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Title: Madrid, sublime city Author: Camillo Berneri Date: 2nd December 1936 Language: en Topics: Madrid, Spanish Civil War Source: Retrieved on 26th August 2021 from http://struggle.ws/berneri/madrid.html Notes: Article which appeared in âGuerra di Classâ No. 5, 2nd December, 1936. Translation published in âThe Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Reviewâ Number 4, 1978
Pilate is just as infamous as Judas. Who is Pilate today? He is not even
the assembly of Geneva foxes, he is not even the ostriches of
Social-democrat Ministerialism. Pilate is you, the European proletariat!
Can you, oh tender proletarian mother tuck your little child into its
bed without seeing mangled children lying abandoned in the roads like
carrion. Can you play lovingly with your child, oh proletarian, without
thinking of the children lying in pain in hospitals, suffering the
tortures of their wounded flesh and the anguishes of fear.
And yet you read left-wing papers and you know that there exists a great
city running with blood, torn apart and reduced to ashes by explosions
of shells; they tell that the children have been surprised by death when
they were shouting to the heavens the songs of their unconcern, that
their mothers roam about searching for the fruit of their wombs and
carry their blood-stained bodies in search of unlikely or belated help.
The stench of death rises from dispatches and correspondence from
Madrid. The sky over Madrid is red with fires which should set the world
aflame. And yet, everything collapses, everything burns, a whole
population is dying â without the masses being affected.
In the agony of Madrid there is all the horror of a rape in the
market-place on market day.
Death can continue to strike, sudden as hail in summer and unavoidable
as lightening. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had for themselves
the calm of high altitudes and the moral void of the Ă©poque. Let them
shake it, let them rend it apart, let them burn it slowly, this martyred
city; millions of proletarians donât care at all about it. Is Madrid
resisting? Many wonder how long it can hold out. It is a European
bullfight. It is a disgrace to the peoples and not merely to the
governments and the classes. It is the blockade of anti-fascist
indifference that adds itself to the criminal Fascist siege. Meetings
will not stop the aircraft from flying through the sky over Madrid and
scattering death and ruin. The cold sweat that weighs on the brows of
mothers, the eyes of children enlarged by fear, the bodies pounded and
shaken by the convulsions, are no more than a future vision of what you
will suffer, you who are entrenched in non-intervention! Today, the war
is in the sky over Madrid, tomorrow it will be in the sky over it
Barcelona, the day after tomorrow in the sky over Paris. The European
war has started again. It exists, even if it has not been declared.
These are the aircraft and pilots of Mussoliniâs Italy and Hitlerâs
Germany which are massacring and ruining Madrid.
The horror of it no longer touches peopleâs consciences? Well then, the
bombs will waken them. And that will be Historic justice.
Madrid, the joyous Vienna of the Iberian Peninsular is reviving the
deeds of Sagonte. It has passed from the loversâ waltz to the Heroic
Symphony. Epic witness of the acts of heroism of the masses and the
militias, beside which those of the Commune of Paris pale in comparison;
it is disappointing the warlike hopes of the generals it will expose
their careful calculations, it will give the lie to their boastfulness.
It is resisting and will resist. If the compassion of the masses is
deaf, it Europe is incapable of anger, well then, the whole world will
be branded by the energy of this city. Madrid will not be taken. It can
be completely destroyed, but it will not be taken alive.
Death, exodus and the flames will make of it a new Pompeii to the very
end.
If it is not the wings of victory, it will be those of Nemesis that are
unfolded above it. The reputation of the Fascist generals is assured,
but it will be the reputation of Genghis Khan. It will he another
Commune. but it will not be a final glimmer; it will be the blazing up
of a fire that will bring all the âspectatorsâ out of their lairs, at
least as long as it does not burn them there in their Blumist beds.
Madrid where here thousands of men are fighting with an ardour nourished
and sustained by the presence of thousands of women and children is in
the process of pillorying its hangmen and the blind and deaf masses. It
is in the process of lighting for all a light which will once more
permit of hope in man.
Madrid, the martyr city, already merits the title of sublime.