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Title: Scandal Author: Joseph DĂ©jacque Date: Friday, December 21, 2012 Language: en Topics: anarcho-communist, strategy Source: Retrieved on May 11th, 2014 from http://libertarian-labyrinth.blogspot.co.at/2012/12/the-scandalous-joseph-dejacque.html Notes: Essay from Le Libertaire No. 4 (August 2, 1858)
We live in an era of decadence. The world is peopled only with walking
corpses. Everything that moves, moves slowly. A sovereign indolence
weighs on nations and individuals alike. However, looking deeply into
this human charnel house, we glimpse the subterranean life that stirs,
swarms and sometimes ventures to the surface. Our century is a century
of transition; under its visible inertia an immense transformation is
taking place. This is not yet the complete death of the old social
order, but it is already the beginning of the new. The operation,
although it is latent, is nonetheless real. Government, property,
family, religion, everything that makes up the organism of the civilized
societies breaks down and begins to rot. There are no more morals; the
morals of the past no longer have any sap; those of the future are still
only a sprout. What is good for the one, is evil for the other. Justice
has no criterion other than force; success legitimates all crimes. Mind
and body are prostituted in the commerce of mercantile interests.
Pleasures are no longer possible, if they are not the pleasures of the
brute. Dignity, friendship, and love are banished from our mores, lie
separated from one another, or perish, strangled, as soon as they want
to dawn across this officially bourgeois society. There is no more grace
or beauty in this world, no naĂŻve smile or delicate kiss. The feeling
for art is replaced by the taste for the disgusting and grotesque.
Society, in its decrepitude, resorts to bloody flagellations to
over-stimulate its old carcass and sometimes still give itself some
dreadful semblance of virility. Atony and gangrene have blunted all its
capacities for labor, as well as for pleasure. It can no longer enjoy
anything. For it, work is a punishment and pleasure a labor. It does not
know what it wants or what it does not want. Everything weighs on it; it
stumbles and sinks in all sorts of depravity and cowardice. It wants to
escape from that horrible nightmare, to shake off the burden of
degradation that suffocates it; it looks forward to waking up; it knows
that it only has to stand up on its feet to destroy that oppression, and
it is so drained that it does not have the strength to rise, or the
courage to conquer its numbness. And yet the idea ferments in it, and
enlightens it internally in its sleep, until it is powerful enough to
make it open its eyes and shine from its pupils. One side of its life,
its robe of flesh, is left in the sepulcher of the past; the other side,
its mind or spirit, floats on the winds of the future.
It is up to us, revolutionaries, tatters of humanity whom the breath of
progress lifts, social rags that the light of understanding colors with
its purple fires, and that it displays above the Civilized like a
scarecrow or a flag,—a scarecrow for those who want to remain
stationary, and a flag for those who want to press forward,–it is up to
us to stimulate the work of decomposition, up to us to try to indicate
the stone that holds Humanity in immobility, up to us to open the paths
of universal regeneration.
Two manners of acting present themselves to those who want to become
propagators of new ideas. One is calm, scientific discussion, without
renouncing anything of principles, to report them, and comment on them
with a fine courtesy and firm restraint. This process consists of
injecting truth drop by drop into minds that are already prepared, elite
intelligences, still beset by error, but animated by good will.
Missionaries of Liberty, preachers with smiling faces and caressing
voices, (but not hypocrites,) with the honey of their words they pour
conviction into the hearts of those who listen to them; they initiate
into the knowledge of truth those who have a feeling for it. The other
is bitter argument, although scientific as well, but which, standing
firm in the principles as in a coat of mail, arms itself with Scandal as
with an axe, to strike redoubled blows on the skulls of the prejudiced,
and force them to move under their thick covering. For those, there are
no words blistering enough, no expressions cutting enough to shatter all
these ignorances of hardened steel, that that dark and weighty armor
that blinds and deafens the dull masses of the people. All is good to
them–the sharp sting and the boiling oil—in order to make these
apathetic minds tremble to their heart of hearts, under their tortoise
shells, and to make resonate, by tearing at them, these fibers which do
not ring out. Aggressive circulators, wandering damned and damnators,
they march, bloodthirsty and bleeding, sarcasm on the lips, the idea
before them, torch in the hand, across hatreds and hisses, to the
accomplishment of their fateful task; they convert as the spirit of hell
converts: by bite and fire.
The two approaches are good and useful, depending on the sorts of
listeners we encounter along our way. Some require one, and some require
the other. For both, it is a matter of temperament, a question of their
condition in the current society. They can even be alternately applied,
according to the disposition of the mind or the environment in which we
find ourselves. Both, if they do not back down from the principles, if
they cling firmly to liberty, are agents provocateurs [in the sense of
inciting agents] of the Revolution. However, in our civilized societies,
it is the smallest number who are disposed to listen. The greatest
number turn a deaf ear, and it is by Scandal that one pierces the
eardrum.
How, anyway, not to employ words forged with the tongue of scorn to
penetrate into this manure of the world where strut, like some like some
poisonous mushrooms, the round, flat faces of the ignominious
bourgeoisie. Can one employ anything but the teeth of a pitchfork to
speak to these vegetations of legal matters? Does all of that feel? Does
all of that think? Can a man with a heart live in such a society? Is he
called to live only to drag along his days among that filthy rabble? Is
it my fault, it is our fault, who have in our heart the poetry of the
future, if nature has given us some disposition to love, an intelligence
of the good, enthusiasm for the beautiful, and if we encounter at every
step only intellectual and moral deformities? Is it our fault if in such
a society we only find hate to dispense, if there we can only revel in
disgust?
O Scandal! Vengeful fury, be my companion as long as the world remains
the old world, as long as bourgeois obesity and obscenity ripen on the
velour of exploitation, as long as servility and idiocy of the workers
will grovel in the rut and under the halter of capital!
Yes, there must be some like me, like us–the cursed, the rebels–to march
unbending–in the direction of progress, to move the inert blocks, to
face the avalanches of stones and smooth the way for those who have the
same goal, but who make the propaganda in less irritating forms, who
engage in polemics with more peaceful epithets.
Scandal, avenging fury, to you my pen and my lips!
It is through you that shame enters the hearts of men. It is through you
that their minds awaken to enlightenment. It is through you that the
wicked tremble, and through you that the good hope.
If there is still, or rather if there is already some modesty in the
world, Scandal, avenging fury, great redresser of morals, it is to you
that it is owed.
It is you that forces enemies of the new idea to serve this idea by
criticizing it. All who speak of socialism, for good or evil, spread
socialism by spreading its name. Sooner or later truth emerges from
untruth, it gets the better of its detractors in the long run. Only
silence is harmful, and it is you, Scandal, who imposes speech on the
mute and, whether they like it or not, forces them to make themselves
heralds of that which they persecute.
Scandal, anarchic authority, you are more powerful than all the
authorities of the official world. The kings and the bourgeois, the
emperors and their subjects can only put the gag of death on the mouths
of men; you, voice strident, fiber electric, you make even the stones
speak!
O Scandal! Great educator of the deaf and mute, revolutionary breath,
satanic deity, spread your wings and vibrate over the world; bring forth
the idea from all these skulls of granite, like the sibylline sounds
from the depths of the grottos.
Scandal, you are the organ that makes the Civilized bow down their heads
in their shame, and that their thought raises up the spheres of future
harmony.
Bellow and rumble still, provocative storm. Your thunder-bursts are a
salutary anthem.
My pen and my lips are yours, Scandal!