Chapter 7

Not today. It rings more powerful than its own, overwhelming the lost exhortations, the brutal voice of reality.

The shipyards, the factories, the workshops that in every dreamy valley break the unsuspecting silences, that in the old patriarchal cities whetted the hymn of the resurrection, and thicken the energies of the serfs in the turgid and inviolate, and.... They want around them — the necessary warp of veins and arteries — canals, railways and ships that of every exotic sea, bear the fruits of the earth and of the herds, and at the four horizons disperse together with the name and glory of the great German homeland, the wealth accumulated by the inexhaustible fervor; and they want, milestones of the triumphal ascension, arsenals and armies that assure their rhythm and fortune, remain the source and reason of war.

The unintentionally confessed reason:

“In ten years’ time we will have a population of eighty gainful employment, if we do not have the network of colonies that we lack today, with a few negligible exceptions.

And, even today, is it admissible that sixty-five million Germans, their trade with the whole world, remain the goods of forty-five million Englishmen, and allow them the protection of the old world, the supremacy of the sea?” the general Von Bernhardi wondered who — stopped the durlindana and the morione of don Quixote who on the genius on the culture on the superiority of the German people, of which he had established himself herald and knight, They collected more mockery and more trifles than ‘non el ingenioso hidalgo de la Mancha — he decided to tell us in less chivalrous but less abstruse language the anguish that gnaws in his country the great thieves, and to show us behind the windmills of a crafty nationalism the reality of the interests that want priority in the market and in the great international bottleneck their share of loot.

And the conclusion, the only conclusion that can respond to this antagonism of interests and summarize its furor, can only be the one that he draws from it:

“A war between Germany and England is inevitable. England has the greatest interest in unleashing it as soon as possible”... and on the other hand “our aspiration to a larger place in the world will surely lead us to a war like the Seven Years war, in which we will certainly be as victorious as the heroic King of Prussia.[6]

Let’s leave the odds of the final victory as a gang. They are so inseparable from the salaries of the proud from the responsibilities of the professional warrior that — no one would know hunger by chance: a German general cannot risk bad predictions; he does not have the interest — courage and freedom. It is interesting to note the fundamental part of General Von Bernhardi’s statements; the German army, the German navy have no other mission than to ensure an outlet for German industry, the sea routes and the markets of the world for German industry and finance.

***

And it is denounced with such cynical brutality that it is really not understood how the good Kropotkin could have found in the political vassalage of Alsace-Lorraine the origins and the reasons for German armaments and, I don’t know well, what dream of feudal intentions to the current war; in the defense of the republic or of English constitutionalism the concerns of civilization and liberty for which we would like to conscribe in service of the allies. Alsace? Lorraine? But the Republican capitalists don’t want them back. Note well the Delaisi, that in Mulhausen have developed woolen mills, cotton mills, steel mills so powerful that against their fertility they had to devise the strictest customs protection in France, and that back in France, those workshops would make such competition to the workshops of Creuzot to the spinning mills of the Vosges of Lille de Rouen to bring a disastrous upset throughout the economy of the national industry. Let’s explain even less the Kropotkin’s cantonalism that in his last study on “The War” he shows to have drawn on a work that six years ago aroused the most legitimate anxieties in France. It is a cry of alarm to the French bourgeoisie, Center l’Oligarchie Financière, against a handful of stock exchange bandits who, while suffocating in their insatiable tentacles, put the enormous reserves of French savings into the service of foreign industry.

Who gave the wonderful impetus to German industry today unsurpassed, incoercible? Who renews her blood in her tired veins if not the Republican financial oligarchy that would sell France and the Republic to the Kaiser seventy times seven times to make money?

“The policy of our great banks is not only undemocratic, and anti-national...

The Bank of Paris and the Netherlands has a loan with the State of São Paulo, Brazil. The loan is for the ransom of the railways. The French subscribe, the Germans collect orders for mobile equipment and lines...

The shares of Banca Commerciale Italiana are introduced on the Paris market. What is Banca Commerciale Italiana? It is an institution founded by Deutsche Bank, Dresdener Bank, Disconto Gesellschaft, a German bank that has periscope to finance commercially the Triple and conquer the Italian market...

The French Gold Mining Company... formed an alliance with the Frankfurt Metallgesellschaft to sell German bonds in France.

