The text is from my copy of
Emma Goldman's Anarchism and Other Essays.
Second Revised Edition. New York & London: Mother Earth
Publishing Association, 1911. pp. 85-114.
THE
PSYCHOLOGY OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE
TO ANALYZE the psychology
of political violence is not only extremely difficult, but
also very dangerous. If such acts are treated with understanding,
one is immediately accused of eulogizing them. If, on the
other hand, human sympathy is expressed with the Attentäter,
1
one risks being considered a possible accomplice.
Yet it is only intelligence and sympathy that can bring
us closer to the source of human suffering, and teach us
the ultimate way out of it.
The primitive man, ignorant
of natural forces, dreaded their approach, hiding from the
perils they threatened. As man learned to understand Nature's
phenomena, he realized that though these may destroy life
and cause great loss, they also bring relief. To the earnest
student it must be apparent that the accumulated forces
in our social and economic life, culminating in a political
act of violence, are similar to the terrors of the atmosphere,
manifested in storm and lightning.
To thoroughly appreciate
the truth of this view, one must feel intensely the indignity
of our social wrongs; one's very being must throb with the
pain, the sorrow, the despair millions of people are daily
made to endure. Indeed, unless we have become a part of
humanity, we cannot even faintly understand the just indignation
that accumulates in a human soul, the burning, surging passion
that makes the storm inevitable.
The ignorant mass looks
upon the man who makes a violent protest against our social
and economic iniquities as upon a wild beast, a cruel, heartless
monster, whose joy it is to destroy life and bathe in blood;
or at best, as upon an irresponsible lunatic. Yet nothing
is further from the truth. As a matter of fact, those who
have studied the character and personality of these men,
or who have come in close contact with them, are agreed
that it is their super-sensitiveness to the wrong and injustice
surrounding them which compels them to pay the toll of our
social crimes. The most noted writers and poets, discussing
the psychology of political offenders, have paid them the
highest tribute. Could anyone assume that these men had
advised violence, or even approved of the acts? Certainly
not. Theirs was the attitude of the social student, of the
man who knows that beyond every violent act there is a vital
cause.
Björnstjerne Björnson, in
the second part of Beyond Human Power, emphasizes
the fact that it is among the Anarchists that we must look
for the modern martyrs who pay for their faith with their
blood, and who welcome death with a smile, because they
believe, as truly as Christ did, that their martyrdom will
redeem humanity.
Franįois Coppé, the French
novelist, thus expresses himself regarding the psychology
of the Attentäter:
"The reading of the details
of Vaillant's execution left me in a thoughtful mood. I
imagined him expanding his chest under the ropes, marching
with firm step, stiffening his will, concentrating all his
energy, and, with eyes fixed upon the knife, hurling finally
at society his cry of malediction. And, in spite of me,
another spectacle rose suddenly before my mind. I saw a
group of men and women pressing against each other in the
middle of the oblong arena of the circus, under the gaze
of thousands of eyes, while from all the steps of the immense
amphitheatre went up the terrible cry, Ad leones!
and, below, the opening cages of the wild beasts.
"I did not believe the execution
would take place. In the first place, no victim had been
struck with death, and it had long been the custom not to
punish an abortive crime with the last degree of severity.
Then, this crime, however terrible in intention, was disinterested,
born of an abstract idea. The man's past, his abandoned
childhood, his life of hardship, pleaded also in his favor.
In the independent press generous voices were raised in
his behalf, very loud and eloquent. 'A purely literary current
of opinion' some have said, with no little scorn. It
is, on the contrary, an honor to the men of art and thought
to have expressed once more their disgust at the scaffold."
Again Zola, in Germinal
and Paris, describes the tenderness and kindness,
the deep sympathy with human suffering, of these men who
close the chapter of their lives with a violent outbreak
against our system.
Last, but not least, the
man who probably better than anyone else understands the
psychology of the Attentäter is M. Hamon, the
author of the brilliant work Une Psychologie du Militaire
Professionnel, who has arrived at these suggestive conclusions:
"The positive method confirmed
by the rational method enables us to establish an ideal
type of Anarchist, whose mentality is the aggregate of common
psychic characteristics. Every Anarchist partakes sufficiently
of this ideal type to make it possible to differentiate
him from other men. The typical Anarchist, then, may be
defined as follows: A man perceptible by the spirit of revolt
under one or more of its forms,--opposition, investigation,
criticism, innovation,--endowed with a strong love of liberty,
egoistic or individualistic, and possessed of great curiosity,
a keen desire to know. These traits are supplemented by
an ardent love of others, a highly developed moral sensitiveness,
a profound sentiment of justice, and imbued with missionary
zeal."
