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Title: The War Author: Errico Malatesta Language: en Topics: anti-war, War Source: retrieved from "The Complete Works of Errico Malatesta," Vol. III — Ed. Davide Turcato Notes: Translated by Paul Sharkey from “La guerra,” L’Agitatore Socialista Anarchico (April 25, 1897), single issue, replacement for no. 7 of L’Agitazione.
War has broken out.[1] The European powers, which, it seems, were out to
exorcise it and in order to do so had ridden roughshod over any sense of
humanity, letting 200 thousand Armenian throats be cut with impunity
here, and the Cretan rebels be machine-gunned there for the benefit of
the “grand assassin” in Constantinople, have proved powerless to fend
off conflict—just as they will be powerless to remedy it and find a
solution to the Eastern question that satisfies the peoples and
guarantees peace.
Maybe these great peace-makers will prove incapable of doing more than
brawling among themselves, swamping Europe with outrages and mourning.
Here we have political bankruptcy, hot on the heels of the economic
bankruptcy of the bourgeois system.
And after that the bourgeois will still claim to be the enlightened
class and to have an entitlement to lead society! They have organized a
massive system of production and trade and have presided over a state of
affairs in which hunger has become endemic and where machinery, the
instrument of production, enslaves and kills the producer! They have
organized a complicated political system that was to have guaranteed
peace if not freedom, and they find themselves obliged, because of their
fear of war, to squander the better part of national wealth on
armaments, only to end up with a disastrous war all the same—one that is
going to leave in its wake the very same uncertainties and dangers as
before! But they will carry on regardless, with easy consciences,
revelling in the people’s sweat and blood… until such time as the people
rectify the matter.
Meanwhile human blood is being spilled in Thessaly and Epirus in a
ferocious struggle in which the blind religious and political fanaticism
of one side is matched by the no less blind patriotic fanaticism of the
other.
What are the likely results of this contest?
In what is left of the Turkish Empire, solutions modelled on the
European political system are less acceptable than elsewhere. The
nationality principle cannot provide the basis for the formation of
territorial States since the most diverse nationalities over there are
intermingled in the same territories. The only solution that would not
bequeath a permanent state of violence and oppression would be one based
upon the broadest freedom for every ethnic and religious group. There,
anarchist organization, that is, organization from the ground up by
means of free federation, would not only be an ideal of superior social
life but a pressing necessity imposed by circumstances. But we can be
sure that this is a solution that none of the powers upon whom the
course of events depends would be willing to even discuss.
And since real freedom is out of the question, frankly, we are not sure
what to wish for. Out of peace or war in Europe, out of the extended
lifespan of the Turkish Empire or out of its disintegration, out of the
expansion of the Russian Empire or out of its decline, circumstances and
events may come that serve or disserve the cause of the proletariat and
that we can neither predict nor direct.
The fact is that the whole of politics today is dominated by dynastic
and class selfishness, and thus everything redounds to the disadvantage
of the proletariat: good cannot come other than from some involuntary
and fortuitous conjunction of circumstances or from conscious resistance
by the proletariat itself.
The only thing we can do, the only thing we should do is awaken the
consciousness of the proletariat and do our bit to see to it that it is
ready to profit from the events, whatever they may be.
[1] Even though fighting had already broken out, the formal declaration
of war was not issued by the Ottoman Empire until April 18, 1897.
(Turcato's note)