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Title: Articles from “Machete” #2 Author: Various Authors Date: 2008 Language: en Topics: anti-voting, Europe, history, Islam, racism, religion Source: Personal communication with the translator
“At the crossroads in Rome, there were pots and bowls to allow passersby
to piss.”
In those days, Chigalev told his followers: “One man in a thousand
enjoys an absolute freedom and exercises boundless authority over the
other nine hundred and ninety-nine. The others have to give up all
individuality, become a herd and through total submission, by means of a
series of regenerations, reach a state of primitive innocence, something
like Eden, even though they will still all have to work.”
In our day, the vote is in real danger of becoming mandatory. Along
public buildings, we are ordered to vote for Dick because Dick is Harry
and Harry is Dick. Yesterday evening, Sunday, in a certain place in the
capital, near an old church, in a place where school didn’t last long
enough to spread the idiocy of candidates, panels in the shape of
Chinese screens were made available. In the darkness, this formed a
toothed fortress. On this fine spring night, lovers occupied the polling
stations and a vagrant snored by his litre of red wine.
In the city of Sravasti, the Buddha entered the house of a certain
Sudatta, an extremely poor man. The man wasn’t there. There was a white
dog on the divan who ate off a plate. On seeing the Buddha, the dog lept
to the ground and viciously barked at him.
The Buddha told him, “Silence, you skinflint!”
The dog went to lie down in a corner, all trembling, as if he had been
beaten.
When Sudatta got back and saw his dog in such a sad state, he asked who
had reduced him to this condition. The residents of the house answered:
“The Buddha, treating him like a skinflint.”
Enraged, Sudatta went to demand an explanation from the Buddha.
“First of all, why did you treat him like a skinflint?”
“I merely spoke the truth. That animal is your deceased father. Born as
a dog in his new life as punishment for his avarice, he continues to
keep an eye on his goods. Force him to show you the treasure he has
hidden from everyone, even you.”
Sudatta returned home and scolded the dog.
“Since you were my father in your previous existence, everything that
belonged to you now belongs to me. Let’s go, show me the treasure that
you kept hidden from me.”
The dog slid under the divan and began to scratch the ground. Sudatta
began digging at the spot and brought out a great treasure.
Putting his trust now in the Buddha, he asked him to teach him about
actions and sanctions. And, among other things, the Buddha told him:
“What happens to everyone is inevitably what he chooses. Will causes
action, but action causes sanction, against which willing is no use.
“Poverty is the punishment of the rich.
“The dog’s life is the punishment of the rich who think of nothing but
being rich.
“Respect your dog of a father. Otherwise, in a future life, you will be
dog food.”
[Armand Robin]
On the Internet in the spring of 2000, the first disinformation campaign
aimed at giving credence to the idea of religious racism in Europe was
developed. It made a strong contribution to the about-face of some left
and ultra-left militants. These militants didn’t hesitate in renouncing
a project, a thought and a language rooted in three centuries of
revolutionary battle. The refusal of their history in the name of
anti-colonialism is only explained by the abandonment of the
anti-clerical universalism of this history. They no longer defend a
cause with conviction as masters of their choice, but rather defend the
cause that others have chosen for them. Why should they raise doubts, in
an unusual manner, about the reasons for their solidarity? Has this
world truly changed? Aren’t the forms of domination the same everywhere?
Hasn’t capitalism been a pure, unchanging negativity for some time now?
Mincing in their certitudes, they judge their moral rectitude to be
incontestable. Like in the Victorian era, they have their poor, and they
have found the truly guilty once and for all. They even judge those
whose critiques don’t spare the social, cultural and religious practices
of the victims that these militants claim to defend unfailingly to be
suspect or reactionary. How could they admit that their systematic
support facilitates the very specific interests of certain victims who
aspire to become new masters? In the final analysis, what must be
understood is the way that the language of these militants has been
falsified to the point where they confuse the anti-clerical and the
religious; why, for example, have they been born along from support of
the Palestinian cause to defense of Muslim associations, going from the
denunciation of racist aggression and police violence in urban ghettoes
to the denunciation of anti-muslim racism?
