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
_It is the Russian Revolution_. Not, of course, the Miliukov-Kerensky
revolution, but the real revolution that gave birth to Soviet Russia.
The submissive, enslaved, long-suffering Russian people unexpectedly
transformed into a free, daring Giant breaking a new path for the
progress of mankind—that is the reason for the changed attitude of the
capitalistic world. It is one thing to help Russian revolutionists to
overthrow the Czar and to put in his place a “democratic” form of
government which has proven such a boon to our own Czars of commerce and
industry. But it is quite a different thing to see the Prometheus of
labor rise in his might, strike off his chains, and with the full
consciousness of his complete economic power bring to life the dreams
and aspirations of a thousand years,—the economic, political, and
spiritual emancipation of the masses of the world. This pioneer social
experiment now being tried in Russia—the greatest and most fundamental
ever witnessed in all history—is the guiding star to all the oppressed
and disinherited of the world. Already its magic light is spreading over
the whole European horizon, the harbinger of the approaching Dawn of
Man. What if it should traverse the ocean and embrace our own shores
within its orbit? The whole social order of the financial Czars,
industrial Kaisers, and land Barons of America is at stake: the “order”
maintained by club and gun, by jail and lynch law in and out of court;
the “order” founded on robbery and violence, built upon sham and
unreason, artificiality and insanity, and supported by misery and
starvation, by the water-cure, the dungeon and straitjacket; an “order”
that transcends all chaos and daily makes confusion worse confounded.
Such social “order” is doomed. It bears within itself the virus of
disintegration. Already the conscience of America is awakening. The war
marked the crisis. Already American men have chosen imprisonment,
torture, and death, rather than become participants in an unholy war.
Already American men and women are beginning to realize the anti-social
destructive character and purpose of authority and government by
violence, force, and fraud. Already the workers of America are
outgrowing the vicious circle of craft-unionism, learning the lesson and
the power of solidarity of the international proletariat, and gaining
confidence in their own initiative and judgment, to the confusion and
terror of their antiquated, spineless leadership. Already they are
seeing through the sham of “equality before the law,” and are in open
rebellion to government by injunction.
A spark from the glowing flame of Soviet Russia, and the purse-proud
autocracy of America may be swept away by the social conflagration.
Wherefore the united chorus of all Czars and Kaisers, “Death to the
Bolsheviki, the aliens, the I. W. Ws., the Communists, the Anarchists!”
V
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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