domingo, 5 de junio de 2011

Anarchism - Nudism, Naturism by Carlos Ortega

photo: Anarchist prisioners at the Modelo Prision in Barcelona

Anarchism and the different Naturist views have always been related. This relationship was quite important at the end of the 1920s. The linking role played by the ‘Sol y Vida’ group was very important . The goal of this group was to take trips and enjoy the open air. The Naturist athenaeum, ‘Ecléctico’, in Barcelona, was the base from which the activities of the group were launched. First ‘Etica’ and then ‘Iniciales’, which began in 1929, were the publications of the group, which lasted until the Spanish Civil War. We must be aware that the naturist ideas expressed in them matched the desires that the libertarian youth had of breaking up with the conventions of the bourgeoisie of the time. That is what a young worker explained in a letter to ‘Iniciales’ He writes it under the odd pseudonym of ‘silvestre del campo’, (wild man in the country). “I find great pleasure in being naked in the woods, bathed in light and air, two natural elements we cannot do without. By shunning the humble garment of an exploited person, (garments which, in my opinion, are the result of all the laws devised to make our lives bitter), we feel there no others left but just the natural laws. Clothes mean slavery for some and tyranny for others. Only the naked man who rebels against all norms, stands for anarchism, devoid of the prejudices of outfit imposed by our money-oriented society.”

The relation between Anarchism and Naturism gives way to the Naturist Federation, in July 1928, and to the lV Spanish Naturist Congress, in September 1929, both supported by the Libertarian Movement. However, in the short term, the Naturist and Libertarian movements grew apart in their conceptions of everyday life. The Naturist movement felt closer to the Libertarian individualism of some French theoreticians such as Henri Ner than to the revolutionary goals proposed by some Anarchist organisations such as the FAI, (Federación Anarquista Ibérica). During the Republican period that split led to both orientations growing further and further apart.

Naturalism, as well as other ideas for change in sexual behaviour, have remained within the Libertarian Movements longer than they have been, if ever, in other labour oriented parties. With the fall of the Republican regime and the arrival of General Franco’s dictatorship, all that disappeared

Carlos Ortega

Unbriddled Freedom by Enzo Martucci

Stirner and Nietzsche were undoubtedly right. It is not true that my freedom ends where that of others begins. By nature my freedom has its end where my strength stops. If it disgusts me to attack human beings or even if I consider it to be contrary to my interests to do so, I abstain from conflict. But if, pushed by an instinct, a feeling, or a need, I lash out against my likes and meet no resistance or a weak resistance, I naturally become the dominator, the superman. If instead the others resist vigorously and return blow for blow, then I am forced to stop and come to terms. Unless I judge it appropriate to pay for an immediate satisfaction with my life.

It is useless to speak to people of renunciation, of morality, of duty, of honesty. It is stupid to want to constrain them, in the name of Christ or of humanity, not to step on each other’s toes. Instead one tells each of them: “You are strong. Harden your will. Compensate, by any means, for your deficiencies. Conserve your freedom. Defend it against anyone who wants to oppress you”.

And if every human being would follow this advice, tyranny would become impossible. I will even resist the one who is stronger than me. If I can’t do it by myself, I will seek the aid of my friends. If my might is lacking, I will replace it with cunning. And balance will arise spontaneously from the contrast.

In fact, the only cause of social imbalance is precisely the herd mentality that keeps slaves prone and resigned under the master’s whip.

“Human life is sacred. I cannot suppress it either in the other or in myself. And so I must respect the life of the enemy who oppresses me and brings me an atrocious and continuous pain. I cannot take the life of my poor brother, who is afflicted with a terminal disease that causes him terrible suffering, in order to shorten his torment. I cannot even free myself, through suicide, from an existence that I feel as a burden.”

Why?

“Because,” the christians say, “Life is not our own. It is given to us by god and he alone can take it away from us.”

Okay. But when god gives life to us, it becomes ours. As Thomas Aquinas points out, god’s thought confers being in itself, objective reality, to the one who thinks. Thus, when god thinks of giving life to the human being, and by thinking of it, gives it to him, such life effectively becomes human, that is, an exclusive property of ours. Thus, we can take it away from each other, or anyone can destroy it in herself.
Emile Armand frees the individual from the state but subordinates him more strictly to society. For him, in fact, I cannot revoke the social contract when I want, but must receive the consent of my co-associates in order to release myself from the links of the association. If others don’t grant me such consent, I must remain with them even if this harms or offends me. Or yet, by unilaterally breaking the pact, I expose myself to the retaliation and vengeance of my former comrades. More societarian than this and one dies. But this is a societarianism of the Spartan barracks. What! Am I not my own master? Just because yesterday, under the influence of certain feelings and certain needs, I wanted to associate, today, when I have other feelings and needs and want to get out of the association, I can no longer do so. I must thus remain chained to my desire of yesterday. Because yesterday I desired one way, today I cannot desire another way. But then I am a slave, deprived of spontaneity, dependent on the consent of the associates.
According to Armand, I cannot break relationships because I should care about the sorrow and harm that I will cause the others if I deprive them of my person. But the others don’t care about the sorrow and harm that they cause me by forcing me to remain in their company when I feel like going away. Thus, mutuality is lacking. And if I want to leave the association, I will go when I decide, so much the more if, in making the agreement to associate, I have communicated to the comrades that I will maintain my freedom to break with it at any time. In doing this, one does not deny that some societies might have long lives. But in this case, it is a feeling or an interest sensed by all that maintain the union. Not an ethical precept as Armand would like.

From christians to anarchists (?) all moralists insist that we distinguish between freedom, based on responsibility, and license, based on caprice and instinct. Now it is good to explain. A freedom that, in all of its manifestations, is always controlled, reined in, led by reason, is not freedom. Because it lacks spontaneity. Thence, it lacks life.

What is my aim? To destroy authority, to abolish the state, to establish freedom for everyone to live according to her nature as he sees and desires it. Does this aim frighten you, fine sirs? Well then, I have nothing to do. Like Renzo Novatore, I am beyond the arc.

When no one commands me, I do what I want. I abandon myself to spontaneity or I resist it. I follow instincts or I rein them in with reason, at various times, according to which is stronger within me.

In short, my life is varied and intense precisely because I don’t depend upon any rule.

Moralists of all schools instead claim the opposite. They demand that life always be conformed to a single norm of conduct that makes it monotonous and colorless. They want human beings to always carry out certain actions and to always abstain from all the others.

“You must, in every instance, practice love, forgiveness, renunciation of worldly goods and humility. Otherwise you will be damned”, say the Gospels.
“You must, in each moment, defeat egoism and be unselfish. Otherwise you will remain in absurdity and sorrow,” Kant points out.

“You must always resist instinct and appetite, showing yourself to be balanced, thoughtful and wise on every occasion. If you don’t, we will brand you with the mark of archist infamy and treat you as a tyrant,” Armand passes judgment.
In short, they all want to impose the rule that mutilates life and turns human beings into equal puppets that perpetually think and act in the same way. And this occurs because we are surrounded by priests: priests of the church and priests who oppose it, believing and atheistic Tartuffes. And all claim to catechize us, to lead us, to control us, to bridle us, offering us a prospect of earthly or supernatural punishments and rewards. But it is time for the free human being to rise up: the one who knows how to go against all priests and priestliness, beyond laws and religions, rules and morality. And who knows how to go further beyond. Still further beyond.

The Damned Song by Enzo Martucci


Oh!… Why wasn’t I born on a pirate ship, lost on the endless ocean, in the midst of a handful of rugged, brave men who furiously climbed aboard, singing the wild song of destruction and death? Why wasn’t I born in the boundless grasslands of South America, among free, fierce gauchos, who tame the fiery colt with the “lasso” and fearlessly attack the terrible jaguar?… Why? Why? The children of the night, my brothers, impatient with every law and all control, would have included me. These people, spirits thirsty for freedom and the infinite, would have known how to read the great book that is in my minds, un utterly marvelous poem of pain and conflict, of sublime aspirations and impossible dreams… My intellectual heritage would have been their intangible treasure, and at the clear fount of my satanic pride and eternal rebellion, they would have fortified their strength, already violently shaken by a thousand hurricanes. Instead, I was fatally born in the midst of the nauseating herd of slaves who lie in the filthy slime where the imperial ruling Lie and hypocrisy exchange the kiss of brotherhood with cowardice. I was born into civilized society, and the priest, the judge, the moralist and the cop have tried to weigh me down with chains and transform my organism, exuberant with vitality and energy, into an unconscious and automatic machine for which only one word was supposed to exist: Obey. They wanted to kill me!… And when I rose in the violence of irresistible force and wild shouted my “no,” the idiotic herd, amid the splashing of stinking slime, launched its vacuous insults.

