it a light, give it a goal, and you will have made despair the audacity, resignation the heroism, sloth the revolt, vassal a sanculotto, the “lettre de cachet” a handful of ashes, the Bastille a pile of ruins; and the social revolution of the war borseiola.
Responsibilities and managers have been taking on more precise and more defined features every day for twenty months, while trembling inexhaustible strength from millions of breasts
Half? Who will point to the misguided conquistadors the goal?
Who will keep an eye on the cyclops?
The anarchists, who have not gone to the drift of the hideous drift full of hatred and blood, and follow and live anxiously every day and every episode of the Iliad trick, are preparing to take away their revenge as soon as the war is over, and ask themselves tormentingly in which of the great crevasses they are going to shove to subvert the iniquitous social order the first cartridge of dynamite; And many comrades, many and the best, ask us, almost pythonesses, repositories of every arcane of destiny, if this sari really will be the good time, and what shall we do? as if they could expect from us more than a few sparse and modest predictions subject to much, to much benefit of inventory, some judgment which, though discreet, and by the intimate desire and ardent expectation spoiled even before the inevitable surprises of the unexpected.
We sincerely believe that this time it’s the good one, that we’re on an abrupt “tournant de l’histoire” however the war ends, indeed — where it doesn’t seem a paradox to you — because we can’t imagine how the war could otherwise end.
Those who expect to see the epilogue precipitate from exhaustion, will have to wait a long time, since they cannot suppose the exclusive exhaustion of only one of the belligerent groups for the benefit of the others; but having to reasonably admit that it is, to an equal or proportional depression in both; therefore the solution of the conflict should at least refer to the consummation... of the human race; a little late indeed if the psalm of the revolution has to tune in when the war is over.
The insurrection will precede the ceasefire, or rather, it will break through to prevent peace from restoring to the ruins of war the social order that has unleashed its horrors and infamy.
You must precede her! Must surprise the weapons in the exhausted fist to the shoulders, to the kidneys, the august international mischief that for a handful of guineas, for a strip of land, for a crown, has on the altar of Molok bartered the most fervent, the purest blood in the world. And don’t ask us where, when all the perdition will burst forth!
No visionary has ever prefixed the palpitations and path to history, and we have so little faith in social astrology that we have never asked it for the numbers and signs of becoming. Numerous serious, persistent, urgent, convergent events and causes that look, speak for themselves. In the melting pot of every country, they tremble, under the slag of the dross. Stagnant widespread resignation, disappointments, disappointments, disdainfulness compressed, ancient hatreds, implacable; in the old Germany that of every palpitation, of every morsel of bread has fed the most formidable army in the world so that together with the easy victory would bring the coveted hegemony of the world, and numbered anguished, distressed, hated, attacked for every side, the days of atrocious agony; In the old Republican Gaul who, on the balance sheet of the longed-for victory, far away, feels immense at the revenge of the sacrifice; in the old England, lecherous bilge of usuries to which the wily liberal and pietist hypocrisies are thin fig leaf; in the old homeland that the Pellagrosis humers feel inadequate the pride of bleeding for the dubious redemption of others before their own; in Austria, in Russia; in Turkey, several hundred irreconcilable fiefdoms and servants; Everywhere and a furrow, a hut, a belly, an attic, a child, a love, a hope, these causes are urging, hammering, pressing on each other, overlapping and knotting themselves in the dense mesh of anxieties, trials, torments, common curses, needs, longings, hopes, common purposes. And we simply say that those lawsuits will have an effect.
And we can without fear that, converging above and beyond the widest disagreement the world has ever seen, these causes, among many varied and complex effects, will flourish a general consequence; and that if in history insurrections of a general nature take the name of revolution when, having shattered the envelope of inconsistent and outdated relations, they carry in their laps the viaticum and compass to a new and better path, we not only have insurrection and revolution at our gates, we also have clear and precise the task they assign to the avant-garde.
They know, from the old experience and the new, that if not the churches, the sects, the parties make the revolution, but — unknowingly most of the time — the great masses scourged by anger and need, so much so that as a rule, at the first stage, the indignation subsides and satisfies the need; Only the avant-garde handpieces can of the inexorable ax tear the good breach, arouse sacrilegious face in every Bastille, in every den of lie and privilege, the leveling fire.
At home or in the trenches, under the barrage of the machine gun or under the bite of the inopia, the ragamuffins of a hundred devastated homelands will tire of war today or tomorrow: Today or tomorrow, in Germany, in France, in France, in Russia, in Asia, they will rise up in Germany, in France, in Russia, in Asia and, like a century ago, they will determine the hasty coalitions, the undergone reconciliation of the Habsburgs, the Savoy, the Hohenzollern and the Romanoff, if in every country we do not know how to disorient the central power by beheading it, to dismantle the ruling class by removing the most precious hostages from its bosom, mercilessly eliminating all those who can return to the fate of the insurrection by holding back the barrier; if we do not give a weapon and bread to every insurgent, if the plot of conservative interests and solidarity is disrupted, we will not victoriously ensure communications and means for understanding and revolutionary mobilization; if we are not aware of the enormous task that we have to perform, if we do not have a clear vision of the goal that we want to reach, if we do not know how to profit from the inexhaustible variety of resources that will put at our disposal the first adventurous impulses; if we do not know how to heal the benefits of the new regime for the doubtful, the uncertain, the distrustful; if we do not have the heroic courage of implicit and frightening responsibilities; and especially if we do not have faith in justice. of our cause and in the triumph of our right; if of this faith we will not intrigue the bread and blood, the audacity and tenacity of every legionary of the revolution.
Never the time again!
Never before has the intimate revolt against the regime’s inseparable, fatal, inseparable, cynical, turpitude, ferociousness and cynicism been so unanimous in hearts; never again does the International revolt, subterranean at all frontiers, remain in pain; Never more conserved in longings and vows, high, in the heavens of hope, never so alive, never so fervent in decalogues as today in hearts, today that four henchmen sing her funeral, who have found better fodder in the enemy’s mangers; while from the lunar horizon infinite numbers of hugs rise rosy hands. of children, the righteous foreheads of the aged, the velvety arms of the titans, the spasms and singulars of mothers in a brood, cursing the same heart and the same neck with horror at the exterminating war and the obnoxious peace, proclaiming urgently with anxiety and a voice the vespers, the vespers awaited for liberation.
It’s time he didn’t come back!
To vesper! To vesper! To vesper who gives no quarter and knows no mercy.