From ‘Mother Earth’, June 1915, New York City, edited and published by Emma Goldman
By Anna Strunsky
There are those who have faith in the war because they believe that before the world can attain democracy it must conquer autocratic states and forever lay the ghosts of militarism and feudalism. They are step-by-step revolutionists! For them no price is too great to pay for progress. The suffering and the loss is temporary, but the gain is eternal. It is through seas of blood that the advance of mankind is made — through seas and seas of blood — and if you grudge the price, if you fear, if you hesitate, if you refuse, then you are a prophet of reaction and of weakness, a siren who would hold mankind in your arms while the trumpets call.
A brave doctrine, and it might be said only a nonresistant like Tolstoy or like Buddah could cavil at it.
A cowardly doctrine, and another type of social revolutionist rejects it in the name of an all embracing Idea.
For both these types of revolutionists there exists a hated peace, an illimitable dark. One adopts the tactics of compromise, believing that out of evil, good can come, and out of a conventional means, an unconventional end; the other insists that this end can only be attained by a departure from all the usual and known methods of the world, that revolution can only be brought about by revolution, that the emancipation that comes from war cannot be emancipation, and that the civilization growing out of warfare cannot but be more than in part barbarous and violent. He believes in the uprising of the people, but not in war — which is Government warring upon the people by means of the people.
“War is Capitalism beating out its brains.” Then why stop it, asks the first, and the second answers, because it does it by way of the people. It does it vicariously. He has a more direct way, and he does not believe he has so long to wait. Had he to wait, and were the choice his, he would do so. He knows that his Idea must finally triumph, and in the name of the humanity which he would gladly die to serve, he cannot lend himself to the bloodshed, the devastation, the horror, the unthinkable anguish and torture, the orphaning of children, the breaking of hearts that can never be made whole again, and perhaps as terrible as all this, to the instilling of hatreds and passions in the living that must retard the future for which he has so long striven.
An intellectual and spiritual battle is on between the consistent revolutionist and all other types of radicals and reformers who have accepted the present crisis. The difference is not one of resistance, as opposed to nonresistance. The consistent revolutionist admits the historical necessity of violence. He commits high treason and regicide, he engages in guerilla warfare, he builds barricades. He goes alone or in groups into the high places for purposes of attack. He organizes the people on a basis of force. But his life and the life of every other human being is too sacred to stake on anything less than the unalterable demand of the human spirit for the equal rights of all to life, liberty and happiness. He does not go to war — not even to defend home and country.
Cowardly — but cowardice is itself a military conception. He cannot and does not want to understand military morality. He knows only the courage of principle.
For home and country — but all homes are his home, all countries are his too. He has no separate home and country, and he prays that he may never have them for fear that he may learn a coward’s courage — the courage that comes from a fire-spitting bit of steel in the hand, the courage of despair, the courage of a gambler who gambles with death.
This is not his war and he cannot make it his war, for the guns are not trained upon the people’s enemy but upon the people. Their enemy is one and indivisible, and by going to war the people have pulled down their own flag and have gone to the defense of that of their opponent. Over their own mangled and bleeding forms their rush to the ranks is made. They are bayonetting themselves. It is a universal suicide they are committing. In place of the fraternity which yesterday existed, there is distilled today the poisonous fumes of nationalistic patriotism which threatens to cover the earth with darkness for another fifty years.
They are slaying and being slain by the hundreds of thousands for something so much less than that for which they fought in the French Revolution. The French Revolution brought into the world the conception of society, of the Third Estate. Before that we had institutions, religion, caste, government, but the people did not exist. The Revolution extended the idea of the people as far as the Rhine. If the present war brings it as far as the Vistula it would be indirectly and fortuitously, and not through that conscious passionate effort which brought liberalism to France a hundred and twenty-five years ago. Today the driving motive of the war is defensive. If militarism were unresisted, whole nations would lose their parliaments, they would be treated as alien citizens in their own country, their language, their traditions would be attacked, or annihilated. So they stand together and oppose the advance of the Iron Heel, and battle for the most primitive of political rights.