To the above characteristics,
says Alvin F. Sanborn, must be added these sterling qualities:
a rare love of animals, surpassing sweetness in all the
ordinary relations of life, exceptional sobriety of demeanor,
frugality and regularity, austerity, even, of living, and
courage beyond compare.2
"There is a truism that
the man in the street seems always to forget, when he is
abusing the Anarchists, or whatever party happens to be
his bęte noire for the moment, as the cause
of some outrage just perpetrated. This indisputable fact
is that homicidal outrages have, from time immemorial, been
the reply of goaded and desperate classes, and goaded and
desperate individuals, to wrongs from their fellowmen, which
they felt to be intolerable. Such acts are the violent recoil
from violence, whether aggressive or repressive; they are
the last desperate struggle of outraged and exasperated
human nature for breathing space and life. And their cause
lies not in any special conviction, but in the depths of
that human nature itself. The whole course of history, political
and social, is strewn with evidence of this fact. To go
no further, take the three most notorious examples of political
parties goaded into violence during the last fifty years:
the Mazzinians in Italy, the Fenians in Ireland, and the
Terrorists in Russia. Were these people Anarchists? No.
Did they all three even hold the same political opinions?
No. The Mazzinians were Republicans, the Fenians political
separatists, the Russians Social Democrats or Constitutionalists.
But all were driven by desperate circumstances into this
terrible form of revolt. And when we turn from parties to
individuals who have acted in like manner, we stand appalled
by the number of human beings goaded and driven by sheer
desperation into conduct obviously violently opposed to
their social instincts.
"Now that Anarchism has
become a living force in society, such deeds have been sometimes
committed by Anarchists, as well as by others. For no new
faith, even the most essentially peaceable and humane the
mind of man has yet accepted, but at its first coming has
brought upon earth not peace, but a sword; not because of
anything violent or anti-social in the doctrine itself;
simply because of the ferment any new and creative idea
excites in men's minds, whether they accept or reject it.
And a conception of Anarchism, which, on one hand, threatens
every vested interest, and, on the other, holds out a vision
of a free and noble life to be won by a struggle against
existing wrongs, is certain to rouse the fiercest opposition,
and bring the whole repressive force of ancient evil into
violent contact with the tumultuous outburst of a new hope.
"Under miserable conditions
of life, any vision of the possibility of better things
makes the present misery more intolerable, and spurs those
who suffer to the most energetic struggles to improve their
lot, and if these struggles only immediately result in sharper
misery, the outcome is sheer desperation. In our present
society, for instance, an exploited wage worker, who catches
a glimpse of what work and life might and ought to be, finds
the toilsome routine and the squalor of his existence almost
intolerable; and even when he has the resolution and courage
to continue steadily working his best, and waiting until
new ideas have so permeated society as to pave the way for
better times, the mere fact that he has such ideas and tries
to spread them, brings him into difficulties with his employers.
How many thousands of Socialists, and above all Anarchists,
have lost work and even the chance of work, solely on the
ground of their opinions. It is only the specially gifted
craftsman, who, if he be a zealous propagandist, can hope
to retain permanent employment. And what happens to a man
with his brain working actively with a ferment of new ideas,
with a vision before his eyes of a new hope dawning for
toiling and agonizing men, with the knowledge that his suffering
and that of his fellows in misery is not caused by the cruelty
of fate, but by the injustice of other human beings,--what
happens to such a man when he sees those dear to him starving,
when he himself is starved? Some natures in such a plight,
and those by no means the least social or the least sensitive,
will become violent, and will even feel that their violence
is social and not anti-social, that in striking when and
how they can, they are striking, not for themselves, but
for human nature, outraged and despoiled in their persons
and in those of their fellow sufferers. And are we, who
ourselves are not in this horrible predicament, to stand
by and coldly condemn these piteous victims of the Furies
and Fates? Are we to decry as miscreants these human beings
who act with heroic self-devotion, sacrificing their lives
in protest, where less social and less energetic natures
would lie down and grovel in abject submission to injustice
and wrong? Are we to join the ignorant and brutal outcry
which stigmatizes such men as monsters of wickedness, gratuitously
running amuck in a harmonious and innocently peaceful society?
No! We hate murder with a hatred that may seem absurdly
exaggerated to apologists for Matabele massacres, to callous
acquiescers in hangings and bombardments, but we decline
in such cases of homicide, or attempted homicide, as those
of which we are treating, to be guilty of the cruel injustice
of flinging the whole responsibility of the deed upon the
immediate perpetrator. The guilt of these homicides lies
upon every man and woman who, intentionally or by cold indifference,
helps to keep up social conditions that drive human beings
to despair. The man who flings his whole life into the attempt,
at the cost of his own life, to protest against the wrongs
of his fellow men, is a saint compared to the active and
passive upholders of cruelty and injustice, even if his
protest destroy other lives besides his own. Let him who
is without sin in society cast the first stone at such an
one."3
That every act of political
violence should nowadays be attributed to Anarchists is
not at all surprising. Yet it is a fact known to almost
everyone familiar with the Anarchist movement that a great
number of acts, for which Anarchists had to suffer, either
originated with the capitalist press or were instigated,
if not directly perpetrated, by the police.
