having stolen a rifle. Even though it transpired that the theft had been carried out in order to use the rifle against the Turks, the rebel was convicted.”
The Milanese newspaper added not one single word of comment and this, to tell the truth, did not surprise us in the least. Deep down, today’s liberals and right-thinking folk—the very same people who only yesterday were leading demonstrations in support of rebel Candia, all in the name of trampled-on justice, freedom, and righteousness—have a notion of justice, freedom, and righteousness that we might call, to borrow the current parlance, Turkish.
Look at what is going on in our own country, here in the Italy where we enjoy all such freedoms and rights as, from a legal perspective, should make the Italian people the happiest of peoples, past, present, and maybe even future.
When it comes to practicalities, however, we face the same thing as would befall Trento and Trieste tomorrow, were they to be reunited with the mother country, or Candia, if the yearned for annexation to Greece were to come to pass.
The people’s lot, Balzac writes, is the lot that befell Sancho Panza—Don Quixote’s squire—the day he became king of that island… on terra firma. King, yes, but the moment he tried to exercise his sovereignty, someone popped up immediately and forbid him from doing so.
As a working man, I am actually entitled to the fruits of my labors, notwithstanding which, come the end of the week, I am reminded that the bulk of what I have earned finishes up in the master’s pockets.
They have granted me the right of association, but lo and behold, there are disbandment orders and, behind these, the specter of the Penal Code. Never mind: I can join a hundred, two hundred and indeed a thousand people in public; but should I make so bold as to do so, the least that will befall me is that I will earn a sound thrashing from the no less sound guardians of law and order. More? I am granted the right to think what I will, as best suits me, yet I know that despite the repeal of the emergency powers laws, my finest comrades, guilty only of aspiring to a society less squalid than this one, are still being banished into forced residence.121
It is shouted from the rooftops that we are free to write and free to publish anything that enters our heads, but we know from past experience what fate awaits our very humble paper if, through no fault of our own, we should fall foul of the king’s Prosecutor. —And finally, they will add that justice is the same for everyone, and, in truth, it is so equal for all, that the magistrate will acquit the commendatore and send me to prison for having been so foolhardy as to steal some trifle: just as the first Greek court set up in Candia yesterday convicted the rebel who had stolen a rifle for the noble purpose of defending his native land, and will shut both eyes to the thieves of a different stripe who will, tomorrow, prey upon the very same homeland to the liberation of which they contribute not at all.
So the issue to be resolved, we believe, is a far cry from the so-called nationality question. We believe—though our sympathies with those who rebel are a lot more authentic than those exhibited by certain politicians for sordid electioneering purposes—that the resolution of every other issue is dependent upon the economic question, and that our material and moral efforts should be geared towards persuading the proletariat that it will not attain real freedom until such time as society’s wealth ceases to be the monopoly of the parasitical few.
121 [Author’s note] Galileo Palla, Silvio Majolini, Luigi Burbassi to Ustica—Luigi Galleani, Emilio Santarelli, Serafino Mazzotti to Pantelleria, etc.
And the other islands? The government of gentlemen will see to those anon!
On the Road to Damascus
Translated from “Sulla via di Damasco,”
L’Agitazione (Ancona) 1, no. 1 (March 14, 1897).
“To listen to him, you’d think he had been touched and revivified by the breath of the truth which earlier hid itself from him, like some unknown deity wrapped in a cloud. That cloud then dispersed by the blast of a rush of ideas and, having looked the new truth in the face, a long sigh welled up from the depths of his chest and he felt like he had received a calling to a more expansive, broader life.”
* * *
Osvaldo Gnocchi Viani carries on in the same vein for a good column-full of such prose in which he talks about Him, the great convert, as he deserves.122
* * *
Like a new Saint Paul, “He no longer has his former faith.”
He too was startled by a vision on the road to Damascus.
Remember? A voice from on high called out to the apostle, saying: Saul, Saul, why dost thou persecute me? And the Apostle, thereafter known as Paul, stricken by the truth that had hitherto been beyond his knowledge, was converted and received his baptism and became the most ardent propagator of the faith.
You are right, Osvaldo: He has been converted, been baptized and become an apostle of the new… Milanese church: and he too will pen his epistles from Rome to the faithful from various… constituencies, questing for one that might lead him to… martyrdom in Montecitorio:123 a martyrdom, in fact, a lot gentler and more profitable than that suffered by the apostle Paul.
…
You are right, Osvaldo: all you socialist sheep are right. But bear this in mind: that the primitive Christian church went into decline and turned into the Catholic Church, complete with all its brutishness, at the very point when men who, up until that point, stood for differing and opposing doctrines, were reconciled with one another.
The adherents of the new church climbed to the highest, most lucrative levels of the State; the orthodox, the honest disciples, were driven out of the Christian community as heretics.
Catholicism’s victory marked the ruin of Christianity: there was no more talk of the principles of love, equality, and justice, which the Master, the meek workman from Nazareth, had preached to the multitudes!
Would your victory, you electoral socialists, not likewise mark the ruin of the unadulterated, true principles of socialism preached by your very own teachers, whom you today ignore?
May the future, of which even now you claim to be the masters and arbiters, prove us wrong here.
In the meantime, we, the heretics of today, shall stick sure-footedly to the old path!
122 Osvaldo Gnocchi Viani, “Fra due litiganti,” Lotta di Classe 6, no. 8 (February 20–21, 1897). The quotation above differs somewhat from the original, though the differences are minor. Gnocchi Viani was a prominent figure of Italian socialism, dating back to the days of the First International. His reference is to Saverio Merlino’s shift.
123 Montecitorio is the name of the palace in Rome that hosted the Italian chamber of deputies.
From London. For the Record124
Translated from “Da Londra. Cose a posto,” parts 1 and 2, L’Agitazione (Ancona) 1, no. 1 (March 14, 1897); no. 2 (March 21, 1897).125
Dearest comrades,
I am delighted about the imminent publication of the newspaper L’Agitazione and from the bottom of my heart wish you the utmost success. Your paper
