Chapter 4

Kropotkin, no. Kropotkin finds no extenuating circumstances except in the sentimental impulsiveness that will be his misfortune or his fortune, but for which, if you find in the morning papers the echo of a plebeian insurrection, he sets his intimate hopes on fire at the usual prediction of the imminent social revolution, with the same imprint with which he extinguishes them at sunset if the newspapers bring him the new evil that the movement has been suffocated and order restored.

Of these dizzying climacteric oscillations, he is a habitual recidivist.

In March 1904 the sudden outbreak of war between Russia and Japan hastily drew the horoscope of the revolution that, unfortunately and for reasons beyond and beyond pure accident, will not ignite in the economic field even the current war from the outcome of which — victorious in all probability for the allied powers — the hypothesis of a political revolution subverting the Czarism that from the long war and its bloody triumphs will arise predictably restored, rehabilitated, expert.

And still three years ago, closed to the severe warnings of history one ear, closed the other to the voices of his vast and ancient experience, he did not put his hurrah! to that of the freebooters who praised the Mexican social revolution from the comfortable safe kennels, which is not — and has never appeared as clear as it is these days — but a shady competition of vulgar appetites, of shameless adventurers, of inconfessable interests from Huerta, to Carranza, to Villa, in Zapata, in Morgan, in Harriman, in Wilson, in Hearst, — are they all raging from every lair a little bit, to which, indifferent or suspicious, the Mexican proletariat remains, however, stubbornly foreign, devastated to the point of abjection by the surviving industrial Middle Ages and by some centuries of intensive religious culture?

That’s the way it is; and always the man who, firing his first articles thirty years ago at the “Revolte”, saw the revolution break every minute from the pores, from the outrage of collective life, and gathering a decade later his last studies in the “Conquest of the Bread” saw at least as far away as the new ice age the revolution of the servants, in which he always believes, and whose advent, which is better, he works with his formidable strength and with unchanged fervor.

Violent and fleeting crisis of feeling on which, under the impact of the immediate consequences, his domination the reason.

But in the meantime, disastrous.

* * *

Disastrous. He reaps the mortifying testimony of these days.

None of the great newspapers that presume to keep their readers up to date with what is happening in the field of science, literature, and the arts, has ever shown that they have noticed him, his prodigious fifty years of research, investigation, and noble toil from which have flourished literary, philosophical, and scientific works that would be enough for the glory of a less unorthodox scientist: “The mutual support” and the study of “Russian Literature”.

They have never taken care of it; they have around his work his name; warp agrees the conspiracy of silence not to break it but to denounce the instigators of it to the international police.

They raise him on the shields, today that he and for the war, today that he is for France for England for Russia against the Teutonic barbarity, all the pennivendolo that he knows tied to the flocks of high finance, that he, Kropotkin, has branded in recent articles on “The War” as the worst scoundrel who has ever been fattened by the misery of the ruin of the massacre of poor simple and good people that he, Kropotkin, warned, a few months are, not to be dazzled by appearances, not to believe in the deep political causes, the national hatreds with which you try; to justify any war which is never more than a conspiracy drenched in a handful of high-class thieves.

And Kropotkin is not a man to be deluded into believing that it is late in repairing the conspiracy to forget this sudden and posthumous apologia. Certainly not to his acumen, his doctrine, his culture, his pride, his generous dream — to which he gave the price of the jail of Peter Paul and Clairvaux, the price of a perpetual ban from all the land, his whole life — he blesses the brothel press and purse-snatcher; He blesses his contradiction, he blesses Kropotkin who repudiates the warrior hymn for France and the republic and drowns in the democratic lie of nationality and homeland, class struggle, proletarian solidarity, social revolution, anarchy.

Tribbling, grinning, grinning.

***

The young men who awakened from their torpor and from oblique conventionalism freed themselves from the magical caress of his word, and in the mysterious delubriousness that the Ignatians guard their wealth and joy, and from the humble they demand from the humble, the perennial tribute, the sweat of every toil, the tears of every pain, the blood of every holocaust, They saw his sacrilegious white hands tearing from the tabernacle, worshiping his accomplices’ veils, stripping bare the nefarious fraud that sells joy to idleness, the balance of justice to thieves, the gospel to the Pharisees, order to murderers, mercy to the executioner, and an unending handful of vermin and scoundrels, the greatest and most worthy of mankind.

Did he not, then, have us in the torpid viluppage of history, which unravels our acumen and courage in its riddles, did he not teach us to discern beyond all frontiers of tradition, faith, language, friends, and enemies? How many irreconcilable enemies on this side of the frontier have the bond of faith, of language, of tradition, of every community brutally broken, building on our squalor their insolent fortune, on our servitude their tyranny, on our abjection their pride, on the destruction of our flesh, souls, our hearts, their privilege?

Enemies with whom, not that peace, no truce and possible, will ever be hoped for until the fruits of thought, of human work — a condition or Guarentigia of civilization, of progress that in time and space have no boundary — are not from the claw of the hoarder’s hub, exasperated, resigned, patrimony of all, instrument of the regeneration of all, an instrument of freedom and well-being of all?

How many brothers and sisters on this side and on the other side of every frontier, born on the same litter, raised in the same darkness, torn by the same anguish, standing under the same cross, have, in spite of different traditions, faith, language, different flags, identity of interests, solidarity of hope and destiny?

He, with a fervent voice with pertinence that no one knew more alive more stubbornly, disarming the fratricidal hatreds he thickened in expiatory hurricanes on the secular enemy the inexhaustible fury; He, with the seer’s broad gesture, on the slow sinking of every barrier, pointed out to us the only limit on the horizon of the great redeemed homeland of tomorrow; he, crying out to us the holy war of final liberation, disciplined the instinctive reluctance of the exploited, and made them meet every war of robbery and extermination.

Because in the name of the homeland, a liar symbol of a traditional commonality that badly hides the desperate antagonism of interests that tears each lineage apart; For in the name of a civilization erected on nequizia, on lies, on fraud, he asks us today for a truce from the oppressors, hatred from the oppressed, the exploited, the brothers of whom, in the name of a greater civilization, of a greater homeland, yesterday propitiated the irresistible Eucharist, and before our souls, uncertain in the whirlwind, he evokes today, guardian of every civil flame, truculent the other of every gallows, the ghosts of France and Germany when he told us, yesterday as well, that Germany greedy for war and unscrupulous Germany of the Bank, of the Stock Exchange, of the Krupp, that France ready for war and France who bartered the Declaration of Rights for the shares of Creuzot, of Credit Lyonnais, of the Bank of France; And to make the war of the financiers of the bankers of the bankers of the great shipowners of the great suppliers, on this side and on the M of the Rhine, and to pay the price m so many youths, in so much blood, in so many bitter morsels of bread, are the homeless the homeless the homeless the breadless of the two nations?

Surely he is not the man of yesterday’s judgment, which he expressed so wisely with such unscrupulous courage in a serene mind: he is certainly today the man of yesterday, and where his judgment has not been overwhelmed by the impetus of the crazy cyclone, the man of yesterday and the man of today must have, good or poor, their reason if they suddenly find themselves facing each other, one on one side, the other on the opposite side of the barricade.