But it is too late for slavery, says the revolutionist, even though they put it on the statute books. If militarism had its way, unresisted on the battle-field, it would be resisted all the more passionately, in civic life, the touch-stone of military success, and resisted victoriously. The grandiose, spectacular, too inconceivably costly struggle would be replaced by another, stronger, because more restrained, less costly, more effective. You cannot conquer an awakened people. You cannot Prussianize Belgium and France. You cannot eradicate the teachings of Marx and Engels from the minds of hundreds of thousands of German Socialists. Surely they would find some way of uniting in spirit and in deed with the comrades of other nations in case of such an invasion on the part of a government which they had always understood and denounced. Disarmament is not non-resistance. It is a resistance which must carry everything before it. It is raising the battle-field to a higher plane upon which the nobler and better must conquer, where today almost as surely they must fail. It is to practice a resistance unknown in history. It is a modernism which partakes of the future society which it goes to build up.
The revolutionist uses violence and is met with violence. But it is not the violence of organized warfare. We must attack conditions, he says — conditions alone create people. We must use direct action; we must not wait until we have captured the government and passed laws, we must strike for our freedom day by day as best we can by mass or group activities. In the Class Struggle that is being waged we are justified in using every means that advances our Cause but we must seek sanction not in the laws made by the Enemy. We must present our demands and wrest our rights from the unwilling fist of those who by the devious and direct forces of social and economic law are in control of them.
If they let us free, we will not go to their prisons. Against their wishes we will not mount their scaffolds. If they do not fight us, we will not fall in the ranks. But the likelihood is that they will imprison, hang and shoot us and that we will have to use some of their methods ourselves before they lay down their arms.
So in opposing war, he is no more a non-resistant than the opportunist revolutionist. Simply that the larger warfare in which he is engaged precludes the smaller. He says that when you accept results of war and call them good, you individually give your assent to war, you as much as vote the money and the men, you pay a price which your humanity should have made you forever incapable of paying — the price of the blood of the people.
On the revolutionary battle-field death will also stalk. There will be obstructionists of progress who will so baffle the social conscience, that it will be forced to meet them with violence. They will not be many in number, because upon that battle-field there will be ranged a large majority, or at least a strong minority of the people.
The revolutionist does not like the kind of life nor the kind of death that war deals out to men — the ranging of millions of uniformed men in opposing ranks for the reducing of human beings to a mangled mass lying in the dust, their inarticulate sobbing for water with their bodies, for their mothers, with their souls. He says that nothing shall make him accept all this for anybody before he accepts it for himself, or for his son, and the fact that millions of people voluntarily accept this ordeal is sufficient commentary to him of what life means to them, and sufficient ground for his revolutionism.
What are the soldiers doing? Drinking, looting, outraging girls, sabering old women, hanging peasants to beams, and partly burning them! It is perhaps to the honor of the human mind that men whose business it is to kill should go mad and commit deeds of horror. The revolutionist does not commit atrocities, he does not hack and slay in a frenzy of blood-madness, “stab and stab until their arms ache and in one day fill a trench with dead, nine miles long.” He is different because he is not trained in butchery, not morally perverted, and most of all, because he is a self-directing conscious nature dedicated to a great Idea.
The dreaded Uhlan, nineteen years of age, whom one saw on the train to Liege, fraternizing with his Belgian captors, did not oppress France, did not take Alsace, did not care whether it was held or given up, knew nothing but the superstition that he must not resist the powers. They have made him meek, and lowly, and obedient. Somewhere in the bottom of his heart, he has a feeling of discontent, of doubt, a sense of cheapness, that he is only a tool, that his fellow-men hold him to be something less than a human being. Perhaps he eases his pain by the thought that some day men like him will emancipate their manhood. Meanwhile he does what he must, the gentle, pale-faced, murderous Uhlan, who so vigorously shook the Belgian’s hand. Despite your vaunted faith in human nature, in generic man, you mark him out for death by the hundreds and thousands and millions. They are militarists, you say, and they must be wiped off the face of the earth. But I am not a murderer, exclaims the revolutionist. I do not wipe people off the face of the earth. I do not believe in artificial selection — the killing off of all the bad, that the good may remain. I do not punish, I educate.
We progress, we develop ourselves; then comes a call to arms, and all is swallowed up. The last vestiges of civilization are gone. We ourselves become war-mad. A reversal of everything takes place. Instead of preparing for life in its multitudinous and beautiful forms we prepare for death — night covers everything. We sink further into the slime of the abyss.
We lose our humanity.
The arts of civilization remain to us — portable crematories, for instance! Wonderful! Entrancing! What science, what modernism! You burn up the human débris. It’s all right. Nothing is left. It is as if these thousands upon thousands of men had never been. What can be better and simpler?