For a number of years acts
of violence had been committed in Spain, for which the Anarchists
were held responsible, hounded like wild beasts, and thrown
into prison. Later it was disclosed that the perpetrators
of these acts were not Anarchists, but members of the police
department. The scandal became so widespread that the conservative
Spanish papers demanded the apprehension and punishment
of the gang-leader, Juan Rull, who was subsequently condemned
to death and executed. The sensational evidence, brought
to light during the trial, forced Police Inspector Momento
to exonerate completely the Anarchists from any connection
with the acts committed during a long period. This resulted
in the dismissal of a number of police officials, among
them Inspector Tressols, who, in revenge, disclosed the
fact that behind the gang of police bomb throwers were others
of far higher position, who provided them with funds and
protected them.
This is one of the many
striking examples of how Anarchist conspiracies are manufactured.
That the American police
can perjure themselves with the same ease, that they are
just as merciless, just as brutal and cunning as their European
colleagues, has been proven on more than one occasion. We
need only recall the tragedy of the eleventh of November,
1887, known as the Haymarket Riot.
No one who is at all familiar
with the case can possibly doubt that the Anarchists, judicially
murdered in Chicago, died as victims of a lying, blood-thirsty
press and of a cruel police conspiracy. Has not Judge Gary
himself said: "Not because you have caused the Haymarket
bomb, but because you are Anarchists, you are on trial."
The impartial and thorough
analysis by Governor Altgeld of that blotch on the American
escutcheon verified the brutal frankness of Judge Gary.
It was this that induced Altgeld to pardon the three Anarchists,
thereby earning the lasting esteem of every liberty-loving
man and woman in the world.
When we approach the tragedy
of September sixth, 1901, we are confronted by one of the
most striking examples of how little social theories are
responsible for an act of political violence. "Leon Czolgosz,
an Anarchist, incited to commit the act by Emma Goldman."
To be sure, has she not incited violence even before her
birth, and will she not continue to do so beyond death?
Everything is possible with the Anarchists.
Today, even, nine years
after the tragedy, after it was proven a hundred times that
Emma Goldman had nothing to do with the event, that no evidence
whatsoever exists to indicate that Czolgosz ever called
himself an Anarchist, we are confronted with the same lie,
fabricated by the police and perpetuated by the press. No
living soul ever heard Czolgosz make that statement, nor
is there a single written word to prove that the boy ever
breathed the accusation. Nothing but ignorance and insane
hysteria, which have never yet been able to solve the simplest
problem of cause and effect.
The President of a free
Republic killed! What else can be the cause, except that
the Attentäter must have been insane, or that
he was incited to the act.
A free Republic! How a myth
will maintain itself, how it will continue to deceive, to
dupe, and blind even the comparatively intelligent to its
monstrous absurdities. A free Republic! And yet within a
little over thirty years a small band of parasites have
successfully robbed the American people, and trampled upon
the fundamental principles, laid down by the fathers of
this country, guaranteeing to every man, woman, and child
"life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." For thirty
years they have been increasing their wealth and power at
the expense of the vast mass of workers, thereby enlarging
the army of the unemployed, the hungry, homeless, and friendless
portion of humanity, who are tramping the country from east
to west, from north to south, in a vain search for work.
For many years the home has been left to the care of the
little ones, while the parents are exhausting their life
and strength for a mere pittance. For thirty years the sturdy
sons of America have been sacrificed on the battlefield
of industrial war, and the daughters outraged in corrupt
factory surroundings. For long and weary years this process
of undermining the nation's health, vigor, and pride, without
much protest from the disinherited and oppressed, has been
going on. Maddened by success and victory, the money powers
of this "free land of ours" became more and more audacious
in their heartless, cruel efforts to compete with the rotten
and decayed European tyrannies for supremacy of power.
In vain did a lying press
repudiate Leon Czolgosz as a foreigner. The boy was a product
of our own free American soil, that lulled him to sleep
with,
My country, 'tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty.
Who can tell how many times this American child had gloried
in the celebration of the Fourth of July, or of Decoration
Day, when he faithfully honored the Nation's dead? Who knows
but that he, too, was willing to "fight for his country and
die for her liberty," until it dawned upon him that those
he belonged to have no country, because they have been robbed
of all that they have produced; until he realized that the
liberty and independence of his youthful dreams were but a
farce. Poor Leon Czolgosz, your crime consisted of too sensitive
a social consciousness. Unlike your idealless and brainless
American brothers, your ideals soared above the belly and
the bank account. No wonder you impressed the one human being
among all the infuriated mob at your trial--a newspaper woman--as
a visionary, totally oblivious to your surroundings. Your
large, dreamy eyes must have beheld a new and glorious dawn.