Now, I laugh… The crowd is unable to understand certain spiritual depths, and doesn’t have a sharp enough gaze to penetrate the hidden recesses of my heart… You curse me, you curse me still, as now, stained with sloth, for sixty centuries, you consume the ritual of the lie; you curse me, applauding your laws and your idols… I will always cast the red flowers of my contempt in your face.



***



From the peak on which I live with the eagle and the wolf, faithful companions of my solitude, I contemplate humanity, this grotesque parody of the reptile, with great nausea. Around me, lush nature wraps the rock in a green cloak of undergrowth, whose wild beauty gives the mind and inexpressible feeling of strength and joy. Below, on the mountain slopes, fertile fields stretch out, dotted here and there with isolated houses and villages in which human beings cement the millennia-old chains with unfortunate blindness.

And I laugh… I laugh as I watch human beings, these little monsters shrunken by space, when they are poisoned in the workshops where sewer gases lacerate their lungs…, when they pass by chanting in procession, bowed beneath the idols of fanaticism and unconsciousness…and when, in cowardice, they consecrate their slavery, licking the hand of the master that savagely beats them. I see the miserable comedy of human hypocrisy and pettiness unfold below me feet, and a deep sense of disgust sweeps over me, and an unspeakable loathing winds through me heart… And still I laugh… And as the chime of the bell that tolls for the feast rises from the village in the silence of the night, I sing my purest song to the eagle and the wolf, the faithful companions of my solitude. It is the song of my pain and my passion… And my song says:

“Oh, God of destruction, of terrible and monstrous God, rise up from the deepest bowels of the unknown and come to me through the open wounds of the old earth, come to me… come with the overwhelming, sudden fury of the squall; devastate, destroy this weakened and decadent world, which needs a new blood bath to renew itself… I will lend you my arm and my thought. We will struggle together as long as any temple arises bearing testimony to the superstition and sloth of men… as long as any law, engraved on the tablets of deception, tries to impose dedication to itself on the rebel,… and as long as life, encroached upon and oppressed, cannot rise once more triumphant in the light of day. Then, when clouds of flame rise threateningly from smoking ruins toward the sky, satanic, demonic, mad, we will sing our iconoclastic hymn of negation and revolt…” So I say! And my voice is, indeed, mighty and arcane, indeed, rich with hatred and feeling, so that my eagle rises up over a horizon which sinister lightning bolts flash… and my wolf with eyes like embers howls and pounces on the muddy paths of the village where he brings terror and death…

Above, on my peak, so high and inaccessible, the fateful symbol of my liberation waves is the wind: the black flag.



***



Now I dance on the edge of an abyss at whose bottom the murky waters of death sinuously wind… I dance, tragically, with my mind focused on the dawn of my “true” life, of the free and intense life I want to conquer for myself, at the cost of the fiercest conflict and the most difficult sacrifice. Because I belong to the race of invincible giants for whom danger is not a barrier, but a sting, a spur that pushes them to realize their will more forcefully. And I dance, I dance… The pale, anemic virtues that dominate in this world of eunuchs and slaves, have tried to lure me. But I have answered their fondlings and their threats with the diabolical laughter of my savage sarcasm. Humanity, Society, State, Law, Morality… You already know the force of my blows as I know the force of yours… And yet you don’t stop attacking me, you don’t cease entertaining the mad intention of reducing my unbending temper in the fetters of obedience… Well, you still throw your hat into the ring, you still drag that bleak, amorphous mass of flabby slaves in your train, you sharpen your weapons that will shatter upon my invulnerable armor… I resolutely wait for you. I, the damned one, the rebel… I wait for you with my eagle and my wolf, the faithful companions of my solitude. And my brothers also wait for you, arrayed for battle at my side, my brothers, the heroic and undefeated children of Evil…

So come on! The sacrilegious and destructive iconoclast has flung his challenge. And in an intoxication of enthusiasm, a delirium of energy, an exaltation of audacity, he will fight his war, in the open and hidden… Later, when poison darts have pierced the armor and reached his heart, he will slide, sneering, to the bottom of the dark abyss where the threatening waters of Death sinuously flow.


Enzo Martucci

From Proletario # 4,
September 17, 1922

Heroic Spring by Enzo Martucci

Oh!… Why wasn’t I born on a pirate ship, lost on the endless ocean, in the midst of a handful of rugged, brave men who furiously climbed aboard, singing the wild song of destruction and death? Why wasn’t I born in the boundless grasslands of South America, among free, fierce gauchos, who tame the fiery colt with the “lasso” and fearlessly attack the terrible jaguar?… Why? Why? The children of the night, my brothers, impatient with every law and all control, would have included me. These people, spirits thirsty for freedom and the infinite, would have known how to read the great book that is in my minds, un utterly marvelous poem of pain and conflict, of sublime aspirations and impossible dreams… My intellectual heritage would have been their intangible treasure, and at the clear fount of my satanic pride and eternal rebellion, they would have fortified their strength, already violently shaken by a thousand hurricanes. Instead, I was fatally born in the midst of the nauseating herd of slaves who lie in the filthy slime where the imperial ruling Lie and hypocrisy exchange the kiss of brotherhood with cowardice. I was born into civilized society, and the priest, the judge, the moralist and the cop have tried to weigh me down with chains and transform my organism, exuberant with vitality and energy, into an unconscious and automatic machine for which only one word was supposed to exist: Obey. They wanted to kill me!… And when I rose in the violence of irresistible force and wild shouted my “no,” the idiotic herd, amid the splashing of stinking slime, launched its vacuous insults.

Now, I laugh… The crowd is unable to understand certain spiritual depths, and doesn’t have a sharp enough gaze to penetrate the hidden recesses of my heart… You curse me, you curse me still, as now, stained with sloth, for sixty centuries, you consume the ritual of the lie; you curse me, applauding your laws and your idols… I will always cast the red flowers of my contempt in your face.



***



From the peak on which I live with the eagle and the wolf, faithful companions of my solitude, I contemplate humanity, this grotesque parody of the reptile, with great nausea. Around me, lush nature wraps the rock in a green cloak of undergrowth, whose wild beauty gives the mind and inexpressible feeling of strength and joy. Below, on the mountain slopes, fertile fields stretch out, dotted here and there with isolated houses and villages in which human beings cement the millennia-old chains with unfortunate blindness.

And I laugh… I laugh as I watch human beings, these little monsters shrunken by space, when they are poisoned in the workshops where sewer gases lacerate their lungs…, when they pass by chanting in procession, bowed beneath the idols of fanaticism and unconsciousness…and when, in cowardice, they consecrate their slavery, licking the hand of the master that savagely beats them. I see the miserable comedy of human hypocrisy and pettiness unfold below me feet, and a deep sense of disgust sweeps over me, and an unspeakable loathing winds through me heart… And still I laugh… And as the chime of the bell that tolls for the feast rises from the village in the silence of the night, I sing my purest song to the eagle and the wolf, the faithful companions of my solitude. It is the song of my pain and my passion… And my song says:

“Oh, God of destruction, of terrible and monstrous God, rise up from the deepest bowels of the unknown and come to me through the open wounds of the old earth, come to me… come with the overwhelming, sudden fury of the squall; devastate, destroy this weakened and decadent world, which needs a new blood bath to renew itself… I will lend you my arm and my thought. We will struggle together as long as any temple arises bearing testimony to the superstition and sloth of men… as long as any law, engraved on the tablets of deception, tries to impose dedication to itself on the rebel,… and as long as life, encroached upon and oppressed, cannot rise once more triumphant in the light of day. Then, when clouds of flame rise threateningly from smoking ruins toward the sky, satanic, demonic, mad, we will sing our iconoclastic hymn of negation and revolt…” So I say! And my voice is, indeed, mighty and arcane, indeed, rich with hatred and feeling, so that my eagle rises up over a horizon which sinister lightning bolts flash… and my wolf with eyes like embers howls and pounces on the muddy paths of the village where he brings terror and death…

Above, on my peak, so high and inaccessible, the fateful symbol of my liberation waves is the wind: the black flag.



