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Title: The Expropriator
Author: Renzo Novatore
Date: November 26th, 1919
Language: en
Topics: Abele Ferrari, expropriation, individualist
Source: Renzo, Novatore (1919). The Expropriator. Iconoclasta!, aI, 1s, 10.
Notes: L’Iconoclasta was from Pistoia, Italy. Translated in 2009 by Luther Blissett [copyleft]

Renzo Novatore

The Expropriator

My freedom and my rights

As much as my capacity of power

Even the felicity and greatness

I have only in the measure of my strength!

(From a book I have written that will never see the light)

The expropriator is the most beautiful figure, male, unscrupulous, and

virile that I have ever found in anarchism. He is the one who has nought

to attend to. He is the one who has no altar on which to sacrifice

himself. He glorifies only Life with the philosophy of Action. I met him

in a distant midday in August while the sun embroidered in gold the

giant green nature, perfumed and festive, singing playful songs of pagan

beauty.

He said, “I was always a restless spirit, vagabond and rebellious. I

have studied people and their souls in books and in reality. I have

found a mixture of comedian, of plebeian, of villain. I was nauseated.

From one part the sinister moral phantoms, created by the lies and by

the hypocrisy that dominate. From the other part the sacrificial beasts

that adore with fanaticism and cowardice. This is the world of men. This

is humanity. To this world, for these men and this humanity, I feel

repugnance.

Plebeian and bourgeois are equivalent. They deserve each other.

Socialism is not of this opinion. He had made the discovery of good and

evil. And to destroy these two antagonisms he created another two

phantoms: Equality and Fraternity among men...

“But people will be equal before the state and free in Socialism ... He

— socialism — Has denied the Force, the Youth, the War! But when the

bourgeoisie, who are the peasants of the spirit, don’t will to be the

same as plebeians, who are peasants of the flesh, then socialism admits,

whining, war. Yes, even socialism admits homicide and expropriation. But

in the name of an ideal of equality and of human brotherhood... Of that

holy equality and brotherhood that commenced from Cain & Abel!...

“But with Socialism you think to half; you are half free; you are half

alive!... Socialism is intolerance, is impotence of living, is the faith

of fear. I’m going beyond!

“The Socialists have found good the equality, and bad the inequality.

Good the servants and bad the tyrants. I crossed the threshold of good

and evil in order to live my life intensely. I live today and can not

await tomorrow. The wait is of peoples and of humanity, so could not be

my affair. The future is the mask of fear. The courage and strength have

no future for the simple fact that they themselves are the future that

revolts on the past and destroys it.

“The purity of life proceeds only with the nobility of courage that is

the philosophy of action.”

I observed: “The purity of this your life seems to me to border on

crime!”

He said: “Crime is the supreme synthesis of liberty and life. The world

is the moral world of phantoms. There are spectres and shadows of

spectres, there is the Ideal, Universal Love, the Future. Here is the

shadow of the spectre: here is ignorance, fear, cowardice. Deep

darkness. Perhaps eternal darkness. Even I had lived, one day, in that

bleak and lurid prison.

Then I was armed with a sacrilegious torch to ignite the ghosts and

violate the night. When I arrived at the rusty gates of good and evil I

have I have furiously toppled them I have crossed the threshold. The

bourgeoisie I have thrown his moral anathema and plebeian idiot his

moral curse.

“But the one and the other are humanity. I am a man. Humanity is my

enemy. It wants to tighten me around its thousand horrendous tentacles.

I try to tear from it all which my desires need. We are at war!

Everything I have the force to wrest is mine.

And all that which is mine I sacrifice upon the altar of my freedom and

my life.

Of this my life that I feel palpitate among the palpitating flames I

burst in the heart; Among this savage torture of all my being that I

inflate the soul of divine storms, and that makes me echo in the spirit

of thunderous fanfare of war and polyphonic symphonies of a superior

love, strange and unknown, that I (empie[1]) the veins of a blood lush

and vigorous, that spreads in all the wrapping of my muscles, of my

nerves and of my flesh, quivering diabolically with rejoicing expansion;

of this my life of which I glimpse through the vision crowd of my

fantastic dreams, eager and needful of of perennial development.

My motto is: walk expropriating and igniting, always leaving behind me

howls of moral offenses and smoking trunks of old things.

When men possess no more ethical wealth truly unique real inviolable

treasures then I will throw out my lock-picks. When in the world there

will be no more phantoms, then I will throw out my torch. But this

future is distant and might never be! And I am a son of this distant

future, sealed in lead on this world by Chance to where I bow to power.”

So said to me the Expropriator in that distant midday in August while

the sun embroidered in gold the giant green nature, fragrant and

festive, singing songs of joyful pagan beauty.

[1] empie — to make impious.