Deportation, its meaning and menace: Last message to the people of America by Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman — John Shaqi
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
But thoughtful people in Russia were not long deceived by this hellish
stratagem. That is why Russians of character and intelligence never lent
themselves to the practice of Jew-baiting and persecution. The
authorities frequently had to resort to importing the human dregs of
distant communities, fill them with vodka, and then turn them loose on
the defenceless Jews. These Black Hundreds and hooligans of Czarist
Russia were the infamous regime now forever cast into the abyss of
oblivion by the awakened and regenerated spirit of New Russia. There
have been no pogroms in Soviet Russia.
But the Black Hundreds and the hooligans have now come to life again—in
democratic America. Here they are more mad and pernicious than their
Russian colleagues in crime had ever been. Their wild orgies of assault
and destruction are directed, not against the Jew, but against the more
comprehensive scape-goat of Capitalism, “the alien,” the “radical.”
These are being made the lightning rod upon which is to be drawn all the
fury of the storm that is menacing the American plutocracy. As the Czars
pointed at the Jew as the sole source and cause of the Russian people’s
poverty and servitude, so the feudal lords of America have chosen the
“foreign radical,” “the Bolshevik” as the vicarious victim for the sins
of the capitalist order. But while no intelligent and self-respecting
Russian ever degraded himself with the Czar’s bloody work, we see in our
democracy so-called cultured people, professional men and women, “good
Americans,” inspired and aided by the “respectable, reputable” press,
turn into bestial mobs. We see high Government officials, State and
Federal, play the part of the hooligans, encouraging and aiding the
American Black Hundred of legionaries, in a frenzied crusade against the
“foreigner,” whose sole crime consists in taking seriously the American
guarantees of free speech, free press, and free assembly.
The war hate against everything German was vicious enough, though the
people of America were repeatedly assured that we were not making war
against the German people. One can understand also, though not
countenance, the vulgar clamor against the best and finest expressions
of German culture, the stupid prohibition of the language of Goethe and
Schiller, of the revolutionary music of Wagner and Beethoven, the poetry
of Heine, the writings of Nietzsche, and all the other great creative
works of Teuton genius. But what possible reason is there for the
post-war hatred toward aliens in general and Russians in particular? The
outrages and cruelties perpetrated upon Germans in America during the
war pale almost into insignificance compared with the horrible treatment
the Russians in the United States are now subjected to. In fact, the
Czarist pogroms, barring a few exceptions, never rivaled the fearful
excesses now happening almost daily in various American cities, their
victims, men and women, guilty only of being Russians.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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