From ‘Why?: Accursed Be Man Who Silenced Child’s First Inquiry For He Laid Foundation Of All Tyrannies’, Tacoma, Wash., February 1913, published by Mrs. Frances Moore
Uncle Sam, through its immigration department, is giving vent to a long-standing grudge against Cipriano Castro, and if he succeeds in brushing aside all legal impediments, he will have the ex-president of Venezuela deported as an undesirable citizen. Castro, it will be remembered, defied European and American governments, who with their bully-like attitude, claimed for the capitalists of their respective countries the ownership of various mining industries. This imposition was resented so strongly, that Cipriano started a sort of a diplomatic rough-house that eventually culminated in a war-like demonstration by the powers, and to avoid the possible gobbling up of the coveted territory, he finally consented to resign.
The press, as usual, in dealing with this incident, strives to belittle and cast ridicule upon Venezuela and the sympathetic nature of her sons in order to magnify and extol the merit that we ought to possess ourselves. Having resided in that beautiful country for a short while, we can assure our readers that for a poor devil it has many decided advantages over us. Happy, contented, hospitable, the humble Venezuelan is a king beside our sweating, toiling men, women and children, urged to age and decrepitude by the resist-less forces of industrialism and the haunting spectres of hunger and poverty.
While we have become blue and bilious with the greed and vulgarity of the times, her kindly people still cherish the primitive virtues of hospitality and brotherhood, their object in life is not death and accumulation. Climate and environing conditions have united to preserve the freshness and virility in her people. Industrialism and commercialism, the twin curses of our civilization, are practically unknown, her sons depending on her fields and forests, her pastures and her wines for the measure of prosperity she enjoys. Fruit and flowers are everywhere; a fertile soil yields bountiful harvest under moderate work; a bland and balmy climate makes hard and unremitting toil a folly. Cold and hunger, the potent allies of plutocracy, are unknown.
Gaunt, red mills, whose wheels grind out at once pauperism and plethora, are fortunately few, and the hard conditions of our industrial civilization, are happily absent from their land. The dreadful, future rainy day is never in the eye of the Venezuelan living in the land of plenty; and hence the thrift, selfishness and utter disregard for the neighbor’s rights are not conspicuous on the shores of the Caribbean. The hurry and rush of our life, that leaves so many nerveless wrecks at forty are absent from their free and careless life; these curses add neither balm nor beauty to human kind.
The Spanish-American is a philosopher; music and art mean much more to him than to us; he is imaginative, and poesy appeals to him. Freedom to him is an ideal thing, a bird on the wing; with us it is a caged canary, safely lucked up to be looked at. We make a fetish of law and order; the Venezuelan does not care to be misgoverned, insulted, and robbed under forms of law. While we bear legal outrage and law-made annoyance with the patient endurance of an ass, the Venezuelan draws his sword and destroys both the bad law and the evil law-maker with one blow. Hence the ease with which he enters upon war and revolution. When he learns like us to love dollars better than ideals, order more than freedom, law more than justice, mammon more than man, chaff more than wheat, he may attain our higher civilization. Meantime we have a sneaking regard for his ways.
Also
The Alien Enemies Act: Annotated, by Liz Tracey (2025/1798)
Viewpoint of People Living on Puyallup River, by Ramona Bennett (1970)
Man’s Liberation, by Marcus Graham (1925)
The Mexican Comrades at McNeils, by Why? (1913)
1902–1903 European Blockade of Venezuela, from Wikipedia
The Chinese Are Our Brothers, by James F. Morton, Jr. (1902)
The Incomparable Anarchist Frankie Moore, by Transmetropolitan Review (note with caution that Transmetropolitan Review has less than zero concern for historical accuracy and peddles their own fantasies as reality, for personal gain. -Ed.)
The War Spirit, by Lizzie M. Holmes (1898)
Anarchists on National Liberation