Now, to a recent instance
of police-manufactured Anarchist plots. In that bloodstained
city Chicago, the life of Chief of Police Shippy was attempted
by a young man named Averbuch. Immediately the cry was sent
to the four corners of the world that Averbuch was an Anarchist,
and that Anarchists were responsible for the act. Everyone
who was at all known to entertain Anarchist ideas was closely
watched, a number of people arrested, the library of an
Anarchist group confiscated, and all meetings made impossible.
It goes without saying that, as on various previous occasions,
I must needs be held responsible for the act. Evidently
the American police credit me with occult powers. I did
not know Averbuch; in fact, had never before heard his name,
and the only way I could have possibly "conspired" with
him was in my astral body. But, then, the police are not
concerned with logic or justice. What they seek is a target,
to mask their absolute ignorance of the cause, of the psychology
of a political act. Was Averbuch an Anarchist? There is
no positive proof of it. He had been but three months in
the country, did not know the language, and, as far as I
could ascertain, was quite unknown to the Anarchists of
Chicago.
What led to his act? Averbuch,
like most young Russian immigrants, undoubtedly believed
in the mythical liberty of America. He received his first
baptism by the policeman's club during the brutal dispersement
of the unemployed parade. He further experienced American
equality and opportunity in the vain efforts to find an
economic master. In short, a three months' sojourn in the
glorious land brought him face to face with the fact that
the disinherited are in the same position the world over.
In his native land he probably learned that necessity knows
no law--there was no difference between a Russian and an
American policeman.
The question to the intelligent
social student is not whether the acts of Czolgosz or Averbuch
were practical, any more than whether the thunderstorm is
practical. The thing that will inevitably impress itself
on the thinking and feeling man and woman is that the sight
of brutal clubbing of innocent victims in a so-called free
Republic, and the degrading, soul-destroying economic struggle,
furnish the spark that kindles the dynamic force in the
overwrought, outraged souls of men like Czolgosz or Averbuch.
No amount of persecution, of hounding, of repression, can
stay this social phenomenon.
But, it is often asked,
have not acknowledged Anarchists committed acts of violence?
Certainly they have, always however ready to shoulder the
responsibility. My contention is that they were impelled,
not by the teachings of Anarchism, but by the tremendous
pressure of conditions, making life unbearable to their
sensitive natures. Obviously, Anarchism, or any other social
theory, making man a conscious social unit, will act as
a leaven for rebellion. This is not a mere assertion, but
a fact verified by all experience. A close examination of
the circumstances bearing upon this question will further
clarify my position.
Let us consider some of
the most important Anarchist acts within the last two decades.
Strange as it may seem, one of the most significant deeds
of political violence occurred here in America, in connection
with the Homestead strike of 1892.
During that memorable time
the Carnegie Steel Company organized a conspiracy to crush
the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. Henry
Clay Frick, then Chairman of the Company, was intrusted
with that democratic task. He lost no time in carrying out
the policy of breaking the Union, the policy which he had
so successfully practiced during his reign of terror in
the coke regions. Secretly, and while peace negotiations
were being purposely prolonged, Frick supervised the military
preparations, the fortification of the Homestead Steel Works,
the erection of a high board fence, capped with barbed wire
and provided with loopholes for sharpshooters. And then,
in the dead of night, he attempted to smuggle his army of
hired Pinkerton thugs into Homestead, which act precipitated
the terrible carnage of the steel workers. Not content with
the death of eleven victims, killed in the Pinkerton skirmish,
Henry Clay Frick, good Christian and free American, straightway
began the hounding down of the helpless wives and orphans,
by ordering them out of the wretched Company houses.
The whole country was aroused
over these inhuman outrages. Hundreds of voices were raised
in protest, calling on Frick to desist, not to go too far.
Yes, hundreds of people protested,--as one objects to annoying
flies. Only one there was who actively responded to the
outrage at Homestead,--Alexander Berkman. Yes, he was an
Anarchist. He gloried in that fact, because it was the only
force that made the discord between his spiritual longing
and the world without at all bearable. Yet not Anarchism,
as such, but the brutal slaughter of the eleven steel workers
was the urge for Alexander Berkman's act, his attempt on
the life of Henry Clay Frick.
The record of European acts
of political violence affords numerous and striking instances
of the influence of environment upon sensitive human beings.