***



Now I dance on the edge of an abyss at whose bottom the murky waters of death sinuously wind… I dance, tragically, with my mind focused on the dawn of my “true” life, of the free and intense life I want to conquer for myself, at the cost of the fiercest conflict and the most difficult sacrifice. Because I belong to the race of invincible giants for whom danger is not a barrier, but a sting, a spur that pushes them to realize their will more forcefully. And I dance, I dance… The pale, anemic virtues that dominate in this world of eunuchs and slaves, have tried to lure me. But I have answered their fondlings and their threats with the diabolical laughter of my savage sarcasm. Humanity, Society, State, Law, Morality… You already know the force of my blows as I know the force of yours… And yet you don’t stop attacking me, you don’t cease entertaining the mad intention of reducing my unbending temper in the fetters of obedience… Well, you still throw your hat into the ring, you still drag that bleak, amorphous mass of flabby slaves in your train, you sharpen your weapons that will shatter upon my invulnerable armor… I resolutely wait for you. I, the damned one, the rebel… I wait for you with my eagle and my wolf, the faithful companions of my solitude. And my brothers also wait for you, arrayed for battle at my side, my brothers, the heroic and undefeated children of Evil…

So come on! The sacrilegious and destructive iconoclast has flung his challenge. And in an intoxication of enthusiasm, a delirium of energy, an exaltation of audacity, he will fight his war, in the open and hidden… Later, when poison darts have pierced the armor and reached his heart, he will slide, sneering, to the bottom of the dark abyss where the threatening waters of Death sinuously flow.


Enzo Martucci

From Proletario # 4,
September 17, 1922

On Renzo Novatore by Enzo Martucci

(revised from a translation by Stephen Marletta)

My soul is a sacrilegious temple

in which the bells of sin and crime

voluptuous and perverse,

loudly ring out revolt and despair.



These words written in 1920, give us a glimpse of the promethean being of Renzo Novatore.

Novatore was a poet of the free life. Intolerant of every chain and limitation, he wanted to follow every impulse that rose within him. He wanted to understand everything and experience all sensations—those which lead to the abyss and those which lead to the stars. And then at death to melt into nothingness, having lived intensely and heroically so as to reach his full power as a complete man.

The son of a poor farmer from Arcola, Italy, Abile Riziero Ferrari (Renzo Novatore) soon showed his great sensibility and rebelliousness. When his father wanted him to plow the fields he would flee, stealing fruit and chickens to sell so that he could buy books to read under a tree in the forest. In this way he educated himself and quickly developed a taste for non-conformist writers. In these he found reasons for his instinctive aversion to oppression and restriction, to the principles and institutions that reduce men to obedience and renunciation.

As a young man he joined the Arcola group of anarcho-communists, but he was not satisfied with the harmony and limited freedom of the new society they awaited so eagerly. “I am with you in destroying the tyranny of existing society,” he said, “but when you have done this and begun to build anew, then I will oppose and go beyond you.”

Until he was fifteen years old, Renzo included the church in his poetry. After that, freed and unprejudiced, he never planted any roots in the gregarious existence of his village, but often found himself in conflict with both men and the law. He scandalized his respectable family, who wondered what they had done to deserve such a devil…

…Novatore, who was influenced by Baudelaire and Nietzsche, asserted that we had needs and aspirations that could not be satisfied without injury to the needs and aspirations of others. Therefore we must either renounce them and become slaves, or satisfy them and come into conflict with Society, whatever kind it may be, even if it calls itself anarchist. Novatore:



Anarchy is not a social form, but a method of individuation. No society will concede to me more than a limited freedom and a well-being that it grants to each of its members. But I am not content with this and want more. I want all that I have the power to conquer. Every society seeks to confine me to the august limits of the permitted and the prohibited. But I do not acknowledge these limits, for nothing is forbidden and all is permitted to those who have the force and the valor.

Consequently, anarchy, which is the natural liberty of the individual freed from the odious yoke of spiritual and material rulers, is not the construction of a new and suffocating society. It is a decisive fight against all societies—christian, democratic, socialist, communist, etc., etc. Anarchism is the eternal struggle of a small minority of aristocratic outsiders against all societies which follow one another on the stage of history.



Those were the ideas expressed by Novatore in Il Libertario of La Spezia, L’Iconoclasta of Pistoia, and other anarchist journals. And these were the ideas that then influenced me as I was well-prepared to receive them.

During World War I Novatore refused to fight for a cause that was not his own and took to the mountains. Astute, courageous, vigilant, his pistol at the ready the authorities failed at every attempt to capture him. At the end of the war the deserters were amnestied and he was able to return to his village where his wife and son were waiting for him.

I was sixteen years old and had run away from home and my studies, freeing myself from my bourgeois family, who had done everything they could to stop my anarchist activities. Passing through Saranza on my way to Milan, I stopped to get to know Novatore, having read his article “My Iconoclastic Individualism”. Renzo came at once to meet me together with another anarchist called Lucherini.

We passed unforgettable hours together. Our discussions were long and he helped me fill gaps in my thinking, setting me on my way to the solution of many fundamental problems. I was struck by his enthusiasm.

His appearance was impressive. Of medium height he was athletic in build, and had a large forehead. His eyes were vivacious and expressed sensibility, intelligence and force. He had an ironic smile that revealed the contempt of a superior spirit for men and the world. He was thirty-one years old, but already had the aura of genius.

After two months wandering around Italy with the police at my heels, I returned to Arcola to see Renzo again. But Emma, his wife, told me that he was also hunted and that I could only meet him at night in the forest.

Once again we had long discussions and I was able to appreciate his exceptional qualities as a poet, philosopher and man of action even more. I valued the power of his intellect and his fine sensitivity which was like that of a Greek god or a divine beast. We parted for the last time at dawn.

Both of us were existing under terrible conditions. We were in open struggle against Society, which would have liked to throw us in jail. Renzo had been attacked in his house at Fresonaro by a band of armed fascists who intended to kill him, but he had driven them off with home-made grenades. After that he had to keep a safe distance from the village.

Despite being an outlaw, he continued to develop his individualist anarchist ideas in libertarian papers. I did the same and we aroused the anger of the theoreticians of anarcho-communism. One of them, Professor Camillo Berneri, described us in the October, 1920 issue of L’Iconoclasta as “Paranoid megalomaniacs, exalters of a mad philosophy and decadent literature, feeble imitators of the artists of opium and hashish, sirens at so much an hour.”

I could not reply because in the meantime I had been arrested and shut up in a House of Correction. But Renzo replied for both of us and took “this bookworm in whom it is difficult to find the spirit and fire of a true anarchist” to task.

More than a year later I was provisionally released from prison, but I could find out nothing regarding the whereabouts of Renzo. Finally I received the terrible news that he had been killed.

He was at an inn in Bolzaneto, near Genova, along with the intrepid illegalist S.P., when a group of carabinieri arrived disguised as hunters. Novatore and S.P. immediately opened fire and the police responded. The tragic result was two dead, Renzo and Marasciallo Lempano of the carabinieri, and one policeman wounded. This was in 1922: a few months before the fascist march on Rome.

So a great and original poet, who, putting his thoughts and feelings into action, attacked the mangy herd of sheep and shepherds, died at the age of thirty three. He showed that life can be lived in intensity, not in duration as the cowardly mass want and practice.

After his death it was discovered that, together with a few others, he was preparing to strike at society and tear from it that which it denies the individual. And in the Assizes Court where his accomplices were tried, a prosecuting counsel acknowledged his bravery and called him “a strange blend of light and darkness, love and anarchy, the sublime and the criminal.”

A few friends collected some of his writings and posthumously published them in two volumes: Above Authority (Al Disopra dell’Arco) and Toward the Creative Nothing (Verso il Nullo Creatore). Other writings remained with his family or were lost.

