The Complete Works of Malatesta Vol. III. Errico MalatestaЧитать онлайн книгу.
and active fighter for genuine, complete emancipation.
Otherwise, we would have served and would serve the interests of the monarchy and the conservatives!
Let us all ponder this point. What is at stake is the interest of our cause and our honor as men and as a party.
The isolated, casual propaganda that is often mounted as a concession to one’s conscience, or as merely an outlet for a desire to argue, is of little or no use. Given the unconscious, impoverished conditions in which the masses find themselves, and all the forces lined up against us, this propaganda is forgotten and evaporates before it can build up any impact and make any headway. The terrain is too hard for seeds scattered randomly to germinate and put down roots.
We are after unrelenting, patient, coordinated effort tailored to a range of settings and a variety of circumstances. Each of us must be able to depend on the cooperation of all the rest; and wherever a seed has been thrown out, there must follow solicitous attention from the grower in the tending and protection of it until such time as it blossoms as a plant capable of surviving on its own and bringing forth further fertile seeds.
In Italy, there are millions of proletarians who are still blind instruments in the hands of the priests. There are millions who, while hating the master intensely, are persuaded that one cannot live without masters, and they are incapable of imagining and yearning for any other emancipation than their becoming masters in their turn and exploiting their fellow wretches.
There are vast stretches—actually most of the landmass of Italy—where our message has never been heard or, if perchance it has made it there, it has left no discernible trace behind.
Though only a few, there are workers’ organizations and we are alien to them.
Strikes occur and, caught unprepared, we are neither able to help the workers in their struggle nor profit from the mental unrest to spread our ideas.
Popular upheavals and near-insurrections happen and nobody gives us a thought.
Then comes the persecution, and we are imprisoned, deported in our hundreds or thousands, and we find ourselves powerless to even draw the public’s attention to the infamies visited upon us, let alone to do anything else.
To work, comrades! The task is a big one! To work, everyone!147
147 This article was impounded by the censor.
The Judicial Crime in Barcelona
Translated from “Il crimine giudiziario di Barcellona,”
L’Agitazione (Ancona) 1, no. 4 (April 4, 1897).
A telegram from Barcelona reports that the “Superior Court Martial has requested the death penalty for nine perpetrators of a dynamite outrage, lower sentences for others, and the acquittal of thirty accused.”
This is the penultimate act of a ghastly tragedy, of one of the most horrific crimes that a so-called civilized government has ever committed.
Here are the facts.
In the Calle Cambios Nuevos in Barcelona, on June 7 last year, a bomb was thrown into the middle of the Corpus Domini procession and exploded, claiming many victims.
Was it the work of a madman? Or was it the work of thugs hired to give the reaction a pretext for snuffing out the last remnant of freedom in much-feared Catalonia and for exterminating the known enemies of the priests and the monarchy by the garrotte and the firing squad, or by the slower but almost equally sure penalty of deportation to Fernando Po? Or was it one of those ineffectual and ill-targeted acts of vengeance, like in Barcelona or elsewhere in the past, when anarchists, irked and driven almost mad by persecution, thought to stand up for justice and mount propaganda?
One has no way of knowing. Some crackpots, attempting to plead the case for that act, said and put in print that the bomb was aimed at the believers following the procession. But the most likely thing, assuming that the thrower had some revolutionary purpose in mind, no matter how well or poorly grasped, is that the bomb was aimed at General Despujol who was at the head of the procession, surrounded by his general staff, and that it was only by misadventure that it exploded in the midst of the crowd.
Be that as it may, it is known that deeds of this sort are always the handiwork of isolated individuals and nothing came to light that might have led to the perpetrator.
Though quick to throw people in prison, even the police were left for several days absolutely at a loss as to whom to target. However, the liberal press and the public were saying that the bomb throwing had been contrived by the Jesuits, and as proof they pointed to the police’s inertia; and the government, which is egged on by the Jesuits who have the regent in thrall, wanted by all means to locate or invent the culprits.
And the arrests started. Without any criteria to guide them, just at random, they arrested upwards of 400 people, anarchists and non-anarchists, republicans, freethinkers, and even people who had never had any involvement in politics; some because they were on the staff of anarchist and anti-clerical newspapers, others because they had subscriptions to those newspapers; others because they had figured in earlier trials and, mostly, on the strength of anonymous tip-offs or simply because some copper needed to haul somebody off to prison and scooped the first person he came across.
Some of those arrested were lodged in the hold of a warship, some in the blockhouses of Montjuich; and they were held there and denied communication with anyone. Barcelona was under a state of siege; the press was muzzled; the families of the detainees knew nothing; no lawyer was allowed access to the detainees, who had been denounced to the military authorities and had no defense counsels beyond servicemen appointed to them by the court martial.
For long months, the trial was shrouded in the deepest mystery—and then there was a report that Ascheri had owned up to being the material author and had named his accomplices, who had confessed in turn, and that the prosecutor was asking for death sentences on 28 of the accused and penal servitude for life for another 80 or 100.
Meanwhile sinister whispers were starting to circulate in Spain. The odd letter that the detainees had managed to smuggle out, the indignation of a few warders and gendarmes who refused to act as butchers, and the confidential tales of others lifted an edge of the dense veil shrouding the mysteries of Spain’s Bastille. Torture is being used in Montjuich: around ten have died under it, others having been driven mad. Fasting and the stick are commonplace, mild ways of inducing the accused to say what the judge wants him to say. The detainees are fed dried cod and are denied beverages; then, after two or three days of that regimen, by which time the prisoner is prey to the terrifying hallucinations of thirst, the judge has him brought before him in chains and shows him a bottle filled with crystal clear water and says to him: confess and I’ll give you this water. The electric helmet is applied. Testicles are twisted between split rods and using guitar strings. Detainees are forced, on pain of a caning, to keep continually on the move, night and day, denied sleep and rest until they collapse, exhausted, to the ground; at which point they are forced, by red hot pokers to their naked flesh, to stand and walk again.
A committee of Barcelona residents, made up of well-known and respectable persons, went to Madrid and visited the newspaper editorial offices showing toenails torn from the feet of the Montjuich prisoners.
Evidence of the ghastly outrages being perpetrated under cover of the law were building up. What started out as fearful suspicion was becoming a generally held belief.
One of Madrid’s leading newspapers, El País printed: “If, as we believe it to be, it is true that in the Montjuich fortress the tortures of which the prisoners speak in their letters are in use, then Spain is more savage than Morocco and Turkey, and the Spanish people, if it tolerates this disgrace, is irrevocably lost to civilization.”
And then it added: “If the allegations are untrue, how come the government does not deny them by allowing the detainees to be seen, granting admittance to Montjuich to those eager to verify the complaints raised, and allowing a committee of physicians to visit those who claim to