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 have been tortured?”
The government denied none of it and, when the debate opened, it strictly forbade entry to the public and representatives of the press.
But that did not succeed in averting a scandal; beneath the army uniform of some of the designated defense counsels there still beat a human heart and what was going on became known to the public.
The public prosecutor counsel stated: “Given the enormity of the offense and the numbers of the accused, I am turning a blind eye to reason and, despite the absence of proof, am treating all of those on trial as perpetrators and accessories.”
The detainees all professed to be innocent. The presiding judge sought to prevent them from speaking and questioning the witnesses, who were the torturers themselves, but the detainees were insistent, shouting out and displaying the scars covering their entire bodies. The defense counsels protested and challenged the witnesses to be cross-examined. Even some gendarmes fled the court, horrified. The alleged perpetrator, Ascheri, stated that he confessed because he could no longer stand the torture and that it was under torture that he named those whom the judge required him to accuse. All of the others who made confessions or named others said the same, and they proved it with the still visible marks of the tortures to which they had been subjected.
Yet in spite of all of this, the court passed sentence—eight death sentences, with the others clapped in irons for life or given lesser sentences.
Many of those who were acquitted, or who had been found innocent and omitted by the investigating magistrate from his indictment, are still being held in preventive custody.
In Spain and abroad, public opinion was outraged. All those Spanish newspapers not living on secret funds called for a review of the trial and for a public hearing. In France and in England the newspapers carried many heart-rending documents; special editions were compiled; protest rallies held; embassies were taken to task by citizens of every persuasion.
It was hoped that the Spanish government would never dare take things further and that it would order a review of the trial.
Instead, the announcement has been made that the Supreme Court Martial is after one more life.
Are the Spanish people going to let this sacrifice be carried out?
Are civilized peoples not going to be able to force respect for civilization upon these western Turks who, in addition to the rash ferocity of the Turkish pasha, display the cold-blooded heartlessness and craven hypocrisy of the Catholic Inquisitor?
Polemic
Translated from “Polemica,” L’Agitazione (Ancona) 1,
no. 4 (April 4, 1897).
We have received the following letter, with a request that it be published:
For the Record
Regarding Merlino’s evolution, which was seen coming for many a year by those of us active within the anarchist camp, we need to explain ourselves, lest we fool ourselves again.
There is no denying that the anarchist camp is split into two factions, one called anarchist socialist and the other anarchist or libertarian. Between one faction and the other, there is a gap that seems negligible but which, in terms of substance, is very wide.
Both factions are in agreement about the End, both of them being communist and anarchist and cognizant of the need for the mutual solidarity without which anarchy is not possible. They are both convinced that the attainment of the End requires the s. r.148
But they differ substantially as regards means.
The anarchist socialists want large-scale organization of individuals into groups, groups into regions, and regions into continents; they want agreement on action; and embrace the collective deed, rejecting the individual deed.
The anarchists or libertarians want absolute freedom for the individual and the group; they accept the collective deed such as what happened
