Luigi Galleani Archive
Written: 1914.
Source: From RevoltLib.com
Transcription/Markup: Andy Carloff
Online Source: RevoltLib.com; 2021
One understands that, set aside in the sophism of civilization, the reasons for the war could not interest the proletariat.
Where did civilization ever meet the pariahs? From whence and when did it fall on their pale fronts! did the dews and hopes of the resurrection reappear?
Thus, they do not communicate the servants in the enthusiasm of their lords even if they suffer, once again, desperate uncertain deserts the violence of a destiny against which they do not have the necessary Concorde force to arise.
It’s by academics, by doctrinaires, by politicians. It is roaring out of churches, councils, consecrated areopagos of science, literature, art, the protest against the barbaric warrior of the bloodlines; and because it is blind, obtuse and beastly, it awaits with every duce at the shadow of every flag, with Lord Kitchener consecrated knight in the exotic massacres and recurrences of the Dark Continent; with Joffre, the gloomy survivor of the restoration of 1871; with the Czar’s Co- sacks grown in the assiduous pogroms, in the systematic massacres of old women and children, to the great war, to the great glory on the western camps; With the two emperors, the one bent under half a century of infamy of hanging crimes of carnage, the other prone to the daily torture of the crowds indocile to his game — science, art and poetry, to the vast horizon torn by reckless investigation in the darkness of dogma and mystery, to the vast human drama bleeding in every heart, beyond every frontier of time and space, to the great human hope freed from stupid predestinations to the conquest of truth, beauty, justice, redemption, have put a bleak end. The bitter and greedy hermit of the Indigenous, shameless courtesans of merchants and brewers.
Gabriele D’Annunzio our “for the oak and for the laurel and for the flashing iron, for victory and for glory and joy”, invokes pronubo to the fortunes of the new Italy — the Italy of Bava Beccaris and of Piazza del Pane — high guardian of the fati, Dante Alighieri, speaking with little respect; while from London Rudyard Kipling another larger, more assiduous tribute of average blood of children asks the womb of British mothers to save the homeland that the Huns of the twentieth century want to reduce, humiliate, to a dark German province; and Maurizio Maeterlink, the pure and fine and meek poet of children and simple people, in front of him the heartbreak of his heroic Flemish land, not against the horrendous fetishes that bend to their ominous yoke, before the foreigner, the subject and the citizen, poisons the poisoned giambo, but to the people the inexorable resolution acclaims: the wrecking of the wicked irresistible deep secret forces that innervate all the German soul and want to be crushed under the heel without mercy, because no human power can mantle them, mitigate them, drag them on the path of progress, not even with more severe glue than the lessons, and want to be destroyed like a wasp’s nest that we know will never be able to change into a nest of beneficial bees and industrious.
Let a thousand years of civilization pass, thousands of years of peace with all possible refinements of art and culture: The German spirit will remain unchanged, always ready to explode as soon as the occasion arises, seize the same aspects, with the same infamy” for this war, the war of today, is the shock of two fundamental currents of the soul, of the world: one dark of iniquity, injustice, tyranny; the other yearning for freedom, life, the right to joy.
Delenda Germany!
Almost two millennia have passed from Tacitus to Maeterlink, but in the mind of the Flemish poet, of the many who follow in his footsteps and divide his horrors, Germany has remained as it was in Tacitus’ time “all wooded with horrors and swamps, among which the people continue, as then, to raise cattle on the same land as every other civilized softness, ferocious at war, greedy for prey, drunk, The historian’s doubt that the historian feared if the Germans had the face of men and limbs and the heart of beasts, as they did then and today they dare not exclude Maeterlink, D’Annunzio and Rudyard Kipling, who, in the name of the civilization of the right to life and joy, deplore its final extermination.
Delenda Germany!
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We must be fair: on the other side of the border there are no less anathemas: Barbarism and England. The hypocritical Pharisaism of England, envious of German greatness and power, must be blamed for the war that devastates the continent. Roentgen throws into the basket of war funds the medal awarded him by the British Royal Society for the discovery of X-rays; Ernesto Haeckel and Rodolfo Euchen, who are without contrast the broadest minds, the most generous hearts, the most shining glories of the modern scientific world, in the name of all men of letters and science of the old. Germany, denounce in the “Wossische Zeitung” of Berlin the hypocritical pharisaism of England that has taken away the pretext from the invasion of Belgium necessary to Germany (!) to vent its brutal national selfishness, the ancient hatred and envy of the march that it broods of the greatness of Germany that it would like to destroy without regard to rights, without regard to morality or immorality, for its exclusive advantage.
“Depressing spectacle” — comments Frank Jewet Mather of Princeton University — “that of two great thinkers, both great cosmopolitan figures, who indulge in a violent, inconsiderate and malignant nationalism... breaking a bond that between the two peoples had tightened through the influence that Goethe had exerted on Carlyle and Carlyle on two generations of Englishmen, and through the triumph that Darwinian doctrines had ensured in Germany the temerity and pertinence of German scientists when in England Thomas Huxley fought with dubious fortune to obtain any consideration”.