The court speech of Vaillant,
who, in 1894, exploded a bomb in the Paris Chamber of Deputies,
strikes the true keynote of the psychology of such acts:
"Gentlemen, in a few minutes
you are to deal your blow, but in receiving your verdict
I shall have at least the satisfaction of having wounded
the existing society, that cursed society in which one may
see a single man spending, uselessly, enough to feed thousands
of families; an infamous society which permits a few individuals
to monopolize all the social wealth, while there are hundreds
of thousands of unfortunates who have not even the bread
that is not refused to dogs, and while entire families are
committing suicide for want of the necessities of life.
"Ah, gentlemen, if the governing
classes could go down among the unfortunates! But no, they
prefer to remain deaf to their appeals. It seems that a
fatality impels them, like the royalty of the eighteenth
century, toward the precipice which will engulf them, for
woe be to those who remain deaf to the cries of the starving,
woe to those who, believing themselves of superior essence,
assume the right to exploit those beneath them! There comes
a time when the people no longer reason; they rise like
a hurricane, and pass away like a torrent. Then we see bleeding
heads impaled on pikes.
"Among the exploited, gentlemen,
there are two classes of individuals. Those of one class,
not realizing what they are and what they might be, take
life as it comes, believe that they are born to be slaves,
and content themselves with the little that is given them
in exchange for their labor. But there are others, on the
contrary, who think, who study, and who, looking about them,
discover social iniquities. Is it their fault if they see
clearly and suffer at seeing others suffer? Then they throw
themselves into the struggle, and make themselves the bearers
of the popular claims.
"Gentlemen, I am one of
these last. Wherever I have gone, I have seen unfortunates
bent beneath the yoke of capital. Everywhere I have seen
the same wounds causing tears of blood to flow, even in
the remoter parts of the inhabited districts of South America,
where I had the right to believe that he who was weary of
the pains of civilization might rest in the shade of the
palm trees and there study nature. Well, there even, more
than elsewhere, I have seen capital come, like a vampire,
to suck the last drop of blood of the unfortunate pariahs.
"Then I came back to France,
where it was reserved for me to see my family suffer atrociously.
This was the last drop in the cup of my sorrow. Tired of
leading this life of suffering and cowardice, I carried
this bomb to those who are primarily responsible for social
misery.
"I am reproached with the
wounds of those who were hit by my projectiles. Permit me
to point out in passing that, if the bourgeois had not massacred
or caused massacres during the Revolution, it is probable
that they would still be under the yoke of the nobility.
On the other hand, figure up the dead and wounded on Tonquin,
Madagascar, Dahomey, adding thereto the thousands, yes,
millions of unfortunates who die in the factories, the mines,
and wherever the grinding power of capital is felt. Add
also those who die of hunger, and all this with the assent
of our Deputies. Beside all this, of how little weight are
the reproaches now brought against me!
"It is true that one does
not efface the other; but, after all, are we not acting
on the defensive when we respond to the blows which we receive
from above? I know very well that I shall be told that I
ought to have confined myself to speech for the vindication
of the people's claims. But what can you expect! It takes
a loud voice to make the deaf hear. Too long have they answered
our voices by imprisonment, the rope, rifle volleys. Make
no mistake; the explosion of my bomb is not only the cry
of the rebel Vaillant, but the cry of an entire class which
vindicates its rights, and which will soon add acts to words.
For, be sure of it, in vain will they pass laws. The ideas
of the thinkers will not halt; just as, in the last century,
all the governmental forces could not prevent the Diderots
and the Voltaires from spreading emancipating ideas among
the people, so all the existing governmental forces will
not prevent the Reclus, the Darwins, the Spencers, the Ibsens,
the Mirbeaus, from spreading the ideas of justice and liberty
which will annihilate the prejudices that hold the mass
in ignorance. And these ideas, welcomed by the unfortunate,
will flower in acts of revolt as they have done in me, until
the day when the disappearance of authority shall permit
all men to organize freely according to their choice, when
everyone shall be able to enjoy the product of his labor,
and when those moral maladies called prejudices shall vanish,
permitting human beings to live in harmony, having no other
desire than to study the sciences and love their fellows.
"I conclude, gentlemen,
by saying that a society in which one sees such social inequalities
as we see all about us, in which we see every day suicides
caused by poverty, prostitution flaring at every street
corner,--a society whose principal monuments are barracks
and prisons,--such a society must be transformed as soon
as possible, on pain of being eliminated, and that speedily,
from the human race. Hail to him who labors, by no matter
what means, for this transformation! It is this idea that
has guided me in my duel with authority, but as in this
duel I have only wounded my adversary, it is now its turn
to strike me.
"Now, gentlemen, to me it
matters little what penalty you may inflict, for, looking
at this assembly with the eyes of reason, I can not help
smiling to see you, atoms lost in matter, and reasoning
only because you possess a prolongation of the spinal marrow,
assume the right to judge one of your fellows.