In the name of an “ethnic redefinition of culture”, relativism has
become a conceptual jumble that allows any question of the integralist
tendency of religion or any specific critique of the fate reserved for
women in the urban ghettos, to be described as racist. In an upside-down
world, the critique of religion is no longer a prelude to every
critique; it is downright hostile to it. The effects of such a
theoretical shift can be measured by the wretched reflections of a
leftist, post-feminist writer: “When the economic level is right and
social mixture is assured, no threat — real or imagined — comes to bear;
religions are respected and assume the most inoffensive form, coming
back by themselves to the doghouse.” It isn’t easy to specify which is
the most dismaying aspect of such a statement: the bad faith, the idiocy
or the flagrant absence of historical memory. In this so very natural
way of hastily repeating the worst counter-truths, one recognizes the
effectiveness of those who have all the time in the world to think them
up and spread them. Seeing the excellence of the result, one might fear
that, from now on, religious integralism[1] has all the means for
transforming society, on the basis of its advantage. Analyzing religion
in terms of cultural relativism and a post-modern ideology of diversity
denying that the natural tendency of every religion is integralism
renders religion and its foreseeable consequences unassailable.
The struggle for freedom has always been carried out against religion,
against its self-evident desire to control society and impose its ways
and customs with violence. In Europe, it was through merciless struggle
that religion was put aside in the sphere of private life; that the
freedom of blasphemy was able to prefigure the refusal of any
censorship; that the opposition to the religious fetish preceded the
attack against commodity fetishism. The democratic simulacrum that is
the supposed improvement of the standard of living doesn’t get rid of
the religious question at all, and the example of the United States
provides evidence of this every day. So-called “secular society” has no
reason to renegotiate the separation that it has imposed between church
and state, nor to dialogue with religions in the name of religion.
Defending the excluded by identifying ourselves in a centrally
totalitarian religion is subjecting society to an attack with fatal
consequences: its dissolution.
In the name of the right to difference, of parity between all cultures,
all critique of religion gets transformed into a racist crime. It has
gone so far as to equate the refusal of the Islamic veil to xenophobia
or colonial nostalgia., not to the critique of a religion that oppresses
women. One can measure the expected effects by the surprising
declarations of some post-feminists for whom “the ease with which
European women make love from the first encounter can attack women of
other cultures for whom the gift of their body is a spiritual and
irreversible experience.” This sudden cultural tolerance in fact implies
a cultural vassalage and a condemnation for the fault of sexual freedom
that would thus no longer be a universal conquest. It teaches us about a
certain basic ambiguity regarding the religious question. The
depreciation of atheist positions prepares the terrain for a
high-pressure return to moral values, through an opportune media
overkill.
When blasphemy takes on the pope, it is thought of as an “obsolete
practice”, whereas when it attacks the prophet of Islam , it becomes
colonial aggression. Here we see how, through a sort of “deconstruction
of discourse”, north African and black African immigrants, including
youths and new-born babies, get reduced to their mere religious origins.
It is necessary to convince them that their history and their culture
are summed up in the passive role as victim of the colonial European
past. In this way, they are bullied into becoming one of the faithful
and submitting to a Muslim nation that doesn’t exist anywhere, but that
imposes its freedom-killing project everywhere. Their only “positive”
existence passes through religion. They are kept away from any
anti-Islamic culture[2] within the Islamic world, since recognizing the
existence of such a thing would imply that Europe didn’t have a monopoly
on Enlightenment.
For the defenders of political Islam, the attack carried out against
Houelleberq’s novel, Platform (he is reproached because one of his
characters describes Islam as the stupidest religion in the world) has
been the beginning of a campaign that is always in its preliminary
stages, aimed mainly at transforming the freedom of blasphemy into a
racial crime and preparing public opinion for a new surprise attack. As
the signal of an early victory, the media would speak from that time on
of anti-Moslem racism. The Houellebecq trial was followed by the affair
of the Danish cartoons, coming in to remind the most skeptical of what
is really at stake in this semantic war. The other monotheistic
religions have clearly understood where their interests lie and have
aligned themselves with the Moslems.