So an exceptional man lived and died—the man I felt was closest to me in his ideals and aspirations. He described himself as “an atheist of solitude” He wanted to “ravish the impossible” and embraced life like an ardent lover. He was a lofty conquistador of immortality and power, who wanted to bring all to the maximum splendor of beauty.

Black Flags by Renzo Novatore


I



Black flags in the wind

stained with blood and sun

Black flags in the sun

howling of glory in the wind



We need to return to the origins. To drink at the ancient fountains.

We need to return to heroic anarchism, to individual, violent, reckless, poetic, decentering audacity…

And we need to return with every bit of our modern instinct, every bit of our new conception of life and beauty, every bit of our healthy and lucid pessimism, which is not renunciation or powerlessness, but a thriving flower of exuberant life. We are the true nihilists of reality and the spiritual builders of ideal worlds

We are destructive philosophers and creative poets.


We walk in the night

with a sun in our mind

and with two huge golden stars

in our blazing eyes



We walk…


II



Several years ago, all the earth’s kings, all the world’s tyrants crossed the threshold of time, and—turning their backs on the dawn—called in a great voice—the ghosts of the past, of the gloomiest past!

The voices of the tyrants and kings were joined by the raucous voices of all the great misers of the spirit, of art, of thought and of the idea!—And in the voices of the tyrants, kings and misers, ghosts and phantoms were raised from their tombs and came to dance among us…

The “state,” the “race,” the “fatherland” were macabre storm clouds assailing the heavens, ghastly phantoms darkening the sun; they threw us back into the dark night of distant medieval times.


III



Death!

Who still recalls the macabre dance of the baleful and monstrous god of war?

Who still recalls the war?

Much time has passed between then and now, but upon this wretched yet noble earth, fertilized with sterile corpses and bloated with infertile blood, not a single ideal, virgin flower, made of spirituality and purity, still sprouts today.

No, the flowers that are born now on the dry clods of this earth, so vainly bathed in blood, are not flowers of flourishing life, capable of great hope, virile struggle, vigorous thought; they are rather flowers of death, born in the shadow, growing in the anguish of the unconscious, swept away in the hurricane, borne along in the drift of the river of oblivion…



I am not a sentimentalist… but I have a horrible memory of the war.

It is the reason that I ended up hating and then despising men. Before despising and hating them though, I collected all the tears of humanity in my heart and locked all the sorrows of the world in my vast mind-synthesis…



Even the spirit of the great Zarathustra—who is war’s truest lover and the warrior’s most sincere friend—must have been horribly nauseated by this war…

He must have been horribly nauseated, because I heard him cry out: “You must seek your own enemy, fight your own war, and for your own ideas!”

And if your idea succumbs, may your rectitude cry out in triumph.

But, alas! the heroic preaching of the great liberator came to nothing!

The human herd didn’t know how to distinguish its own enemy or to fight its own war for its own ideas. (The herd has no ideas of its own!)

And not knowing his own ideas that he might make triumph, Abel died at Cain’s hands once again.

He was called to die, and he went, like always. So!

Without knowing how to say either Yes or No! He goes as a coward, as a robot, like always.

If he had at least had the capacity to say the Yes of enthusiastic obedience—if he didn’t have the heroic power to pronounce the titanic No of tragic negation—he would at last have shown that he believed in the “cause” for which he died, fighting…

but he didn’t know how to say yes or no!

He went!

As a coward, like always!

So…

And when he left, he went toward death.

He went toward death without knowing why.

Like always!

And death did not wait…

It came!…

It came and danced.

It danced and laughed!

For five long years…

It laughed and danced over the muddy trenches of the entire world’s fatherlands.

A macabre dance!

Oh, how idiotic and vulgar—how savage and brutal—is this death that dances without the wings of an idea on its back.

Without a violent idea that smashes and destroys.

Without a fruitful idea that generates and creates.

What a stupid and horrendous thing, dying as cowards, without knowing why.

We saw it—as it danced—Death.

It was a black Death, opaque, without any of the transparency of light.

It was a Death without wings!…

How ugly and vulgar it was.

How clumsy its dance was!

And how it mowed them down—dancing—all the superfluous, those of whom there were more!

Those for whom—the great liberator says—the state was invented.

But, alas, it didn’t only mow these down…

Yes! Death—to avenge the state mowed down those who were not useless, those who were necessary…

It also mowed down those for whom life was a profound poem where sublimated sorrow sang a playful refrain…

But those of whom there were not more, those who were not superfluous, those who fell crying out the rebellious and forceful titanic No!: they will be avenged.

We will avenge them!

We will avenge them because they were our brothers; because they died with stars in their eyes; because as they died, they drank the sun.

The sun of the Dream.

The sun of Battle.

The sun of Life.

The sun of the Idea!


IV



The war!…

What has the war renewed?

Where is the heroic transfiguration of the spirit?

Where have the phosphorescent tablets of new human values been hung?

In what sacred temple have the miraculous gold amphorae, containing the flaming hearts of creative geniuses and dominating heroes, that the frantic supporters of great war promised?

Where does the majestic sun of the great new dawn shine?

Frightful rivers of blood washed all the turf in the world and went howling through all the paths of the earth.

Terrifying torrents of tears made their heartrending, anguished lament echo through the darkest, most remote eddies of all the world’s continents.

Mountains of human bones and flesh rotted everywhere in the mud, and cried everywhere in the sun.

But nothing changed—it was useless!

The worm-ridden bourgeois belly just belched with satiety! and that of the proletarian howled from too much hunger!

And enough!

If with Christ and christianity, the human spirit was suspended in the cold and empty void of the afterlife, with Karl Marx and socialism, it was made to descend into the intestines…

The roar that sounded across the world after the war, shaking humanity, was nothing but a belly roar that socialism betrayed, stamped out, smothered, strangled, as soon as it noticed that this roar had begun to take on a bit of the color of an ideal content…

This supreme, nameless cowardice used up, the blackest, bleakest, most baleful reaction was born and grew tremendously.

It was logical—natural—fatal!

It was human…


V



Our time—despite empty and contrary appearances—is already lying on all fours under the heavy wheels of a new History.

The bestial morality of our bastard christian-liberal-bourgeois-plebeian civilization turns toward the sunset…

Our false social organization is collapsing fatally—inexorably!

The fascist phenomenon is the surest, most indisputable proof of it.

In Italy as elsewhere…

To show it, one would only have to go back in time and question history. But even this isn’t necessary!—The present speaks eloquently enough…

Fascism is nothing but a cruel, convulsive spasm of a decaying society that tragically drowns in the quagmire of its lies.

Because it—fascism—indeed celebrates its bacchanals with flaming pyres and malicious orgies of blood; but the dull crackling of its livid fires doesn’t give off a single spark of vivid innovative spirituality; meanwhile, may the blood that pours out be transformed into wine, that we—the forerunners of the time—silently gather in red goblets of hatred setting it aside as the heroic beverage to pass on to the children of the night and of sorrow in the fatal communion of great revolt.

We will take these brothers of ours by the hand to march together and climb together toward new spiritual dawns, toward new auroras of life, toward new conquests of thought, toward new feasts of light; new solar noons.

Because we are lovers of liberating struggle.

We are the children of sorrow that rises and thought that creates.

We are restless vagabonds.

The boldest in every endeavor; the tempter of every ordeal.

And life is an “ordeal”! A torment! A tragic flight.—A fleeting moment!


VI




Our will is heroic!

We’ll stir everything up in a flurry of hatred at the heart of the world, and we’ll transmute everything into a storm of the abyss.

Into a hurricane of the peaks.

Into cries of the mind.

Into howls of freedom!

By celebrating the social evensong, we will try to fully realize individual life, of the free and great I.

So that the night no longer triumphs.

So that the shadow no longer coils around us.

So that the never-ending fire of the sun becomes eternal and perpetuates its feast of light over land and sea!

Because we are fiery dreamers of the impossible, dangerous conquerors of the stars!


VII



Fascism—despite empty and contrary appearances—is something far too ephemeral and impotent to prevent the free, unbridled course of rebel thought that overflows and expands, impetuously bursting beyond every barrier, and furiously spreads beyond every limit—as a powerful, animating, driving force—drawing behind its gigantic steps the vigorous and titanic action of hard human muscle.