"Ah! gentlemen, how little
a thing is your assembly and your verdict in the history
of humanity; and human history, in its turn, is likewise
a very little thing in the whirlwind which bears it through
immensity, and which is destined to disappear, or at least
to be transformed, in order to begin again the same history
and the same facts, a veritably perpetual play of cosmic
forces renewing and transferring themselves forever."
Will anyone say that Vaillant
was an ignorant, vicious man, or a lunatic? Was not his
mind singularly clear and analytic? No wonder that the best
intellectual forces of France spoke in his behalf, and signed
the petition to President Carnot, asking him to commute
Vaillant's death sentence.
Carnot would listen to no
entreaty; he insisted on more than a pound of flesh, he
wanted Vaillant's life, and then--the inevitable happened:
President Carnot was killed. On the handle of the stiletto
used by the Attentäter was engraved, significantly,
VAILLANT!
Santa Caserio was an Anarchist.
He could have gotten away, saved himself; but he remained,
he stood the consequences.
His reasons for the act
are set forth in so simple, dignified, and childlike manner
that one is reminded of the touching tribute paid Caserio
by his teacher of the little village school, Ada Negri,
the Italian poet, who spoke of him as a sweet, tender plant,
of too fine and sensitive texture to stand the cruel strain
of the world.
"Gentlemen of the Jury!
I do not propose to make a defense, but only an explanation
of my deed.
"Since my early youth I
began to learn that present society is badly organized,
so badly that every day many wretched men commit suicide,
leaving women and children in the most terrible distress.
Workers, by thousands, seek for work and can not find it.
Poor families beg for food and shiver with cold; they suffer
the greatest misery; the little ones ask their miserable
mothers for food, and the mothers cannot give it to them,
because they have nothing. The few things which the home
contained have already been sold or pawned. All they can
do is beg alms; often they are arrested as vagabonds.
"I went away from my native
place because I was frequently moved to tears at seeing
little girls of eight or ten years obliged to work fifteen
hours a day for the paltry pay of twenty centimes. Young
women of eighteen or twenty also work fifteen hours daily,
for a mockery of remuneration. And that happens not only
to my fellow countrymen, but to all the workers, who sweat
the whole day long for a crust of bread, while their labor
produces wealth in abundance. The workers are obliged to
live under the most wretched conditions, and their food
consists of a little bread, a few spoonfuls of rice, and
water; so by the time they are thirty or forty years old,
they are exhausted, and go to die in the hospitals. Besides,
in consequence of bad food and overwork, these unhappy creatures
are, by hundreds, devoured by pellagra--a disease that,
in my country, attacks, as the physicians say, those who
are badly fed and lead a life of toil and privation.
"I have observed that there
are a great many people who are hungry, and many children
who suffer, whilst bread and clothes abound in the towns.
I saw many and large shops full of clothing and woolen stuffs,
and I also saw warehouses full of wheat and Indian corn,
suitable for those who are in want. And, on the other hand,
I saw thousands of people who do not work, who produce nothing
and live on the labor of others; who spend every day thousands
of francs for their amusement; who debauch the daughters
of the workers; who own dwellings of forty or fifty rooms;
twenty or thirty horses, many servants; in a word, all the
pleasures of life.
"I believed in God; but
when I saw so great an inequality between men, I acknowledged
that it was not God who created man, but man who created
God. And I discovered that those who want their property
to be respected, have an interest in preaching the existence
of paradise and hell, and in keeping the people in ignorance.
"Not long ago, Vaillant
threw a bomb in the Chamber of Deputies, to protest against
the present system of society. He killed no one, only wounded
some persons; yet bourgeois justice sentenced him to death.
And not satisfied with the condemnation of the guilty man,
they began to pursue the Anarchists, and arrest not only
those who had known Vaillant, but even those who had merely
been present at any Anarchist lecture.
"The government did not
think of their wives and children. It did not consider that
the men kept in prison were not the only ones who suffered,
and that their little ones cried for bread. Bourgeois justice
did not trouble itself about these innocent ones, who do
not yet know what society is. It is no fault of theirs that
their fathers are in prison; they only want to eat.
"The government went on
searching private houses, opening private letters, forbidding
lectures and meetings, and practicing the most infamous
oppressions against us. Even now, hundreds of Anarchists
are arrested for having written an article in a newspaper,
or for having expressed an opinion in public.
"Gentlemen of the Jury,
you are representatives of bourgeois society. If you want
my head, take it; but do not believe that in so doing you
will stop the Anarchist propaganda. Take care, for men reap
what they have sown."