In less cowardly times, Luis Buñuel filmed a Christ who survived a
bloody orgy of 120 days and the execution of a pope; Benjamin Peret spit
on priests; Spanish acratics[3] distributed a flyer in the midst of the
church and throughout Franco’s dictatorship that proclaimed: Christ is
in the shit!
Like Salman Rushdie, Taslim Nasreen rightly observes that the
condemnation of religious ideology restores to the men and women that
this ideology alienates their status, no longer as believers, but as
human beings. Defending this point of view today means risking a fatwa,
as in other times it meant the Inquisition’s executioners. In a world
where people speak more and more commonly about the Christian West,
where politicians lay claim to secularity to preserve, if not strengthen
, the privileges of Christianity, the humanitarian and revolutionary
message can still be heard in the clear identification of its two
enemies: capitalism and religion (two forms of the same fetish?) Can one
still assert the struggle of those who still consider atheistic thought
as one of the forms of the battle for liberation; who hope that the cult
of man replaces that of heaven; who curse the cassock because it teaches
submission, maintains superstition and favors exploitation? Yes, the
histories of Islam and of Christianity are made of cruel and misogynist
practices; and yes, the fight against religion is a fight for freedom
and not the expression of a colonialist desire to impose the model of
the white man everywhere.
The last few generations have underestimated the return of the
religious. In their opinion, from the beginning of the 20^(th) century,
the religious question was obsolete and its critique, having become
out-dated, served no purpose. Not only was the Islamic influence
underestimated, but people often felt a sense of guilt that they could
not cast off or understand where it came from. This blindness resembles
that of the “moral” left. To avoid making the repressive play of the
right and being accused of xenophobia, i.e., racism, one adopts a
position of principle favorable to immigrants and urban youth by
refusing to analyze the religious subordination of many of them. While
violence against immigrant is inexcusable, this does not at all justify
the humiliating religious vassalage of women that is far too often
present in their lives.
The “moral” left can be recognized by its lack of historical culture.
What it confronts always seems new. It is convinced that the presence of
believers in leftist and ultra-leftist organizations is a recent
phenomenon, specifically linked to the development of Islam in France. A
superficial study of the organizational practices of proletarian
movement of the second half of the 19^(th) century prove otherwise.
In Spain, the militants of the founding cells of the International
Workers’ Association had to convince and organize workers and peasants
whose daily life was blindly submitted to the dogmas of the violently
reactionary Catholic church. These militants, noting that religious
obscurantism was universal, radically cut to the heart of the problem by
prohibiting any religious manifestations in the proletarian
organizations and transforming this ban into a daily critique of
religious alienation in social life and state organizations.
Their developmental strategy was ruled by a cultural and educational
practice that, alone, might liberate the people from superstition.
It’s difficult to imagine militants of the AIT participating in meetings
where militants of Islamic organizations could defend Koranic dogma. It
is difficult to imagine them presenting petitions and preparing actions
together with religious associations that exclude women from social and
political life. They would never put up with the lie, which has gone on
too long, that there is such a thing as anti-islamic racism. In their
day they would have responded in the way that we can respond today:
there is such a thing as anti-Arab racism that needs to be fought, but
there is no anti-Muslim racism. Islam is an ideology, and must be fought
as an ideology, in the same way as capitalism, Nazism, Hinduism,
Catholicism. What we have conquered through hard struggle cannot be
compromised by making peace with any cult.
Of course, man invented God so that someone greater than him could
defend his misery. God is the dialectical antithesis of human
imperfections. Ideal entities serve as compensations for misery. Thus,
the qualities given to gods describe through contradiction the defects
and sordidness of those who create the gods.
The absolute is the sum of compensations for human misery. To create
such a perfect notion, man had to renounce his own miserable content.