Fascism is impotent, because it is brute force.

It is matter without spirit.

It is body without mind.

It is night without dawn!

It—fascism—is the other face of socialism…

They are lightless mirrors. Two spent stars!

Socialism is the numerical—material—force that, by acting in the shadow of a dogma, resolves and dissolves itself in a miserable spiritual “no” that empties it of any unchained, willful, heroic, ideal resilience. Fascism is an epileptic child of the spiritual “no” that is brutalized by striving—vainly—toward a vulgar material “yes.”

In the field of moral values, they are equal. Fascism and socialism are two worthy brothers. Even if you call the latter Abel and you call the former Cain. A common Dream unites them. And that dream is called Power.


VIII



Black flags in the wind

stained with blood and sun

Black flags in the sun

howling of glory in the wind




What the war didn’t and couldn’t do, revolution can and must do!


Oh, black flags carried

in a man’s rebellious fist

as he focuses his gaze intensely

beyond the ruling lie

—fluttering in the sun and wind

fluttering in the wind and sun

Victory smiles in the distance!

In the distance—in the distance—in the distance!

In the glory of the sun and wind!


IX



Fascism and socialism are bandages of the time, delayers of the deed!

They are rabidly crystallized fossils that willful dynamism—with which we animate history as it passes—will sweep away into the common grave of the times.—Because in the field of spiritual and ethical values the two enemies are the same.

They are two sides of the same coin.

They both lack the light of eternity!

Only great intellectual vagabonds—carriers of the black flag—can be the luminous animating fulcrum of eternal revolution that pushes the world forward.


X



Our willful soul is multiform…

The fiery throbbing of the sun and the tremulous shudders of the stars pass through it!

We are rebel poets and philosophers of destruction.

We are anarchists.

Iconoclasts!

Individualists,

atheists,

nihilists!

We are the carriers of black flags.


We walk in the night

with a sun in our mind,

and with tow huge golden stars

shining in our blazing eyes!




We walk on!…

And in the theater of humanity, our place is at the most extreme of all extreme lefts.


XI



Behind the gigantic, black thundercloud that still covers the sky, a red twilight flashes.

The tragic celebration of the red evensong is near.

The last black night will become red with blood.

With blood and fire.

Because blood demands blood.

It’s an old story…

And then our children—the children of the Dawn—must be born from blood and forged by fire.

Because new individual ideas must be born, more virginal and beautiful, from the great social tragedies, from the turmoil of new hurricanes!

And it is only from the great, fiery, bloody catastrophe that the real, profound Antichrist of humanity and thought will be born. The real child of earth and sun able to climb over the peaks and probe the abysses.

Because the Antichrist is Eagle and Serpent.

He inhabits the peaks and the depths.

He—the spirit of the new man—will pass through the smoking ruins of the old, destroyed world to rise toward the magnificent mystery of the coming virgin dawn.

Beautiful and superb—he will stand upon the threshold of the new morning saturated with the wild, scintillating strength of superhuman beauty, saying to reluctant men: Onward, onward!


We rush beyond every system

We rush beyond every form

We fly toward the highest freedom

Toward extreme ANARCHY!



XII



We—free spirits—vagabonds of the idea—atheists of solitude—demons of the unseen desert.

We—luminous monsters of the night—we have already gone to the peaks.


We walk in the night

with a sun in our mind,

and with tow huge golden stars

shining in our blazing eyes!




And—with us—everything must be driven to its highest consequence.

Even hatred.

Even violence.

Even “crime”!

Because hatred gives strength that dares.

Violence and “crime” are the genius that destroys and the beauty that creates.

And we want to dare.

To destroy—to renew—to create!

Because all that is low and vulgar must be broken up and destroyed.

Only what is great shall remain.

Because what is great belongs to beauty.

And life should be beautiful.

Even in sorrow.

Even in the hurricane!…


XIII



We have killed the “duty” of solidarity, so that our free lust for spontaneous love and voluntary parenthood acquires a heroic value in life.

We killed pity because it is a false christian emotion and because we want to create noble, unacknowledged generous egoism.

We strangled false social rights—creator of the humble, cowardly beggars—so that man will dig up his deepest, most secret “I” to find the power of the Unique.

Because we know it ourselves.

Life is tired of having stunted lovers.

Because the earth is tired of being uselessly trampled by huge hordes of stupid, chanting, praying, christian midgets.

And finally because we are also tired of these carrion “brothers” of ours who are incapable of peace or war. Inferior in hatred and in love.

Yes! We are sick and tired!

Humanity must be renewed.

We need a epic and barbaric song of new and virgin life sounds over the world.


We’re the carriers

of blazing torches.

We’re the kindlers

of crackling pyres.

Our flag is black.

Our road is the infinite.

And our highest ideal

is the peak and the abyss.




We walk on!…


We walk in the night

with a sun in our mind,

and with tow huge golden stars

shining in our blazing eyes!




We walk on…

And if our dream is an illusion?

And if our struggles are useless and vain? And if the renewal of humanity is impossible to accomplish?

Ah, no! We will walk on just the same.

For our own dignity.

For the love of our ideas.

For the freedom of our spirits.

For the passion of our mind.

For the necessity of our life.

Better to die as heroes in an effort of liberation and self-elevation than to vegetate as impotent cowards in this repugnant reality.



Oh black flags,

oh black trophies,

emblems and symbols

of eternal revolt.




You who are the bloody evidence of all human audacity:

You who are the destroyers of all prejudice:

You who are the only real enemies of all human shame—of all sinister lies!

You who sing eternal revolt, soaked in sorrow and blood!


I grip it in my strong fist

and in the midst of windy storms

I raise it in the glory of the sun.

In the glory of sun and the wind…
Of wind and sun and light.


from Proletario #2, July 1922

With Sincere Pity by Renzo Novatore

I



Oh, good “Goliard”, come—come to me!

Come and listen to the sublime verses of my perverse, cursed lyre. Come and listen to the laughter of my melancholy…

What are you afraid of? What are you afraid of ?

Could you be afraid of the livid, yellow fires of my sulfurous hells?

Could you be afraid of the mysterious winds of my symbolic peaks?

Don’t you understand me?

“Couldn’t I be a false chord in the divine symphony, thanks to the consuming irony that shakes and bites me?”

But you, who are you?

Could you be some spectacled professor who still has old polemical-theoretical accounts to settle with me?

But let it go, oh Goliard, let go of ancient regrets and old torments that trouble your heart. Today is my spiritual Easter feast, my table is set…

So come—oh Goliard—to my table, drink and be quiet!


II



I am a “well of truth, black and shining, where the livid star, the ironic, hellish beacon, the torch of satanic charm, sole glory and comfort—the awareness in evil—flickers!”

But you—who are you?

“Lucky for them, the workers don’t know Baudelaire.” What did you say? Is that how it is, true Goliard? “Long live ignorance and Anarchy. Death to intellectuality, Thought and Art.” Is this what you mean, true Goliard?

But doesn’t “Goliard” signify the rebellious and dissolute student of the Middle Ages?

Ah, poor, grotesque parody!

Oh! pity… pity!


III



Certain that the good Umanitá Nova will absolve and that the Sacred Vestal Virgin—of whom you are the zealous priest—will pardon you, I—the “perverse” and “cursed” poet—invite you into my sad, melancholy oasis where unknown springs gush coolly.

Oh! Come, come!

My demon sleeps too much today and so do my pure Furies.[3]

Come, come…

I will show you the purest flowers of evil in the human garden of my heart, under the fruitful sun of my tormented soul. They are flowers of pity and sorrow, they are roses of blood and love, they are shudders and tears.

Tears of flesh and shudders of the ideal—music of urgent life, flights of spirituality…

Oh, come, come…

Today, in my hell, there is Paradise—come, oh Goliard, it is time!


IV



Here is the “damned Woman” whose sorrowful beauty I artistically—anarchically, humanely, sensitively—sang, whose tortured mind I raised—in song. Look at her, look at her. Do you see her, oh Goliard?

Do you hear her?

Look! There are the ones “laid on the sand, like a thoughtful herd, who turn their eyes toward the mountainous horizon,” and others are “deep in the woods stammering the loves of timid childhood.” Do you see them?