During a religious procession
in 1896, at Barcelona, a bomb was thrown. Immediately three
hundred men and women were arrested. Some were Anarchists,
but the majority were trade-unionists and Socialists. They
were thrown into that terrible bastille Montjuich, and subjected
to most horrible tortures. After a number had been killed,
or had gone insane, their cases were taken up by the liberal
press of Europe, resulting in the release of a few survivors.
The man primarily responsible
for this revival of the Inquisition was Canovas del Castillo,
Prime Minister of Spain. It was he who ordered the torturing
of the victims, their flesh burned, their bones crushed,
their tongues cut out. Practiced in the art of brutality
during his r gime in Cuba, Canovas remained absolutely deaf
to the appeals and protests of the awakened civilized conscience.
In 1897 Canovas del Castillo
was shot to death by a young Italian, Angiolillo. The latter
was an editor in his native land, and his bold utterances
soon attracted the attention of the authorities. Persecution
began, and Angiolillo fled from Italy to Spain, thence to
France and Belgium, finally settling in England. While there
he found employment as a compositor, and immediately became
the friend of all his colleagues. One of the latter thus
described Angiolillo: "His appearance suggested the journalist
rather than the disciple of Guttenberg. His delicate hands,
moreover, betrayed the fact that he had not grown up at
the 'case.' With his handsome frank face, his soft dark
hair, his alert expression, he looked the very type of the
vivacious Southerner. Angiolillo spoke Italian, Spanish,
and French, but no English; the little French I knew was
not sufficient to carry on a prolonged conversation. However,
Angiolillo soon began to acquire the English idiom; he learned
rapidly, playfully, and it was not long until he became
very popular with his fellow compositors. His distinguished
and yet modest manner, and his consideration towards his
colleagues, won him the hearts of all the boys."
Angiolillo soon became familiar
with the detailed accounts in the press. He read of the
great wave of human sympathy with the helpless victims at
Montjuich. On Trafalgar Square he saw with his own eyes
the results of those atrocities, when the few Spaniards,
who escaped Castillo's clutches, came to seek asylum in
England. There, at the great meeting, these men opened their
shirts and showed the horrible scars of burned flesh. Angiolillo
saw, and the effect surpassed a thousand theories; the impetus
was beyond words, beyond arguments, beyond himself even.
Seņor Antonio Canovas del
Castillo, Prime Minister of Spain, sojourned at Santa Agueda.
As usual in such cases, all strangers were kept away from
his exalted presence. One exception was made, however, in
the case of a distinguished looking, elegantly dressed Italian--the
representative, it was understood, of an important journal.
The distinguished gentleman was--Angiolillo.
Seņor Canovas, about to
leave his house, stepped on the veranda. Suddenly Angiolillo
confronted him. A shot rang out, and Canovas was a corpse.
The wife of the Prime Minister
rushed upon the scene. "Murderer! Murderer!" she cried,
pointing at Angiolillo. The latter bowed. "Pardon, Madame,"
he said, "I respect you as a lady, but I regret that you
were the wife of that man."
Calmly Angiolillo faced
death. Death in its most terrible form--for the man whose
soul was as a child's.
He was garroted. His body
lay, sun-kissed, till the day hid in twilight. And the people
came, and pointing the finger of terror and fear, they said:
"There--the criminal--the cruel murderer."
How stupid, how cruel is
ignorance! It misunderstands always, condemns always.
A remarkable parallel to
the case of Angiolillo is to be found in the act of Gaetano
Bresci, whose Attentat upon King Umberto made
an American city famous.
Bresci came to this country,
this land of opportunity, where one has but to try to meet
with golden success. Yes, he too would try to succeed. He
would work hard and faithfully. Work had no terrors for
him, if it would only help him to independence, manhood,
self-respect.
Thus full of hope and enthusiasm
he settled in Paterson, New Jersey, and there found a lucrative
job at six dollars per week in one of the weaving mills
of the town. Six whole dollars per week was, no doubt, a
fortune for Italy, but not enough to breathe on in the new
country. He loved his little home. He was a good husband
and devoted father to his bambina Bianca, whom
he adored. He worked and worked for a number of years. He
actually managed to save one hundred dollars out of his
six dollars per week.
Bresci had an ideal. Foolish,
I know, for a workingman to have an ideal,--the Anarchist
paper published in Paterson, La Questione Sociale.
Every week, though tired
from work, he would help to set up the paper. Until later
hours he would assist, and when the little pioneer had exhausted
all resources and his comrades were in despair, Bresci brought
cheer and hope, one hundred dollars, the entire savings
of years. That would keep the paper afloat.
In his native land people
were starving. The crops had been poor, and the peasants
saw themselves face to face with famine. They appealed to
their good King Umberto; he would help. And he did. The
wives of the peasants who had gone to the palace of the
King, held up in mute silence their emaciated infants. Surely
that would move him. And then the soldiers fired and killed
those poor fools.