The absolute is potent because it is perfectly empty. This
characteristic is what allows it to represent the ultimate truth.
Nothing can be demonstrated through the absolute: the absolute is
precisely the highest truth which cannot by demonstrated. Only the
details, the pauses, can be demonstrated. But the impossibility of
testing the absolute is what makes it unassailable. It is impossible to
budge a lie that has no object and so cannot be related to anything. The
lie can only be effectively seen if an object that is easily grasped at
a glance doesn’t seem to fit, in other words, in cases that don’t
matter. The lie that is limited by an object that may be tested, but
never the artifice of a construction, because this excludes the object.
And so works of art cannot be demonstrated, because, like the absolute,
they are separate from the object.
The absolute is the greatest expenditure of energy that man makes. He
then tries to recover this lost energy through prayer, where we can see
that man doesn’t sustain his energy, since he is forced to separate it
from himself to maintain balance. In addition, man first of all fears
himself and his creations, imaginary entities that he has separated from
himself. This is why he does all that he can to forget his dreams since
he fears his wandering mind. I believe that man is less afraid when
facing the universe than when facing himself, because he doesn’t know
the world, just one tiny corner.
The absolute has been man’s greatest endeavor, thanks to which he has
gone beyond the mythological stage. But at the same time, it has been
his greatest defeat, because he invented something greater than himself.
He created his own servitude. This absolute is identical to the void and
to that which has no object. That is how man dies through the absolute,
which is at the same time his means of freedom. Man murders himself,
killed by his own fetishes, which exist more or less in the absolute.
It seems that philosophy is the degeneration of the mythological state.
In fact, in the philosophical epoch the absolute is weakened so much
that it needs to be demonstrated. When something is so weak that, after
having accepted it without thinking, we still have to prove it, it is
defined as a fact of science or knowledge.
In the beginning, absolute gods were the ancestors of rulers who deified
themselves in order to increase servitude and fear. The neutral
absolute, like money, is a tool of power: both can be changed into
anything since they have no precise qualities. The absolute belongs to
leaders, priests, lunatics, animals and plants. On the one hand, the
powerful and kings, on the other hand, beings without any power,
entirely separated from objects and free through their own poverty.
The power of the absolute is shown in its identity with the
unconditional. It has been assimilated in essence and in its own being,
and it is through the absolute that one becomes immortal. So much fear
of death! Words are supposed to begin to be seen through death so that
people can become immortal spirits like them. Words, created by man,
become his nightmares, and notions are the isolation chambers of logic.
It is through notions that duration gets tangled.
The absolute belongs to tectonic, ecstatic sorts. The “snake-man” of
today believes only in his banal and flat “I”. Thus, he has found the
most vulgar form of the absolute and a freedom that, after forgetting
death, has ceased to be limited by “taboos” and is merely petty and
vulgar.
[Carl Einstein]
If we address ourselves to you, men and women who have reached the point
of essential revulsion and who nothing and no one could any longer
rescue from a tragic destiny, it is not to remind you of a non-existent
duty in the face of a life that isn’t worth living. We don’t lack
respect for your decision, because you and you alone know the precise
extent of the pain and anguish that poison your existence. Those who do
not feel that pain and anguish, those who have never even come close to
this because they are kissed by fortune or soft in the head due to
faith, have no reason to censure your fatal decision.
So we don’t want to preach you any sermon or keep you from acting on
your decision. We only intend to ask a favor of you, a small favor for
you who have decided to abandon this world, but one that would give
great joy to those of us who have decided, for the moment, to stay here.
