While under the paternal kiss of the sun, of this sublime and radiant sun, the cavalry gallops with its gleaming weapons, and the arrogant and martial infantry parades beneath the Parisian sky, which witnessed a July 16th and an 18th Brumaire; while in working-class Genoa, cooperators from all over Italy gather to celebrate a Congress where the powerful poetry of a more just and brighter social future smiles, it was deemed wise to invite this weary, lost militant, this humble sentinel of a people who raise a violated flag to speak to you of peace, while the smell of gunpowder and the echo of the shrapnel of a war that is both palingenesis and resurrection still linger in the air, a war that is just and daily for the humble and the exploited against the all-powerful forces of oppressive capitalism.
Yes; we are against all unjust wars, since there are also just ones; we,the militants of an army that is not one of arms and stripes, do not
carry paternal memories, despite this poor orator who tries to stir your
spirits with the knut of sentiment and resentment to raise the cry of
protest and the fruitful curse (...).
Let us try to study the genesis of war. Ultimately, war is nothing more
than the spirit of little people who feel the need to give pleasure to
their fists. Who doesn't remember, from Zola's work Work, the scene of
the children stoning each other, which represents infantile humanity,
faithfully reproducing the process of militaristic psychology?
That infantile tendency should have evolved in our society through human
experience, and like those children who, after having stoned each other,
reconcile and then begin a battle with stones against streetlights, in
the same way the tendency toward war for war's sake will have to take
the form in modern society of the force that breaks, demolishes, and
subverts today in order to build tomorrow the great revolutionary force
that Victor Hugo called just wars for equality and liberty. (...)
And this is where the definition between the two forms of courage is
affirmed. Glory and valor must be compared with social utility, and when
this comparison is made, professional militarism, which in valor for
valor's sake resides all glory and all noble manifestation of human
activity, is inexorably condemned.
Nature itself, as Liell observes, has given claws and fangs to animals
that live by ferocity, but modern man, who possesses reason, that
formidable Promethean force, as Shelleg sang, which conquers the
lightning bolt for the benefit of progressive humanity, this man must
replace the claws and fangs of the beast with that force that is reason,
however embryonic it may still be. (...)
But let us briefly answer this simple yet important question. In the
normality of daily life, does humanity need civil valor or military
valor? The answer is not in doubt. Modern valor is civil valor
transformed into a new need of humanity, knocking at the flowery door of
principles, which, having behind them a past of military glories, serve
to make the light, even more brilliant, of the new valor for science and
humanity. (...)
We therefore said, war on war, in whatever form it manifests itself. War
on economic, moral, and intellectual war; war on all forms of
oppression, and peace on the new civilization based on the great
principle of solidarity: solidarity of nations, classes, and castes,
contributing to the free development of each person's energies for the
benefit of all.
A dream! A beautiful dream, if with a fairy's magic wand, this society,
in which Hobbes's homo hominis lupus is the law, could be transformed
into another society based not on privilege, injustice, and collective
crime, but on the great principles of solidarity, justice, and peace!
Unfortunately, in our society, there exists a flock that is content to
graze, stripping the rare strands of grass from the barren meadow,
knowing no paths other than those that lead to the corral and the
slaughterhouse. (...)
Have any of you ever wondered how the internationalists justify the
survival in our society of those customs from times less civilized than
ours? (...)
But let us console ourselves that today war has lost some of its
primitive character; that today war is no longer savage as it once was;
that it has become scientific and cynical. Desecration of a sacred word!
Scientific warfare, that is, the precious gifts of ingenuity, the
sleepless nights of the man of study dedicated to the fierce problem of
destruction... In this case, science is synonymous with curse... Use it,
O men, as a beneficent goddess, to wrest her secrets from nature, to
give life to machines, strength to coal; use it to turn lightning into a
producer of wealth, to lighten man's labors, to attenuate his pains, to
restore the relaxed sinews of the human bee in its daily toil; use it to
bore into mountains, to irrigate valleys, to cleanse the air, to unite
people with people in a fraternal embrace of solidarity and
collaboration, so that together they may proceed to the conquest of
progress and happiness.
Make science an instrument of civilization, not of destruction and
death... We have said that modern warfare is cynical, and, in fact,
scientific warfare, with which men who do not know each other, who have
never seen each other, are killed thousands of meters away, has also
lost the form of the primitive cult of strength and skill in arms, of
which ancient Greece was an example. (...)
And thus, alongside love of country, we learned love of humanity and
learned to repeat, day after day, the formula of the august Tolstoy,
which invites soldiers everywhere not to shoot at their brothers, even
when ordered to do so. (...)
And repeating everything we have said up to this point, we can do no
more than summarize our words in a cry: A cry that is at the same time a
curse, a promise, and an omen of a new era that does not banish fruitful
struggle, the beneficial struggle in the fields of art, science, and the
multiform application of daily life, but rather that it banishes forever
the bloody and fratricidal struggle perpetrated by the powerful in their
desire for domination, in their thirst for a monopoly of power over the
human flock, which knows no other path than that which leads to the
corral and the slaughterhouse: War on war! Let us abolish militarism!
Notes
(1) Lecture given on October 18, 1903, in Genoa, organized by the
editorial group of the newspaper La Paz.
https://www.federacionanarquistademexico.org/
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