Watch, oh Goliard, as they “walk through rocks full of phantasms!” That is where Saint Anthony saw the blushing naked breasts of his temptation rise like lava…

And then there are those with “howling fevers” who call on Bacchus to drown their regrets, and others who “hide a horsewhip under their dresses” to then—in the dark forest and on solitary nights—“mix the froth of pleasure with their tears and torments.” And I—oh, Goliard of Umanitá Nova, who tried to make unconscious mockery and irony about what I wrote that you couldn’t understand—I wanted to sing of one of these “damned women”—all women are, in this sense, more or less “damned”—one of those who, like the poet, is able to say, “Skies, lacerated like seahores, my pride is reflected in you.

“Your vast clouds, in mourning, are the funeral cars of my dreams, and your glimmerings are the reflections of the Hell in which my heart revels.”


V



Charles Baudelaire, the man who—“lucky for them”—“the workers don’t know.” The marvelous poet who, without the treasury of the U.A.I. in his pocket, was able to get intoxicated with the most exquisite—even though dangerous—deep, luminous, refined sensations. The singular genius whose “mysteriously half-opened lips seemed to guard sarcastic secrets.” The strange, cursed, god-like poet who had no horror of bending down in the mud to humanely gather the Flowers of Evil and sublimate them through the tragic glow of his Art, so that he sang those “damned women” over the tremulous bow of his magical lyre.

“Oh virgins, oh demons, oh monsters, oh martyrs, great spirits, contemptuous of reality, thirsty the infinite, devotees and bacchantes, now full of howls and tears, you, who my spirit has followed into your hell, poor sisters, I love you as I sympathize with you, with your dark pain, with your unsatisfied thirst and the urns of love that fill your great hearts!”


VI



And I too—like Baudelaire—on of the great dead ones whom I secretly love—I desired—in the columns of this paper of ours—that is guilty of being called Proletario—to sing—humanely and anarchically—the tragedy, the tears, the laughter, the crying, the sorrow, the torment, the good, the evil, the sin and the hope of one of these women so that anarchists will know that, among us, not everyone is willing to throw mud and shit on those who, through an excessive thirst for the infinite, have fallen headlong into the abyss with their eyes fixed on the sky and their minds intoxicated by the stars.

And I have written this all with a pen that is my own, with a language that is my own, with a style that is original, that is my own, and that no goliardic—poorly goliardic—irony could persuade me to change by turning from my path.


VII



Some comrade—writing privately to another comrade—once characterized Renzo Novatore as “Anarchy’s Guido da Verona.”[4]

Without pausing to refute the accusation, I will say to you, as Guido da Verona had to say to his critics: “Say what you will about me, I will always give you fragrant roses… even if born in sorrow, even if germinated in tears.”


VIII



Today, my anarchist heart is full of infinite kindness. My winged mind wanders round and round through the sky of the idea.

My free spirit dances merrily in the sad oasis of my solitude—where my mysterious melancholy sings.

Come, oh Goliard—come!

Today my demon is sleeping, as are my Furies…

Come drink at the unknown, virgin springs of my infinite pity…

Tomorrow, the satanic creatures of my volcanic hell could awaken, and I could be furious…

You know? I am a strange, many-sided man.


from Proletario #3, August 15, 1922

[1] A Goliard was a wandering clerical student in medieval Europe disposed to conviviality, license, and the making of ribald and satirical Latin songs.

[2] The paper of the Italian Anarchist Federation. I believe it is still being published and has generally followed a Malatestan line

[3] A reference to the Erinyes or Furies of ancient Greek mythology, dark, primal goddesses of vengeance.

[4] Guido da Verona (1881-1939) was a poet and erotic novelist who eventually got into trouble with the fascist authorities for his writings and committed suicide to escape death at their hands.

The death of the most horrible monster by Erinne Vivani

I was alone and sad. I walked aimlessly through the deserted countryside under the scourge of the noonday sun, with the sole aim of living a few hours in solitude, far from the crowd of voluptuaries and paupers. Dark thoughts bombarded my brain, my mind was in turmoil and I walked, I walked tirelessly, paying no attention to the passing time, not to paths I traversed, which were completely unknown to me.

The sun was nearly setting when I found myself in a place that I called the realm of death. The terrain was all muddy, not one tree, not one blade of grass. A corrupt stench emanated from the pond, over which the sky was almost covered with a myriad of insects and strange black birds, that whirled through the still air without making any noise. Where was I? I turned around and began walking again with the intention of going back home, but I hadn’t even gone ten steps when a voice sounded in that bog and called me by name. Hesitating a bit, I turned toward the point from which the voice had come and spotted something moving in the mud. Who could it be? I took a few steps and made out a horrible monster, who invited me with gestures to approach him. What horror! He was a frightening monster. His body was covered with very long, muddy, bloody, shaggy hair. His enormous head was covered with so many huge snakes that rhythmically opened their mouths wide. The eyes, the nose, the mouth and the ears were replaced with six large circular holes. Instead of fingers and toes, the hands and feet had very long, hooked claws. And that stench came from his body!

With a voice that had nothing human about it, the monster said to me:

“Oh, there you are at last! Why aren’t you laughing now, cursed disciple of Stirner, solitary dweller of the peaks, scourge of morals? Why aren’t you laughing now?”

“But that Egyptian Stirner!” I answered. “I am no one’s disciple. But who are you, and how do you know me?”

“I,” the monster replied, “am Morality and I demand the reasons for the insults that you’ve poured out on me for nearly twenty years, along with those rascals, your individualist comrades. You have always reviled me though you know that I am the direct emanation of God and am eternal and omnipotent like him. If you don’t change your mind, I, with these divine hands, will kill you and drink your damned blood.”

“Here, oh Morality,” I added in dismay, “I might be wrong and would like to admit it. Try to convince me of the errors I committed and I will be happy to become you faithful slave and fervent admirer.”

But the monster answered wrathfully:

“No, no, here it is not a question of being convinced or persuaded, here it is a question of blindly believing me as others do, and you are no different from the others, do you understand?”

“I’ve understood divinely,” I ventured to declare, “only I would like to beg you to talk to me about the high mission that you have in the world: satisfy me.”

“I will satisfy you,” the monster said, “but first I want to eat.”

As he said this, he sat down, opened a sack that he had beside him, lifted a dead baby out of it, bit into the little head and begin to greedily eat.

I was horrified.

Morality asked me: “Would you like to have some?”

“Many thanks,” I answered, “but we individualists are not really cannibals as a great man, a moralist of recent times, insinuated. Tell me, if it’s permissible, who provides you with those poor babies?”

He candidly confessed:

“All the moralists bring them to me in exchange for the services I render them.”



***

When he had finished the macabre meal, the monster started to speak:

“Now, listen to me well, I will speak frankly and sincerely to you, but don’t get squeamish if I show you excessively bitter and sensitive truths.

Know, first of all, that my nature and functions change with the changing of historical and social times and vary from place to place. In certain places, for example, cannibalism and polygamy are moral, while among us, they are the most atrocious crimes. And even here, what was allowed yesterday is banned today, because it is considered immoral, whereas tomorrow it might even be judged very moral, or even made downright obligatory.

Furthermore, my functions change in accordance with the social classes, parties, sects, organizations, etc., to which individuals belong, because my spirit is like a polyhedron of a thousand faces and each face is intended for a given group or category of human beings”



***

“For example, I tell the rich ruling class:

For you it is moral to live on the backs of the workers, to travel in luxury trains, in automobiles, in airships, to dress in silk, to spend thousands of dollars on a bauble, to keep a hundred gilded prostitutes, to own palaces in the cities, villas on the mountains and by the sea and servants in livery and horses and carriages and everything, because property is sacred and inviolable. So try to educate the rabble in the respect of that principle, and if the mob of the poor and of slaves dares to raise its head, you have recourse to the hired killers who, in the name of the law or for a handful of cash, will know how to put those who violate sacred property in their place.”



***

“To priests and monks I say:

Preach resignation and humility, darken the intellect, put minds to sleep, promise paradise beyond the tomb, always fleece the poor when they are baptized, confirmed, given communion, married, when they are ill, when they die and get buried and even hundreds and thousands of years after they are buried, reciting psalms in celebration of the mass for their souls. So it is.

