Chapter XXIII The State's Internal Enemy; Death Pangs of Fleet Street; Spanish Practices; The Battle of Wapping; The Emperor's Courtiers The State's Internal Enemy In a memoir I wrote, The Anarchists in London 1935-55, I digressed to say something of the Welsh miners. In 1938 I spent a weekend in Neath with Sam Mainwaring junior, one of the last active survivors of the heyday of Welsh anarcho-syndicalism. At a meeting of the local ILP I came across an obstreperous group at the back who liked to give hell to visiting "toffee-nosed" English speakers from the Communist and Labor Parties. "Those are the Wrecking Brigade," whispered the chairman. "Take no notice of them." But they were, to my delight, survivors of the formerly strong anarcho-syndicalist miners movement, mostly elderly women and a couple of old men (miners tend to die young). They started by mimicking my accent and finished by applauding every sentence, shouting do...
I. Time brings a better adjustment to the war. There had been so many times when, to those who had energetically resisted its coming, it seemed the last intolerable outrage. In one’s wilder moments one expected revolt against the impressment of unwilling men and the suppression of unorthodox opinion. One conceived the war as breaking down through a kind of intellectual sabotage diffused through the country. But as one talks to people outside the cities and away from ruling currents of opinion, one finds the prevailing apathy shot everywhere with acquiescence. The war is a bad business, which somehow got fastened on us. They won’t want to go, but they’ve got to go. One decides that nothing generally obstructive is going to ... (From : fair-use.org.)