At the beginning of 1908 the Paris Union Bank took part in the establishment of a coal society in German Lorraine with a capital of 18 million marks. French finance gives it for eight million.

On October 1, 1905, in Cologne, on October 1, 1905, the German Coal Company with a capital of fourteen million marks was established by the Industrial and Commercial...

But in this area of French banks’ anti-nationalism there is worse...

A considerable part of the money deposited in French credit institutions and lent permanently to German banks and serves as a fond de roulement to German trade and industry...

Don’t swear, don’t say it’s not true, don’t say it’s impossible.

Let’s be precise. Between the large German and French banks there is a written agreement, a true alliance treaty, under which the French banks provide the German banks with liquid capital: the German banks give the French banks three-month bills of exchange, which they do not pay when due but renew each quarter with the payment of additional interest...

That is to say, French banks grant German banks long-term credit which they deny to French industry.

Not only do German banks not pay back at the due date, they also ask for new money.

In 1900 the French capital available to German banks reached one and a half billion. In October 1906, banks in Berlin sent to Paris for new loans... Credit Lyonnais lent three hundred million francs to Deutsche Bank alone. Société Générale, Credit Industriel et Commercial, Union Parisienne have substantial deposits in Berlin. The statistic of French loans to German banks reaches an incontestable figure’.[7]

If Peter Kropotkin were to translate the meaning and scope of these stock exchange transactions into the vernacular for readers of the “Chronicle”, profane to the mysteries of high finance, he would simply say that the French bankers, those who today hold the reins of the republic, use the small savings of the workers, the maids, the small shopkeepers of France, to starve the French proletariat, to fatten the hoarders, the exploiters, the slave traders of the German proletariat.

He could not tell you otherwise, even if his exhortations to the proletarian defense of the republic were to be beheaded.

* * *

— But if the French capitalists, as you say, have in Berlin, in Hamburg, in Dresden, in Frankfurt, in Dresden, so prosperous a vineyard for their profits, so fruitful a field for their speculations, why does the war between France and Germany devastate the grape harvest with irreparable ruins?

— First of all, the bourgeoisie, the capitalists, the big financiers are largely rivaling at home — the war helping — the reverses suffered across the border. To set up an army, to mobilize it and keep it for a few months, for several years at the border, in the war, you need grains and fodder, shoes and blankets, horses, cars, airplanes, weapons and ammunition, sudden supplies. and continuous of millions, of billions on which speculation is exercised without measure, without limit, without control; then, as has already happened in Germany, in England, in France, in Austria, in Italy, the loans are numbered in billions, the loans of the big credit institutions make with the deposits of the poor devils, collecting commissions, senseiaries, realizing paradoxical gains; then tomorrow, after the first disasters as well as after the final epilogue, it is the dreadnoughts to rebuild, the armaments to renew, the artillery to rebuild, the reserves and fortifications, the whole army to supply, the army to rebuild.

It is the crazy laughter of the billions, of the billions who will extort themselves again, always and only from fatigue, from blood, from sweat, from the fasting of the bastards, to rebuild the greatest homeland, the purple and the banners, to remake the jackals the prey, the orgy, the glory.

Who shouts, “Long live the war?”

Those who do not go to war, who have nothing to lose, who have everything to gain from war.

Who feels more acrid the itch of pride than pride the impetus of the claims of the fatherland and the lineage?

Those of the fatherland who ignore the trials, the deeds, the glories; Those of the lineage who laughed at the heroic ordeal, disputed at all times the civil ascension serving the Pope and the Holy Office, Austria and the forks, the yellow Carignano avantieri, when he threw the capestro to Garibaldi and Mazzini, to the Father of the Fatherland yesterday when on the Golgotha of Aspromonte the dream of Luciano Manara and Goffredo Mameli was tortured in the flesh of the Duce of the Thousand, to Umberto il Buono when he yearned for the restoration of the “ordinances” and of the ancient regime by machine-gunning through the streets of Milan the survivors of the Five Days, the continuers of redemption; and the next day of Gibilrossa, the next day of Volturno or Lissa were liquidated by their new masters in knick-knacks and in cash the thirty Scicli of Iscariot, the heroism of the sixth day; Those whom the fatherland conceives under the edible species of bread and wine, those whom the fatherland has in its strongbox and to impinge it would sell together with their native land their penitents, the indigenous, the father and mother; those who have been at all times the disgrace, the obnoxious, the ruin, and the lineage held and hold in contempt and vassalage.