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All the sadder the spectacle that from the bitter contest the perfidious nationalism of the four great homelands in arms, draws the oblique justification of its beastly fury of extermination and desolation. They defend the glory of wise men, thinkers, poets, German culture, the yellow ulans, the gloomy hussars of death, the forty-two-inch fold of the Kaiser! They bring the bitter grin and fine irony of Schopenhauer and Arrigo Heine through the archaic streets of Louvain and Bruges! And on the paradoxical British dreadnought of fifty thousand tons, he starts again the conquest of the world, which for two centuries vibrates on his word and his passion, William Shakespeare; Darwin starts to revive his serene joy in the confusion of dogmas and councils that have been destroyed. Beyond the Vistula they do not carry the torment, the anguish of the immense ruin the Cossacks of the Don, they carry on the spades the tormenting doubt of Tzernichewsky, the heretical annunciations of Turghenieff, resigned or cunning the gospel of Tolstoy; while the red legions of the Third Republic rebelled on the massacres of Ypres for the converted voice of Anatole France, the passion of liberty, the vow of brotherhood that the ancient regime dismayed in every land, that to the sorrowful servants of every country, had thrown, dying, the first!
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And all the more inauspicious is the abdication, the miserable dedication, which slowly penetrate the new voices through the proletarian racist consciousness of millennia of renewed devotion, the unusual voices and the ungrateful reckless spirit of independence and freedom. They change creeds and saints, but faith remains blind to the flashes of remote truths inaccessible to the universal consciousness. We swear today in Galileo, in Newton, in Laplace’s and Darwin’s theory, as we swore yesterday on the words of Mose, Genesis and the Syllabus. Science has remained a mystery, the privilege scarce knowledge, the wise a priest and a prophet? and when the war massacres the ruin are invoked, it needs supreme health, from Anatole France or Massimo Gorky, from Haeckel, from Rudyard Kipling or Gabriele D’Annunzio, from the flower of intellect, conscience, love, pride, glory of every lineage, May the servants, closed by the daily yoke out of the life that trembles and pulsates and searches and hopes, on the furrow, down in the mine, for the workshops, perennial filth of darkness, the machine, the wind and the sea, may have the servants the freedom to disagree, the right to arise, to escape at the worst in late common sense or in the proud presumption that — relegated they too to the world, no doubt better but just as exclusive as speculation and abstraction, just as deaf to blasphemies, expletives, threats that burst forth and cross each other on the everlasting and irreconcilable shock, On the cute competition on the despicable vulgarity of small daily interests, are esthetes and wise men so removed from every light, from every freedom to judge the great collective hurricanes as the people to discern in the inviolate enigma of the universe, in the closed mystery of the origins?
— They have studied and learned, they know for themselves what millennia of history, millions of inhabitants of the planet have never glimpsed; to the truth they have given the rays, to progress they alone have given wings. The Civil Olympics are numbered and titled by their glorious names; they cannot wander, and wandered as well, we could not be surprised at the truth that had been” denied to them.
And when for war and the vast consent of the elected, when against unanimity, no great voice arises, none of the great voices that in the tragic hours of common destiny awaken echoes beyond the oceans, beyond the continents, beyond the centuries; And it does not ring in the corrupted sky, for the intoxicated souls of passion and perdition, that your defiant, feeble and uncertain protest, for war must be even if it wants new and more exaggerated tributes of misery, horrendous tributes of blood and tears, and, more inexorable than any curse of Leviticus, it will condemn to servitude and weeping the children, and the children of children how far the memory of the irredeemable human ferocity will last through the centuries; for the war are all; not without reason, of course.
We have to bow our heads; we have to be for the war too...
— It’s the roar of the herd.
— It is the cry of every soul, irresistible; it searches even in your midst every heart, it shakes every faith, it disturbs every mind, it troubles every conscience, it undermines and subverts the edifice of doctrine; and like the thunderbolt of Damascus on the path of redemptive expectations.
You pass, though disdainful, through the lice in the busca of a faith and a master who contracts it for the swill; you pass, though disdainful, through the lazzy and mercenary clientele who, saving their bellies, conscripts to the risks of war, the skin of others; through the weak, lazy, too lazy, too squalid to have the courage or the strength of a thought, of a will of their own, overwhelmed today by the storm in the common delirium; But if beyond the oblique or fragile ranks of the minor apostates on the ways of war you find Amilcare Cipriani and Pietro Kropotkin grieving that the seventy years old take away from them to take up a carbine and march against the enemy, you will certainly not say that one lacks the firmness of will, to the other the sagacity, the sincerity to both of them of the consent to the great war, and of the fervent and steadfast vow so that over the feudal Teutonic barbarity the connected armies of France and England, Belgium, Russia and Japan may triumph.
— We found on the way to the Great War, erect against us, beyond the short ranks of the apostates minor, Amilcare Cipriani and Pietro Kropotkin, whose mental probity and adamantine sincerity no one will ever dare to challenge.
We were attracted by the meeting, it did not stir us up, nor did it make us feel toothless: against the war today as yesterday, as always, wherever and however it is lit or has to be lit!
And we will give you the following chapters our modest reasons.