Deportation, its meaning and menace: Last message to the people of America by Alexander Berkman and Emma GoldmanGoldman, Emma
History
Deportation, its meaning and menace: Last message to the people of America by Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman
Goldman, Emma
Anarchism; Deportation
The United States has fortunately always been free from the vicious
spirit of race hatred and persecution of the foreigner. The native negro
excepted, this country has known no race problem. The American people
were never guilty of harboring bitterness or deep-seated prejudice
against members of other nationalities. In truth, the great majority of
them are themselves of foreign birth or descent, the only true native
being the American Indian. Whatever racial differences there may exist
between the various nationalities or stocks, they have never assumed the
form of active strife. On the contrary, they have always been of a
superficial nature, due to misunderstanding or other temporary causes,
and have never manifested themselves in anything save light,
good-humored banter. Even the much-advertised antagonism of the West
toward the Chinese and Japanese is not due to any inherent hatred, but
rather to very definite commercial and industrial factors. In the case
of the Russians especially, as well as in regard to members of the
various branches of the Slavic race, the people of America have always
been particularly friendly and well-disposed. But suddenly all the
war-time hatred toward the “Hun enemy,” the blindest intolerance and
persecution are poured upon the head of the Russian, the Slav. Great
indeed is the power of propaganda! Great is the power of the American
thought controller—the capitalist press. The Russian has become the
victim of American pogroms!
Often and again in the past have we Anarchists pointed out that the
feudal lords of this land would follow, in their march to imperialism,
in the footsteps of the Czars of old Russia, and even outdo their
preceptors. Our liberal friends denounced us as fanatics, alarmists, and
pessimists. Yet now we are confronted with a state of affairs in
democratic America which, in point of brutality and utter repudiation of
every fundamental libertarian principle, surpasses the worst autocratic
methods the Czars of Russia ever dared apply against political
dissenters.
The world is familiar with the story of the pogrom horrors practiced
upon the Jews of Czarist Russia. But what the world, especially the
American world, does not know is that every pogrom in Russia was
directly incited, financed, and prepared by the Government as a means of
distracting the attention of the Russian people from the corrupt
despotic regime under which they suffered—a deliberate method of
confusing and checking the fast growing discontent and holding back the
rising tide of revolutionary upheaval.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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