War – E. Reclus (1898)

_{Charge of Ndebele Warriors in the Matoppo Hills of South Africa during the Second Matabele War}

From ‘Freedom: A Journal of Anarchist Communism”, May 1898, London, UK

War is upon us; terrible war with its atrocities and unspeakable stupidity draws near. We hear its distant echo. Each one of us has friends or relations calling themselves heroes because they massacre Matabeles or Malagays, Dervishes or Dacoits, inhabitants of the Philippine Isles or Cuba, colored men: whites or blacks.

But danger breaks forth around us, it already presses on us. The Spaniards, our neighbours, and civilised English-speaking men — North Americans rush on one another with cries of hatred, coarse words and deadly weapons. An explosion of hatred and fury precedes the cannon’s roar and the bombardment of cities. The American government appeals to Edison‘s genius, to the science of all inventors in order that they discover new wonders in the art of exterminating their fellow creatures.

Yet our engineers are skillful and may be congratulated on the success of their words of death. For a devil who dreams of universal destruction, it must be a fine sight to see a volley suddenly transform a whole battalion of able-bodied young men into a quivering mass of flesh torn by dum-dum bullets! It must also be a refined pleasure for an enemy of mankind to know that the mere contact of two wires produces a shock like a thunderbolt and blows a whole district of a town, with stones, bricks, brains and limbs mixed up, into space. But this does not suffice them. What all these warlike people want now is to cause the total destruction of man and of his works in an immense space, it is to outdo the blind power of nature by the conscient ferocity of man. They must surpass earthquakes and hurricanes, destroy not only haphazard but by an infallible method.

“No false sentimentality!” they say to us. “War is war! ” Well then, so be it. It is because war brings all these terrible consequences in its train that it behooves us to grasp it in its origin and to stop all manifestations from the beginning. A viper must be crushed in the egg. What is there astonishing in war breaking out when the whole of society, as constitutions and institutions have created it, rests on hostile interests and that a rumbling struggle rages in the depths? Pent up hatred must burst forth from time to time, and we should show bad grace in complaining if we ourselves contributed to augment this hatred, or if inert and cowardly before violence and injustice were [to] complacently let it accumulate day by day!

It would therefore be trouble thrown away to cry out against Spain and the United States. When the masses are lashed into an unreasoning fury it is useless to add your voice to the uproar. It is vanity to preach morality to men drunk with alcohol or blood. What is the use of telling them they are exploitable material for spirit merchants, for monopolizers of corn, spirits and petroleum?

But we who are not made drunk by war, are we not guilty ? Have we protested with all our energy, have we rebelled against initial abominations that lead to war, do we always make a stand against injustice, even if it is committed by our countrymen? Now, these social crimes press on us, encompass us on all sides. Here in the British Isles we have the horrors of the workhouse and of the tread-mill, the great prison of Ireland, and our rich folk live on the spoils of half the world.

In France, we have committed the crime of our colonial conquests, the shame of our magistracy ready for anything, the incubus of our army, organised against the people, with its staff brought up in the school of Jesuitism, with its officers that sentence privates guilty of a gesture to death or to the horrors of Biribi [military prisons in French colonial North Africa], while they adulate traitors of high degree.

And the Italian Government? We let them shoot down starvelings, and put those who ask for bread for the poor into prison. As to Spanish ministers, who now drive their people to butchery, they profit by excitement and disturbances, and forget to liberate the men they have tortured.

And yonder, on the other side of the Atlantic, American judges (of whom the public lazily becomes the accomplice) acquit an employer who has caused workmen to be massacred by the score!

Do not let us forget these atrocities. May war, with its terrible upheavals not let us lose sight of social injustice, that monstrous inequality among men which is the primary cause of all strife.

E. Reclus

[The text in ‘Freedom’ is signed only as by E. Reclus, making no distinction between the brothers Élisée and Élie]