And don’t get the idea of forming a family, because it is a serious worry. Woman?… Eh, there are so many rich and poor women who need your confessional! Don’t be afraid. Even many subversives send their wives, their sisters, their daughters to you. And then there are the nuns, Mary’s daughters, her pupils, etc. and in the end, it isn’t said that we must discard the children entrusted to you religious care. Always entertain yourselves, since the nitwits pay well. Hurrah for the black mass!”



***

“But my work becomes most eloquent and effective when I exercise the patriotic function. Oh, the fatherland! I say to the children of rich men, officers, priests and whores: ‘Be patriotic. Whoever doesn’t love the fatherland, doesn’t love his mother. And show your patriotic passion by singing the praises of war, the world’s hygiene. There are your enemies who speak a different language from yours, who have different customs, exterminate them in the holy name of the fatherland. Our king, the king of the rich, will conquer a span of earth, will be more powerful, and, because of his power, yours will grow, since he is your father, the father of the fatherland. Shout in the streets and alleys: Long live war! and war will be. You don’t want to go? You are right. You are rich and deserve to be spared. Shout: We will arm ourselves and depart, and the army of outcasts will depart without thinking and slaughter and get slaughtered because the king and the fatherland want it this way, I want it this way.

Mothers, wives, children, sisters will weep and curse in vain. Will there be recalcitrant soldiers who don’t want to go, that don’t want to murder unknown people who have never caused them any harm? But does it seem like it? Workers are patriots, they are heroes, they will fight like lions and bring back victory.

If, later, they didn’t show themselves as such, our fine gendarmes, the royal guards, the officers of the Guardia di Finanza[1] and other cops would think to give them a kick in the ass and push them to attack and counterattack.

Forward, Savoy, through love or through force!

Hatred will spread like wildfire, the thirst for blood will become unquenchable; it will become lust. It will be a savage body to body struggle, rivers of blood will flow and mountains of corpses will rise. The more a man is a brute, the more he will be judges a hero. This is what happened in the last world war. There were millions and millions of deaths, millions and millions who were left blind, deaf, mute, mad, criminal, tubercular, crippled in their arms and legs, stupefied and so on saying, but what does it matter?

The war generated famine and plague. Old people and children of workers wept and stretched out their hand for pity from the people, young women became prostitutes, but the rich had more money, more power, more glory. This is war, this is the fatherland, this is Morality.”



***

“Now I will tell you about one of my dear descendents: fascism. Three years ago, the interests of the nation, that is of the bourgeoisie, were seriously threatened by the proletarian tide, which—tired of putting up with endless misery—was overwhelming the sacred institutions of the fatherland. The proletariat no longer listened to it’s rulers’ gentle exhortations to calm. Then fascism rose up to destroy the subversives. Thousands of young men enlisted, and they were armed to the teeth.

The police and the judicial system assured them of impunity, the bourgeoisie paid a discrete wage, the press respectfully gave its applause, and they were able to adopt the practice of terror on a large scale.



***

Flanked by the royal guard and by the police in black shirts, every day they commit all sorts of acts of bravado. They make it obligatory for citizens to stick the tricolor outside of their windows, to wear a ribbon in the buttonhole of their jacket, to rise to their feet, hats off, at the first notes of the royal march, to shout Long live the king! In compensation, they basically call themselves republicans like their duce. And they set fire to the workers’ hovels. Everything is permitted to them except striking the leaders of the opposing parties, because if these parties lost their leaders, no one would carry out the task of firefighter and spy.”



***

The monster paused a moment, then continued the speech:

“Perhaps you are ignorant of my infinite power and therefore fight me, oh wicked one. To form a concept of my supreme power for you, I am telling you that I penetrate into human hearts, direct the emotions and passions and all the carnal relations between man and woman. In this case, I take the name of sexual morality.

Among civilized people like us, I proclaim single, monogamous, exclusivist love. It is true that very few men and women follow it, that almost the totality prefer the plurality of affections and of copulations, because all are lovers of the new and the various in all manifestations of life and especially in love, but what could that matter to me?

I require love for just one, if not in substance, at least in form because appearances must absolutely be saved.

I know that you are not of this opinion, that you like to frolic from flower to flower, savoring sinful pleasures, inhaling with your full lungs the scents of the velvety flesh, decorating yourself with the flowers of evil. But I laugh at you, at the disappointments and sorrows that I create for you. I have promised you I’d be sincere, and I will speak to you as well of the very serious inconveniences that derive from the prohibitions of sexual morality.

Young boys and girls, to whom copulation—due to their tender age—is denied, are consumed and mangled in the practice of masturbation.

A few years ago—you’ll recall—the newspapers spoke of a young woman of the high aristocracy, who, while she entertained herself in her room with her dog, heard the door handle move. To hide her guilt, she tried to free herself from the dog’s embrace, the beast, who couldn’t tolerate the abrupt interruption, strangled her.

The instances in which a some woman, in order to destroy the evidence of her illegitimate love, tries to abort and goes to end her days in the hospital.

Some other woman, still in homage to morality, strangles the fruit of her womb with her own hands and throws it in a canal of a sewer. Then there are the most beautiful women, exuberant with youthful life, thirsty for intoxication, who are obliged to give themselves to the embrace of an old, diseased, repugnant man.” “Ah,” I interrupted, “I wasn’t wrong when I wrote in a magazine that venereal diseases, copulation with dogs, infanticide and all the crimes committed for amorous passion have their origins in the limitations imposed by morality!”

“I don’t allow you to interrupt me,” Morality protested, “because my truth must not be discussed, but accepted.”



***

“Now I should speak to you for a while about the disciplined, advanced and conscious proletariat, but it would useless, since you know far too well its infinite merit as beast of burden and of the lash. Instead I will mention the various political parties, republican, socialist and communist.

All parties are equivalent, all are based on state reason, on the principle of authority. It’s not a struggle for liberty, but rather for the replacement of one more or less idiotic and savage tyranny with another. In Russia, for example, Lenin came after the Czar, and Lenin will be followed by… Lenone[2] and so on, because that is what moral law wants.”



***

“As you well know, not even anarchists—better designate by the name of libertarian communists—are immune to moralism. Haven’t you heard how they preach and how they opinionate on the Goddess Morality?

They also organize, that is, deceive themselves and deceive others. They also want to redeem the world, as if freedom could be granted. Freedom, instead, must be lived. And they speak to the masses about a radiant tomorrow: and the masses either don’t understand anything, or they turn a dazzled eye toward the promised Land. Tomorrow the revolution and expropriation, tomorrow equality, freedom and happiness for all. In the meantime, one starves to death.

The theory of the future is the theory of more or less rosy dream, but so far from reality. It is the theory of Christianity. Christ died twenty centuries ago, but Christianity is still alive and triumphant. Christ, for the love of men, said Tomorrow!

All schools of socialism repeat, parrot-like, Tomorrow!, Tomorrow! It is my shadow—the shadow of Morality—that, to cloud the reality of the present, speaks of the light of the future.

I have weakened and domesticated anarchists; I have made them honest and civil; I have spoken to the of love against hatred, of justice and not of revenge, and they—strong from my protection—have risen in the pulpit and—as revolutionaries—have preached against acts of individual terrorism and—as expropriators—against expropriations by individuals. Doesn’t it seem abundantly logical to you? Sure, because for them the individual is worth much less than a pathogenic microbe, whereas society is everything.

It is necessary to destroy egoism in human beings—they obsessively cry—because when egoism is destroyed, human beings will live happily on the earth as good brothers. Whereas you say to everyone and especially to revolutionaries: Be egoistic, because the more egoistic you are, the thirstier you will be for freedom and happiness, and the less you will be able to tolerate your state of misery and enslavement.

Today, in consequence of the fascist police reaction, you start talking in your papers of the need for heroic anarchism again. But it is still certain that anarchist moralists, who will stigmatize every act of individual rebellion, will never be lacking. The social-anarchists were the ones who downgraded, branded, cast stones at Ravochol, Henry, Vaillant, Duval, Mariani, Aguggini and so many other avengers of Anarchy. And I did this on my own, the glory is all mine. I am Morality, born from blind ignorance and the authoritarian spirit of humanity, and I must carry out my function of darkening minds, of creating frightening and baleful phantoms, of extinguishing any spirit of revolt, and as long as I live, human being will be slaves, poor and cowardly. And not even you will be spared from my miserable, ruthless wrath, oh hellish devil.”