War is, like peace, their bakery.

* * *

On the other hand — and we have thoroughly documented this in the course of these modest considerations, drawing on the most diverse and less suspicious testimonies — more than in relations between France and Germany, the reasons for the war must be found in relations between Germany and England, in the irreducible antagonisms between the bankers, industrialists and merchants of the two countries; It appears manifest, even to those who observe superficially, that Russia is not until now in the industrial, commercial, financial aringo, a fearsome competitor for anyone, and that France has long ceased to be so.

Not the terms, but the necessity of competition, are in those relations, in that antagonism, as this lament of a British consul in Syria illustrates, better perhaps of every figure and every consideration: “Once all the European products sold here came from England, today I write to you with a German pen, on German paper, on a desk made in Germany; and in a little while your very humble representative will remain here”.

It was the violent, rapid, inexorable avoidance. The Chamberlain’s customs remedies not only appeared ineffective and late, but they were in the face of a decisive uprising of the English proletariat, just as Lord Roberts’ appeals to conscription, to the immediate need for compulsory military service, were sterile, unheard of against the unanimous repulsion of the English workers.

It was necessary to recommend oneself to the cannon, to find with the wise diplomatic deceptions nations with tradition, organization and military preparation so old and so dense that they could face the German armies on the continent, and to set up an army that would provide for the economic purposes of the war, the destruction of German industry and trade, from the first day of entry into the country.

It was the great dreadnoughts, who, blocking the English Channel and the North Sea, contend to the ports of Bremen and Hamburg for the iron coming from Australia, who deny the German industry the food and the blood of which it lives, who take it away from exporting its own products, and forced her to desperate and ineluctable failure, while alone, now master of the ocean routes, English industry collected orders, conscripted the clientele that in thirty years of effort and wonderful progress German industrialists had captured.

The Vorwaerts, the official organ of the German Socialist Party showed that it had a clear vision of these immediate consequences of the war when, in its September 12 issue, it was forced to admit that “the greatest danger of the military defeat was for Germany the prolongation of hostilities. For Germany the great danger and the possibility that the English fleet will be able to prevent the importation of cotton, silk, copper, oil, lead, leather, rubber, raw materials which are indispensable to the continuation of its industrial life; and that it will be forced to close its workshops”.

And in confirmation of the melancholy predictions of the “Vorvvaerts”, the Minister of Commerce and Labor of Washington summarized on 25 September last in a first statistic the subterranean depressions that the war, which lasted only a couple of months, had determined in imports and exports. For the month of August alone and for North America, German exports, which in 1913 had drawn a total of 21,301,274 dollars, were reduced in August 1914 to 68 dollars.737; and, always and only for the month of August and for North America, German imports, which in 19J3 added up to a total of 15,626,176 dollars, were reduced in August 1914 to 9,400,043. These reduced by half those completely annihilated since last August; now, null and void.

Put on account the results of the atrocious race war in which the German cruisers in the Atlantic and the Pacific, the English cruisers in every sea, in every strait, under every latitude, chase the steamships, the postal boats, the transports of the peaceful rival merchant fleet, less for the love of prey or booty than for the destruction of their respective means of exchange, and then deny that the war — desperately exiles any concern for liberty, civilization4 , progress — is not a fierce competition of usurers in which Democratic and Republican France, absolutist and medieval Russia, today, tomorrow Italy neither meat nor fish, are called to act as lanzichenecco, to act as Swiss to the stockbrokers of London, to the corsairs of England, as well as the German, Austrian or Turkish proletariat and called — exiles all sense of progress and freedom, every consciousness of their own strength and destiny — to be massacred by the great pirates, the great hungry, the great murderers of the Berlin Stock Exchange, Deutsche Bank or Krupp, gathered like wolves lurking at the voice and behind the tragic imperial histrionics.

* * *

But in the current conflict, Pietro Kropotkin sees, particularly designated by history, alongside his allies, the place of the workers, the Italian men of Liberty; and this presumption of his will still require comment.