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Title: Spain
Author: Ricardo Mella
Date: 1897
Language: en
Topics: Spain, Libertarian Labyrinth
Source: Retrieved on 25th April 2021 from https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/working-translations/ricardo-mella-spain-1897/
Notes: Source: Ricardo Mella, “Espagne,” Les Temps Nouveau 2 no. 51 (April 23, 1897): 3. Working translation by Shawn P. Wilbur.

Ricardo Mella

Spain

Time passes and, far from improving, the situation in Spain grows worse

and worse. The colonial wars go badly and the hope of a swift

pacification is abandoned. The exceptional state of Barcelona has not

changed; the hundreds of wretches arbitrarily detained in the prisons

and at Montjuich only await a bit of belated justice to set them free or

else to consummate that legal crime that, taking the lives of some, will

cast the others forever into the penal institutions that the mother

country reserves for the best of her children.

Today, as yesterday, some ignorant proletarians march like docile sheep

to the slaughter where Weiler, Polavieja and their ilk work wonderfully

as executioners well paid by the reaction and the clergy.

Today, as yesterday, the inquisitorial tortures, protected by the

silence of the stupefied masses, continue their triumphant career;

nothing has changed.

However, thanks to the persistence of such a state of things, some

disastrous effects arise. Catalonia, industrial region par excellence,

see the most important of its factories close and thousands of workers

are thus plunged into the most terrible poverty. Galicia, Asturias and

the ancient kingdom of Léon have rapidly become depopulated, their

inhabitants invading the liners bound for American and in a short time

the effect of the closing of the factories and of the emigration will be

felt by all of Spain, which will be devastated by the scourge of famine.

From Cuba and Philippines also come the echoes of the poverty that

invades everywhere. In the colonies and the metropolis alike, life seems

to flee and alone are heard the cries of suffering of those dying of

hunger and the lamentations of those who cry for dear one sacrificed to

a cause that matters very little to them.

We must add to all that that the mass killings and nameless cruelties

inspired by the clerical reaction and executed by the military have

produced a tension of mind so that one would have to be very blind not

to see the cataclysm approaching, coming to put a violent end to the

infamies and the massacres of the restored monarchy.

The Carlist agitation is a proof of what we claim:—as always, while the

dawn of the Revolution appeared on the horizon, the gangs of Carlos VII

prepare to take the field. Some armed groups have already appeared in

Spain, but the reader must not believe that these individuals have been

foully murdered like the republicans of Novelda. The reactionaries are

wolves of the same litter; Carlists and conservatives do not consume one

another.

The past civil war was fomented as much by the Carlists as by the

monarchists who are our masters today, and when it did not suit either

to continue it, peace was made. Today, faced with the danger, the

conservatives and liberals of the restored monarchy, guided in this by a

very natural instinct of self-preservation, will aid, as in the past,

the partisans of absolutism.

Clericalism has taken possession of the institutions; the armies are

commanded by generals belonging to the moinocratie [government of the

monks] and the war minister is a Jesuit.

Over all that the wave advances. The insurrections de Cuba et des

Philippines crowning the edifice, the Carlists on the march; the

Biscayan and Catalan separatists on the alert; the republicans

dethroning their leaders, impatient to hurl themselves into the

revolutionary struggle that these leader block; the workers chased from

the factories, promenading their misery in the streets; the Andalusian

peasants pillaging the bakeries and the warehouses of wheat; the

militant workers of socialism rotting in the prisons and, in an imminent

future, murder consummated and hundreds of workers sent to the penal

colony or deported.

Forward! There are still many men disposed to fight. If the reaction

prepares, it is because it senses that the Revolution comes to give

battle.

Anarchic socialism and the revolutionary spirit still survive in Spain;

they will do their work and the solidarity of the other nations will not

fail us.

Persecuted, imprisoned, deported, we will continue to work for the

approaching Revolution.