From ‘Regeneración’, English Section, July 28, 1917, Los Angeles, California, edited by Enrique Flores Magón, having appeared in Spanish as ‘La Leva’ in the same issue
Democratically, very democratically, since no one has been personally consulted about shouldering a gun and being sent to defend the Morgan millions and the millions of the other bloodsuckers of this boasted Country of Liberty, on Friday, the 20th of July there took place in the Senate chamber, at Washington, D.C., the first of the series of drawings that will be effected to force into the military service 1,374,900 out of the 10,000,000 young men of all races that, with very rare exceptions, were forced to register on the 5th of last June, under the threat of being sent to jail for one year and then forced to register anyway, by being taken in person by the minions of the Dictatorship to the place of registration, or by being induced thru trickery, as was the case with the mexicans, whom the rascally carranzista consuls, and even the american authorities, made to believe that nothing was meant by it but the taking of a census.
The drawing taken on the 20th of this month was to pick out the first lot of men for the european carnage. The funeral act was presided over by Secretary of War, Baker, and witnessed by senators, high-ranking military officers and countless other parasites and a small audience. Baker, with all the gravity and circumspection that the act required, had himself blind-folded, that he might be the one to draw the first number that would determine the first victim in the cause of Capitalism.
It seems that what has been chosen to be called Fate has a taste for being ironic and sarcastic. The first number drawn by Baker, according to “The Times” of this city, designating the first “lucky one” to go to defend “his” country, corresponds to a mexican, Alejandro Duarte.
But the irony of fate does not stop there. Duarte, the “happy” mortal who has had the “honor” of having his number drawn by the worthy hand of Baker and the “glory” of being the first one to be designated for cannon fodder, surely must be anxious, yes, very anxious, to shoulder a gun: but not to defend the Morgan millions, but to avenge grievances, for it is well to know that Duarte is one of the 1,200 striking miners and sympathizers who were brutally assaulted on the night of the 12th of this month in Bisbee, Ariz., at the hands of the Sheriff of that locality and of a criminal mob armed to the teeth, who invaded the homes of the strikers, dragging them from their beds where they slept peacefully, throwing them into cattle cars, taken to the isolated station of Hermanas, N.M., and there abandoned; after being deported they have been concentrated in a military camp, where they still are in the hands of the soldiery.
In that concentration camp is Alejandro Duarte, according to “The Times,” and after being the victim of the savagery that characterizes the Capitalist System, he further had the “luck” to be the first one designated to go and defend the very same ones who exploit him, mistreat him. trample him under foot and oppress him for daring to ask a petty raise of wages. Indeed, so-called Fate has a taste for being ironic and sarcastic.
The same Fate, too, since its first blow, has come to point the honorable carranzista consuls with an accusing finger, denouncing them as liars and criminals who in accord with their master Carranza, in his efforts to win the good graces and favors of Wilson and Wall Street, deceived the mexican workers impudently, that they might tamely go and place their heads on the gibbet of the June 5 registration. This shall once more teach the mexican workers, in a practical way, that what we say is true, that no government must be trusted because all governments are the enemies of the poor and the faithful servants of the rich.
The brand-new machine of conscription has begun to work. The reigning Dictatorship, in its mad anxiety to satisfy the wishes of its masters has undertaken the enterprise of assassinating Democracy and Liberty in their own name.
A mad enterprise this, as mad are the countless persecutions, assaults, vexations and savagery with which terror is sought to be implanted and make the workers tractable who, as a rule, refuse to serve as cannon food for the sinister ends pursued by the bourgeoisie, and its lackeys,
The historic, “iron hand” of Porfirio Diaz has become rusted after the Mexican Social Revolution has been on foot for well nigh seven years.
The “Law of Terror” was smothered under the weight of the Romanoff crown when this rolled on the ground upon being snatched from his head by the sturdy fist of the Russian people.
Bur then, so much the worse for those above! Let them pinch all they want! That the more they pinch the quicker Wilson shall meet his Ipiranga (“Ipiranga” is the name of the ship in which Diaz decamped) to go and die insane in Paris, since he wants to imitate Diaz, and the quicker shall the bourgeois american gentry be seeking other lands and wielding the pick and shovel, the same as more than one mexican bourgeois grazes the post of a section hand in this Country of the mighty Dollar.
The temperature of the Century is not the same as of yore, propitious for the growth of the poisonous fungus of tyranny,
Enrique Flores Magón
Also
For Our Country!, by Enrique Flores Magón (1916)
Carranza’s Doom, by Enrique Flores Magón (1916)
My First Impressions, by Enrique Flores Magón (1916)