Since you are resolved to embark on the Great Voyage, while you are at
it, could you maybe bring a few of the known calamities, that made your
days on this earth unbearable with, you? Wanting to take the last step
in solitude is understandable, it is human. But to do it in company is
sublime; it is godlike. Besides, what do you have to fear? For once, no
one will get to harass you, throwing the consequences of your gesture in
your face. To give an example, you could swallow your poison after
making the congressman, who has given you the poison of his lies to
drink for years, taste it. Do you want to add a bit of weight to your
brain? Very good, but not before supplying some of it to the bank
manager who ruined you. If instead you want to squeeze a noose around
your neck, it would be good if you first got some practice on the neck
of the industrialist who fired you. Before going into the beyond, you
could give the bishop who excommunicated your consciousness a surprise
by arranging an immediate meeting for him with the Supreme Boss. And why
not drag the cop who is standing beside you waiting for the train or
subway with you onto the rails? He will finally lose his ugly habit of
imprisoning other people’s freedom. Not to offend you, but we have never
understood why courthouses and stock exchanges don’t excite the
fantasies of you desperate ones in the way schools seem to in the United
States: Target practice on judges and financial speculators would be a
stirring goodbye gift to your companions in misfortune.
Imagine what might happen if only a fifth of the inflexible suicides of
all countries were to associate their last breath with that of a
despicable person in power? Thanks to you — you suicides who are usually
reviled — we would be witness to a great ethical awakening. On high,
anyone who managed to avoid you would think twice before casting other
human beings into desperation. At the bottom, we cowards who aren’t
capable of making a revolution might find the strength to bring the work
that you have started so generously to term.
We ask you, we beg you, if we may, great desperate ones of five
continents, have heart one last time. Don’t die alone and ignored, a
sardonic conclusion to a life already lacking in joy. Select an
institutional celebrity and knock him off allong with yourself.
I recall happy faces, for the most part young people, if not even just
teenagers — it takes fifty years to make a man, and most of us were not
yet half that age — A joy — very special because it was a historical
joy, with an incomparable tone. I have searched high and low for its
equal, and I don’t see it.
A discrepancy without equal, in most of the militant groups, between the
event and its representation: typical, outdated, compromised, overused
discourses — when not downright antithetical, clumsy, stupid, awkward,
false (the “pro-Chinese” shamelessly praised Stalin, the gulags, the
Moscow trials, Enver Hoxha!). The most timid unduly praised the “popular
front” and the “Resistance”; in short: whatever took place in another
time, through the pure inability to consider what had never taken place.
The Unknown overwhelmed them from all sides, inebriated them, would have
left them breathless if it hadn’t been for the old emaciated refrains:
their youth, freed from the servile duty to prohibitions that had just
the day before limited the possibilities in play to the usual conflicts
with heavy overcoats.
The beginning of the end for the old moons that had launched pale glows
into earlier skies. Retrospective statement of the obvious about a
relationship (underground, but direct) between the French May and the
internal collapse of the pyramid of state lies and terror that had
assumed the appearance of a fatal future in the East for three or four
decades. It took the living dead a quarter of a century to realize that
they were living dead, but on May 13 for the first time, “the stalinist
scoundrels were in the caboose”.
The real end of the “post-war period” — After Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin,
the horrendous colonial wars in Indochina, Algeria, Vietnam, a deep need
to look elsewhere was noticed. A certain juvenile pleasure in disorder
was a way of breaking down the obstacles of the already given.
Proselytes of every sort attributed the most diverse aims to the
movement. Everyone brought their demands to that flow. The movement
welcomed them all. But the unique tone that was its own did not depend
on demands. A fact that may be hard to understand: aware of what it no
longer wanted, that May did not have a precise idea of its future and
perhaps had no need for one. It went to meet the unknown with a lack of
concern never seen in analogous events.
The vital poem of life that awakens. Any poetry other than that of
living life would have caused a shrug of the shoulders. Nietzsche: “I am
not always sad. I don’t always have ideas.”
The return of the repressed, of all the “madnesses of freedom” — from
Saint-Just to Rimbaud, passing through Mallarme and Sade, the
surrealists and Dada. Far from the obsessions of all the police of
thought and feeling. Holderlin, Nietzsche, Breton; and not Jdanov,
Stalin, Kanapa. History substantially changed direction. At a single
stroke, the prefrontal overturning of symbolic activity occurred in
history. Goodbye forever, reptilian brain! Goodbye forever, brow ridges!