***

“Stop, by god!”—I roared—and in a split second pulled out my poisoned dagger; I rushed at the monster slashing his throat terribly. The mortally wounded monster sunk his claws into my poor flesh making it bleed and spewed a reeking greenish-yellow slime from his mouth, completely flooding my face. But new and more terrible blows of my knife rained on the monster, who fell to the ground. He was dead. I immediately thought of cutting out his heart to show to my friends, my comrades, my brothers in sorrow and struggle. And I got ready for the task with my weapon.

But, imagine, oh my brother, the impression I felt when, in place of a heart, I found a huge stone? Suddenly getting over my surprise, I exclaimed: “It’s good in itself.” This would serve me for perfecting my blows when facing some moralistic swine, if there still were any.


Erinne Vivani

from Proletario #4,
September 17, 1922

[1] A militarized Italian police force under the authority of the Minister of Economy and Finance.

[2] This is, unfortunately, an untranslatable insulting play on words. Lenone is the Italian word for a procurer or pimp.

My Anarchism by Armando Diluvi

A while ago, in an issue of Umanitá Nova, there was a debate between comrades Enzo Martucci and Malatesta. They topic was individualism. The one who is writing this understands anarchism from an individualistic perspective and is therefore jumping in.



***

And I will immediately declare that I don’t even agree with Martucci. For example, where he maintains: “if there are individuals who have to cooperate with others to satisfy their needs, there are also strong individuals who are sufficient in themselves for the preservation and development of their personality.” This, I repeat, I do not believe. I think that, by character and temperament, I am one of those who tries to be as sufficient in myself as possible. But I am not able to do this. The material needs of life are so numerous that I still have need of others for some things.

And spiritual needs? Intellectual satisfaction and amusement? If, for instance, I would like to make love to one or more women? If I want to go to the theater? If I want to ride in an airplane? And then, when I might do any of these things, what if I don’t want to do it by myself? What is left of my satisfied I?

For me, the logic of my I is what preserves it from concern for others. Privates and generals aren’t supposed to exist for me, contact counts for nothing to me, I serve myself with them here even when materially instead I serve them. It is either because my concept of slavery is so low and vulgar or because my instinct for rebellion doesn’t have the force of those whom I detest and who enslave me.

However, I can’t conceive of the realization of any anarchist communism like Malatesta yearns for. If the thing remains a desire and aspiration that everyone else does it as I still remain to do it… this is fine. And here perhaps we are in agreement, I—individualist… at least, I think—and communist Malatesta. But why did Malatesta complain in an article a while ago that anarchists were “not organized enough”? Then, how did he come to write in this debate: “We say, and we say it with doubts, that, in our opinion, a communist way of life would respond best to the needs of individualists, but we have never dreamed of imposing our ideas on others and even less concrete way of life”? But the organization you demand to make? To bring down current and coming governments and carry out expropriation? This is logical. But communism would only occur through “the free adherence of human beings.”

I ask, dear Malatesta, if I could consider the anarchist communist form of society to be the best… because it would a society of angels as opposed to today’s society of demons, but I don’t know if it would satisfy me and I don’t know if it would be practical. Is it true, are we pounding a nail back in, one that might be rusty? And what if I want to live without producing anything for you? And what if, by instinct, I don’t particularly want with living together in such a society? It is true, I could by asked: “and what do you do now?” If I make myself strong, I rebel, and society strikes me with… law. But with what will communist society strike me?

***

But I am aware that I’ve gone on about other people’s anarchism, and my own? I understand anarchism from the side of destruction. Its aristocratic logic lies in this. Destruction! Here is the real beauty of anarchism. I want to destroy everything that enslaves me, weakens me and suppresses my desires and I would like to step over the corpses I make of them. When remorse, scruples, conscience exist in me and make me their non-christian slave, my iconoclastic spirit destroys them. And when I don’t feel them, one sees that they don’t exist in me. Yes, iconoclastic negation is the most practical.

And when you realize your communist society tomorrow, would I be satisfied contemplating my navel? Furthermore, I don’t offer a better aspiration where you all would come with us, oh today’s prophecies of tomorrow’s communist society.

The masses? But then, they will never be able to conceive of the individual!

In fact, the singular is what makes the great secrets that are not even conceived by those who enjoy and exploit them, the singular will of the individual is what accelerates progress, the individual is what is emerging and prevailing, the great mass is mediocrity, litter, feed for the ravenous desires of governors and politicians. The lone nihilist is the one who demolishes all the powerful, the iconoclast is the one who destroys all absurd beliefs with his negation. There can be nothing truly free in reconstruction. And this is why all that is not free and destructive is not anarchist. Stirner’s destructive philosophy is undeniably more real that Kropotkin’s reconstruction, no matter how mathematical.


Armando Diluvi
Proletario # 3, August 15, 1922

Of Individualism and Rebelion by Renzo Novatore

There are those who maintain that the human being is by nature a social being. Others maintain that the human being is by nature anti-social.

Well, I admit that I have never been able to clearly understand what they meant by their “by nature,” but I have understood that both sides are wrong, since the human being is social and anti-social at the same time.

Need, want, affection, love and sympathy are the elements that push him toward sociability and union.

The craving for independence and the desire for freedom push her toward solitude and individualism. But, while individualism operates and is realized against society, society defends itself from its attacks. The war between “societarianism” and “individualism” is thus a fertile war of vitality and energy. But, while the individual is necessary to society, this in its turn is necessary to him.

Individualism couldn’t possibly exist if there was no society against which it could affirm itself and live, expand itself and rejoice.



***



Among human beings—only the rebel is the most beautiful figure and the most complete being. He knows how to be the potential tool of his desiring will. He knows how to obey himself and command himself, to preserve himself and destroy himself. Because the rebel is the one who has learned the secret of living and the art of dying.



***



The one who falls rebelling against each and all, prevails even while falling.

And prevailing means instilling the flame of her thought and imposing the light of her ideas in others.

But the fallen rebel’s truest follower is the one who, when falling, knows how to rebel even against the “rebellion” of the already fallen hero.



***



Anyone who wants the spirit of rebellion to become eternal must want the child’s rebellion not to change in its turn into the father’s tyranny.



***



If my father rebelled against my grandfather so as not to be a slave of the paternal faith, I rebel against my father so as not to be a slave of the faith that made him rebel in his turn.

How could it make my son be tomorrow what I am today?



***



Only from the ruins of everything the rebel has destroyed can the creative genius be born.

But what does the creation of the genius prepare if not a new rebellion?



***



I agree with Nietzsche in believing that there has never been any need to question a martyr to know the truth. But desiring force, daring audacity and skillful creative will are treasures inherited only from the genius, the rebel, the hero.



***



I have seen a genius “steal” and an idiot throw a deadly bomb at a state minister.

The first stole so as to live independently and create in freedom. The second killed because of a hidden personal hatred and the will to die.

The first carried out a “vulgar, common crime” and is a “common criminal.” The second carried out a “political crime” and is a “noble and generous political criminal.” I now ask all subversive, political people in general, and anarchists in particular—if in facing this fact, it is a chance to raise another “political crime” up into the splendor of glory and the feasts of the sun so as to cast “common crime” into the mud.



***



Alas! There are still too many who look at the work. But before looking at the work, I look at the creator. Yet even for many—so many—anarchists, it seems that the individual counts for little…

The majority of them are still among the rabble who say: “Human beings don’t count. Events and ideas count.” And this is why, even among us, many higher, sublime beings have been cast into the mud, while many idiots have been raised up in the sun.



***


I deny the right to judge me to all those who don’t understand the voice of my yearnings, the howl of my needs, the flights of my spirit, the sorrow of my mind, the thrill of my ideas and the anguish of my thought. But only I understand all this. Do you want to judge me? Okay then! But you will never judge my real self. Instead you will judge the “me” that you yourself have invented. When you believe you have me between your fingers to crush me, I will be up there, laughing in the distance.

from Proletario # 4, September 17, 1922