Living My Life by Emma Goldman Volume one New York: Alfred A Knopf Inc.,1931. Chapter 8 It was May 1892. News from Pittsburgh announced that trouble had broken out between the Carnegie Steel Company and its employes organized in the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. It was one of the biggest and most efficient labor bodies of the country, consisting mostly of Americans, men of decision and grit, who would assert their rights. The Carnegie Company, on the other hand, was a powerful corporation, known as a hard master. It was particularly significant that Andrew Carnegie, its president, had temporarily turned over the entire management to the company's chairman, Henry Clay Frick, a man known for his enmity to labor. Frick was also the owner of extensive coke-fields, where unions were prohibited and the workers were ruled with an iron hand. The high tariff o...
Ever since the beginning of the European conflagration, the whole human race almost has fallen into the deathly grip of the war anesthesis, overcome by the mad teaming fumes of a blood soaked chloroform, which has obscured its vision and paralyzed its heart. Indeed, with the exception of some savage tribes, who know nothing of Christian religion or of brotherly love, and who also know nothing of dreadnaughts, submarines, munition manufacture and war loans, the rest of the race is under this terrible narcosis. The human mind seems to be conscious of but one thing, murderous speculation. Our whole civilization, our entire culture is concentrated in the mad demand for the most perfected weapons of slaughter. Ammunition! Ammunition! O, Lord, th... (From : University of Berkeley.)
ALLIES: The fairies of Democracy. BARBARIANS: The other fellows. CONGRESS: The valet of Woodrow the First. CENSORSHIP: The rape of Free Speech. CONSCRIPTION: Free men fighting against their will. CIVILIZATION: In God We Trust. DEMOCRACY: The voice of the Gallery Gods. FREE SPEECH: Say what you please, but keep your mouth shut. HUNS: Loyal patriots from Central Europe. HUMANITY: Treason to government. JUSTICE: Successful target shooting. KAISER: A President's ambition. LIBERTY BOND: A bone from a bonehead. LIBERTY LOAN: The bread line of the Unborn. LOYAL CITIZEN: Deaf, dumb, and blind. MILITARISM: Christianity in action. PATRIOTISM: Hating your neighbor. REGISTRATION: Funeral march of Liber... (From : Anarchy Archives.)
Now and After: The ABC of Communist AnarchismWho is the reformer, and what does he propose? The reformer wants to 'reform and improve.' He is not sure what it is that he really wants to change: sometimes he says that 'people are bad,' and it is them that he wants to 'reform', at other times he means to 'improve' conditions. he does not believe in abolishing an evil altogether. Doing away with something that is rotten is 'too radical' for him. 'For Heaven's sake,' he cautions you, 'don't be too hasty.' He wants to change things gradually, little by little. Take war, for example. War is bad, of course, the reformer admits; it is wholesale murder, a blot upon our civilization. But - abolish it? Oh, no! He wants to 'reform' it. He wants to 'limit armaments,' for instance. With less armaments, he says, we'll kill fewer people. He wants to 'humanize' war, to make slaughter more decent, so to speak. If you should carry out his ideas in your personal life, you would not have a rotten tooth that aches pulled out all a...