The innocence of becoming became dangerous again. An adventurous search
for a bit of authentic unknown in history. What enthusiasm in this leap.
Moods and nuances are all that will be remembered of it.
Disarmingly guileless hopes were affirmed with the most tender
seriousness. The linear History of yesterday, having escaped the bed
into which it was channeled by ideological terror, exploded into
unpredictable, distant stars, beyond the barriers. The “im-possible”
seemed to be the minimum that was desirable.
The two symmetrical infamies that had terrorized the century were
delegitimated together by the children of the protagonists of the
preceding generation, which symmetrically lacked the means for
reestablishing moral authorities discredited by so many repetitions and
now without a future — The first attempt to come out from the logic of
resentment in “revolutionary” movements. A new life wanted to live,
which was authorized only by itself.
Those whose lives then vibrated to the emotional pitch of freedom and
existence will never cease to be affected by it. How could they line up
for ordinary life any more — taking care in their retreat not to pay
tribute to the grayness of the day. They certainly didn’t fight to get
wretched “official recognition” or to go up the ladder — “Rather life!”
The French May was the first revolutionary movement whose stake was not
the conquest of state power. In this perhaps it prefigured the future of
truly liberatory human movements: when individuals, many of them, will
devote themselves to themselves. Concerned with the effective
possibilities that they will have at their disposal for entering
directly into the new life that they will have the strength to conceive
here and now. And here they are suddenly becoming responsible.
“Not a society of slaves without masters, but a society of masters
without slaves.” No revolution despised voluntary servitude as much as
the revolution of that May, and, more than this, it distanced itself
from the old fatality of separating one’s life from oneself. The taste
for style again found an effective use. The S.I. gave it back the
brilliance it always had with cruelty and genius.
One result that statistical experts and ideologues didn’t notice: that
May would restore many free human beings to themselves, human beings who
would never again return to the ranks. This is no small thing. The tone
of life would change. What more could one want from an effective
revolution that didn’t limit itself to the expectations of slaves? — We
had this.
A mutation in spirits. A potent incitamentum[4] to experimentation with
concrete freedom. This bad example given to all would go on feeding new
audacities. “Do away with the heritage of May ’68”, monsieur Sarkozy, is
one of the most rhetorical of programs.
Making the economy ironic. Desecrating the political. The return of
complete life as complete, not as mishap, but as possibility, since
everything is starting over, with each new young life. The content of
real existence — things that have place only once — considered in
earnest.
The end of the separation between art and life, formulated not as a
“demand” that leads to a coalition of desires always frustrated at not
achieving their aims, but as a sovereign practice of life as art, that
suddenly gives everyone what they no longer had a way of “reclaiming”
abstractly for an abstract future. The enjoyment of the present, of
play, of efforts dared: superior resources of festival and joy. With
this, stammerings, so many hints of beautiful moments. — A single cry:
“Be beautiful!”
“Slaves, we don’t curse life!”
Choose life instead of those prisms with no depth even if their colors
are purer
Instead of this hour always hidden instead of these terrible vehicles of
cold flame
Instead of these overripe stones
Choose this hear with its safety catch
Instead of that murmuring pool
And that white fabric singing in the air and the earth at the same time
Instead of that marriage blessing wedding my forehead to total vanity
Choose life
Choose life with its conspiratorial sheets
Its scars from escapes
Choose life choose that rose window on my tomb
The life of being here nothing but being here
Where one voice says Are you there where another voice answers Are you
there
I’m hardly here at all alas
And even when we might be making fun of what we kill
Choose life
Choose life choose life venerable Childhood
The ribbon coming out of a fakir
Resembles the playground slide of the world
Though the sun is only a shipwreck
Insofar as it resembles a woman’s body
You dream contemplating the whole length of its trajectory
Or only while closing your eyes on the adorable storm called your hand
Choose life
Choose life with its waiting rooms
When you know you’ll never be shown in
Choose life instead of those health spas
Where you’re served by drudges
Choose life unfavorable and long
When the books close again here on less gentle shelves
And when over there the weather would be better than better it would be
free yes
Choose life
Choose life as the pit of scorn
With that head beautiful enough
Like the antidote to that perfection it summons and fears
Like the makeup on God’s face
Life like a virgin passport
A little town like Pont-Ă -Mousson
And since everything’s already been said
Choose life instead
[Andre Breton]
How could someone think that he had to make belated “excuses” — or even
merely express “regrets” — for the passionate groping path, for the
fever that had been?
