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Title: Among Barbarians
Author: Emma Goldman
Date: February 1907
Language: en
Topics: civilization, Libertarian Labyrinth, Mother Earth
Source: Retrieved on 25th April 2021 from http://wiki.libertarian-labyrinth.org/index.php?title=Among_Barbarians
Notes: Published in Mother Earth 1, no. 12 (February 1907): 10–11.

Emma Goldman

Among Barbarians

The difference between a barbarian and a truly civilized being is this:

While the former sets up his own opinion as the universal criterion, the

latter recognizes no stagnation in the world of ideas; the barbarian

condemns; the civilized man endeavors to understand.

The barbarian says, “We live in the most progressive land; we have

achieved all that is possible.” He considers contrary opinions as

criminal and disturbing the harmony of things.

Barbarism is a stagnant swamp; intellectual liberty is the flowing

river, the raging torrent carrying away the riff raff of old, decayed

institutions.

This barbarism is the great foe of the libertarian and revolutionary

element in America. Not the revolutionists only, but also the innovators

in the fields of art and literature have no less to endure from the

barbarians, though in different form.

The Anarchists are persecuted by absurd legislation; the revolutionaries

in art and literature, by our public opinion and moral standards.

Anarchists are the victims of police brutality; the artists,

dissatisfied with the art conceptions of parlor estheticists, suffer the

condemnation of Mrs. Grundy.

Woe to the American artist who will not be the slave of Puritanic

hyprocisy. He would die of starvation were he to depend upon his art for

the means of subsistence.

It would be difficult to find a judge in the United States who could see

in Anarchistic defendants the representatives of a new conception of

life; a new world-philosophy, intimately related with the social,

scientific, artistic and economic currents of past generations.

In this respect the revolutionists of Europe have the advantage. The

authorities of France, Germany, Italy and Russia lack the spirit of the

American parvenu, whose most characteristic trait is conceit. Worldly

successful, he considers himself perfect; but the self-made man is

usually a god-made ass.

European civilization has outgrown the spirit of the parvenu.

World-changing revolutions have taken place; and where these lacked,

deep-rooted currents developed the consciousness that humanity cannot

remain at a standstill.

There, even the powers that be have to some extent fallen under the

broadening influence of a higher civilization. Naturally, their

interests will determine their inimical attitude towards the heralds of

new ideas; still, their antagonism is not of a character to stamp the

revolutionists as criminals and degenerates, as is the case in this

country.

A Parisian judge, daily passing the site where formerly stood the

Bastille, or the Place de la Concorde, the Tuileries Gardens—each and

every stone loudly proclaiming the historic mutability of all that

is—must necessarily awaken to a clearer appreciation of revolutionary

ideas than his American colleague. The latter firmly believes that the

path of our social and intellectual growth has been finally and

irrevocably marked out by the revolutionary fathers of the republic.