Bresci, at work in the weaving
mill at Paterson, read of the horrible massacre. His mental
eye beheld the defenceless women and innocent infants of
his native land, slaughtered right before the good King.
His soul recoiled in horror. At night he heard the groans
of the wounded. Some may have been his comrades, his own
flesh. Why, why these foul murders?
The little meeting of the
Italian Anarchist group in Paterson ended almost in a fight.
Bresci had demanded his hundred dollars. His comrades begged,
implored him to give them a respite. The paper would go
down if they were to return him his loan. But Bresci insisted
on its return.
How cruel and stupid is
ignorance. Bresci got the money, but lost the good will,
the confidence of his comrades. They would have nothing
more to do with one whose greed was greater than his ideals.
On the twenty-ninth of July,
1900, King Umberto was shot at Monzo. The young Italian
weaver of Paterson, Gaetano Bresci, had taken the life of
the good King.
Paterson was placed under
police surveillance, everyone known as an Anarchist hounded
and persecuted, and the act of Bresci ascribed to the teachings
of Anarchism. As if the teachings of Anarchism in its extremest
form could equal the force of those slain women and infants,
who had pilgrimed to the King for aid. As if any spoken
word, ever so eloquent, could burn into a human soul with
such white heat as the lifeblood trickling drop by drop
from those dying forms. The ordinary man is rarely moved
either by word or deed; and those whose social kinship is
the greatest living force need no appeal to respond--even
as does steel to the magnet--to the wrongs and horrors of
society.
If a social theory is a
strong factor inducing acts of political violence, how are
we to account for the recent violent outbreaks in India,
where Anarchism has hardly been born. More than any other
old philosophy, Hindu teachings have exalted passive resistance,
the drifting of life, the Nirvana, as the highest spiritual
ideal. Yet the social unrest in India is daily growing,
and has only recently resulted in an act of political violence,
the killing of Sir Curzon Wyllie by the Hindu Madar Sol
Dhingra.
If such a phenomenon can
occur in a country socially and individually permeated for
centuries with the spirit of passivity, can one question
the tremendous, revolutionizing effect on human character
exerted by great social iniquities? Can one doubt the logic,
the justice of these words:
"Repression, tyranny, and
indiscriminate punishment of innocent men have been the
watchwords of the government of the alien domination in
India ever since we began the commercial boycott of English
goods. The tiger qualities of the British are much in evidence
now in India. They think that by the strength of the sword
they will keep down India! It is this arrogance that has
brought about the bomb, and the more they tyrannize over
a helpless and unarmed people, the more terrorism will grow.
We may deprecate terrorism as outlandish and foreign to
our culture, but it is inevitable as long as this tyranny
continues, for it is not the terrorists that are to be blamed,
but the tyrants who are responsible for it. It is the only
resource for a helpless and unarmed people when brought
to the verge of despair. It is never criminal on their part.
The crime lies with the tyrant." 4
Even conservative scientists
are beginning to realize that heredity is not the sole factor
moulding human character. Climate, food, occupation; nay,
color, light, and sound must be considered in the study
of human psychology.
If that be true, how much
more correct is the contention that great social abuses
will and must influence different minds and temperaments
in a different way. And how utterly fallacious the stereotyped
notion that the teachings of Anarchism, or certain exponents
of these teachings, are responsible for the acts of political
violence.
Anarchism, more than any
other social theory, values human life above things. All
Anarchists agree with Tolstoy in this fundamental truth:
if the production of any commodity necessitates the sacrifice
of human life, society should do without that commodity,
but it can not do without that life. That, however, nowise
indicates that Anarchism teaches submission. How can it,
when it knows that all suffering, all misery, all ills,
result from the evil of submission?
Has not some American ancestor
said, many years ago, that resistance to tyranny is obedience
to God? And he was not an Anarchist even. It would say that
resistance to tyranny is man's highest ideal. So long as
tyranny exists, in whatever form, man's deepest aspiration
must resist it as inevitably as man must breathe.
Compared with the wholesale
violence of capital and government, political acts of violence
are but a drop in the ocean. That so few resist is the strongest
proof how terrible must be the conflict between their souls
and unbearable social iniquities.
High strung, like a violin
string, they weep and moan for life, so relentless, so cruel,
so terribly inhuman. In a desperate moment the string breaks.
Untuned ears hear nothing but discord. But those who feel
the agonized cry understand its harmony; they hear in it
the fulfillment of the most compelling moment of human nature.
Such is the psychology of
political violence.
FOOTNOTES:
1A revolutionist committing an act
of political violence.
2Paris and the Social Revolution.
3From a pamphlet issued by the Freedom
Group of London.
4The Free Hindustan.
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