For desiring only the fiery beauties and comradeships never dared — with
a frightening lack of concern (never found again) on all sides in the
face of all powers?
It is definitely necessary to pay for guilelessness of this caliber. We
have seen reason.
But once they were dreamed, could beauties, comradeships, expenditures
without calculation ever cease to be — even if we ignored the entire
world in which they demanded to have a value?
Besides, how could it have gone differently with regard to knowledge and
action, considering what we were in that historical instant and in that
moment of our life?
A force drew us, blind as life, without fear or remorse: a possibility,
a happiness, an innocence, a festival.
That loss would be expiated through leaps of this kind: and how
thoughtless, empty, out of place it would be!
What we wanted so intensely, others will “want” with the same boundless
passion, without having “chosen” it first. The world will be young and
beautiful once again, each time authentic life abandons its old skin at
the winter’s end.
This is not a prophecy. Just a statement of fact.
How could anyone go to meet such an unknown, if not with a blindfold
over his eyes?
If “everyone is a Child of his times”, what sense is there at this point
in “repenting” in the face of absolutely destined passions? And how do
we abandon ourselves to repentance, when, contrarily, in these transits
we stored up a stock of cloudless joy for so much time? — of fierceness,
honor, pride, guilelessness, beauty, courage?
Should we excuse ourselves for having been happy, innocent, mad and
beautiful?
Another problem is really knowing how much of our “knowledge”, our words
and even our actions we had “chosen”: above all, it was an
uncontainable, very youthful, vital thrust!
Presuming that then we had not recognized the fantasies that carried us
away as fictions — powerful, outdated illuminations. Again: fated — ,
what sense would there be in not recognizing these illuminations as
such? So that we can be pitifully cross with the boundless drunkenness
generated by those battles?
And how will we be able to speak without sadness of any new acquisition
of “knowledge”, if we had to barter for it with so much lost joy? —
Meager profit, great loss.
Not that we wouldn’t like to think of ourselves as old children.
“A form of life was experienced.” Everyone became someone else.
But at least don’t let our new life pass at the expense of slander
against what we were in other times.
An injustice of this sort about the past would leave questionable
contributions of expectations for future young lives.
We would teach them resignation — the worst defeat of all.
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[1] I have chosen to translate “integralismo” as “integralism” rather
than “fundamentlism” in order to make it clear that the problem is not
one of a literal interpretation of scriptures, but of trying to bring
the whole of society under religious control, to integrate all of
society into a religious body. — translator
[2] For example, Qadarism in the 7^(th) and 8^(th) century, whose
refusal of divine fatalism led to the execution of Ma’bad al-Jahuni in
699 and Ghaylan al-Dimashqi in 743 by the Caliphs; or rationalist
Mutazilism in the 9^(th) century with the famous “House of Wisdom” in
Baghdad where Nestorian physicist Hunayn ibn-Ichaq (called Joannitius)
translated Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Categories and Physics.
Qadarism and Mutazilism were judged as heretical by orthodox Islam and
condemned. In 922, the well-known mystic al-Hallaj was whipped,
mutilated, hanged on the gallows, beheaded and his corpse burned.
[3] “Acratic” is a term that anarchists in Spain and other places have
often used for themselves. It indicates that they are for acracy — no
government — rather than democracy — government by the people. If only
more present day anarchists would get this. — translator
[4] Latin for “incitement” — translator