The people are broken-hearted. Everybody yields. Nothing averts the blighting evil. We are doomed! We are helpless as little children. Our leaders betray us as leaders always have betrayed us and always must. One is a romancer, a literary adventurer who had long lived with the thought of war — war in the air, war in the future, world-wars. Profitable material for his pen — a windfall, this! His mild generosity does not suffer deeply by the spectacle of universal butchery. He is of the breed that accepts the inevitable and makes the most of it. He has a genius for making the most of it.
Another, perhaps the foremost novelist living, had never professed a belief in human progress. In the most brilliant work of his pen, he depicts society as building up to a certain point, collapsing, and then beginning again — an endless repetition of advance and retrogression, advance, destruction and collapse. Another, a symbolist and mystic, whose conception of death is tangible and objective, resembling the animism of primitive man, can not feel appalled at the thought of millions of men themselves exploring the mystery which to him is the supreme Experience. Another, an impossibilistic economic fatalist all his life, is finally carried away by the force of things as they are. “I can not fight because I am old, so I enter the ministry, not to make laws, but to fight in the only sphere possible to me.” Another, the foremost antimilitarist of his generation, proud of his repeated imprisonment for his propaganda against patriotism, becomes the sensational and aggressive journalist-patriot of the present crisis, and calls on his nation for “pitiless vengeance” on the enemy — an example, perhaps, of the efficacy of our prison system! Another, whose original genius found inspiration in the outcasts and tramps of the world, whose writing was vibrant with the voice of the new philosophy, and rang with the mandates of the social revolution, says he has been born again in this war — the hectic excitement of a sick man grown too familiar with death to oppose it.
Patriots all, who have forgotten or deserted the higher patriotism with which they had lived and from which their art drew its strength.
On the revolutionary battle-field there are no soldiers, called to the front with as little power to resist as the machine guns that they drag with them. There are comrades — men and women, infatuated with freedom, who have risen to establish a home of equal hospitality to all, and to cause the dream of fellowship to come to pass upon this earth.
Three Contacts with Kropotkin
From ‘Mother Earth’, December 1912, New York City, published by Emma Goldman, edited by Alexander Berkman
Together with all Socialists of my generation there was never a time when I did not know Kropotkin and was not inspired by his personality, his revolutionary activity and the magnitude of his work as a scientist, thinker and propagandist. On three occasions of my life, however, I came in close, memorable contact with him. The first time was years ago at an ordinary Socialist meeting in San Francisco, when a youth mounted a platform and read the “Appeal to the Young.” Is it a far cry from Russia to America, from the period of 1860 to that of a decade ago, from the Bastille of Saint Peter and Saint Paul to free California? Timeless and ageless is a revolutionist, and that evening Kropotkin was with us as actually as though we were one of his conspirative workingmen’s audiences way back in his wonderful youth.
Stirring, invincible, absolute were his words as they reached us through the youthful reader on the platform. Thousands and hundreds of thousands had read that pamphlet and had responded to it as to nothing else in the literature of revolutionary Socialism, but more eloquent than the pamphlet was our thought of its author. Kropotkin wrote it, that Titan of the Russian and International Revolution, that transitional character, bred of the misery of the Past, and carrying in himself all the glories of love and strength and beauty and freedom of the Future!
In that meeting years ago, as doubtless in countless others the world over, the thought of Peter Kropotkin dwelt like a Presence, and as ever and always, despite his greatness, he was simply our comrade, showing us, rather than telling us, how to conduct ourselves as revolutionists on the battlefield which is our life.
The second time I came in contact with him was when his “Memoirs” were published, that story of his years which is at once the story of the movement, wholly intertwined and inseparable one from the other. This book was an event to all who stood in the shadow of the Cause, and inspiration, a message, a personal gift. There was a new light in the atmosphere. It was as if a wind swept through the arid land. We became lighthearted, smiled, congratulated one another. Again it was the writer behind the written word that held us, it was the great heart, the transcendant mind, resolute, determined upon liberty, the large character nourished by the air and the soil of the Future, but warring passionately, indomitably with the Present.
Then came my third contact with him, actual this time. I remember the English fog, the one light ahead, which led to his house, then the warmth of his hand, and the embrace of his look, as he met me at the door on which I knocked. There stood a Ulysses of the Social Revolution, so vital, so inspired, so aglow with thought and feeling, that all my heart loved him, and I saw him through tears.
Anna Strunsky
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