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 there is no more “Hun” to be hated and lynched. Commerce and
business know their interests. We must feed Germany—at a good profit. We
must do business with its people. Exit the Hun—_der Moor hat seine
Schuldigkeit gethan_. What a significant side-light on the artificiality
and life-brevity of national and racial antagonisms, when the fires of
mutual distrust and hatred are not fed by the interested stokers of
business and religion! But the Frankenstein and intolerance and
suppression cultivated by the war campaign is there, alive and vital,
and must find some vent for his accumulated bitterness and misery.
Oh, there, the radical, the Bolshevik! What better prey to be cast to
the Frankenstein monster?
The powers that be—the plutocratic imperialist and the
jingo-profiteer—all heave a happy sigh of relief.
III
The after-war conditions in the United States are filling the Government
and the more intelligent, class-conscious capitalists with trepidation.
Revolution is stalking across Europe. Its spectre is threatening
America. Disquieting signs multiply daily. A new discontent, boding ill
and full of terrible possibilities, is manifest in every walk of life.
The war has satisfied no one. Only too obviously the glorious promises
failed of fulfilment. Excepting the great financial interests and some
smaller war profiteers, the American people at large are aching with a
poignant disappointment. Some vaguely, other more consciously and
clearly, but almost all feel themselves in some way victimized. They had
brought supreme sacrifices, suffered untold misery and pain, in the
confident hope of a great change to come into their lives after the
victorious war, in the assurance of a radically changed and bettered
world.
The people feel cheated. Not yet have they been able to fix their gaze
definitely upon the specific source of their disappointments, to define
the true causes of their discontent. But their impatience with existing
conditions is passionate and bitter, and their former faith in the
established order profoundly shaken. Significant symptoms of a social
breakdown! Revolutions begin in the heart and in the mind. Action
follows in due course. Political and industrial institutions, bereft of
the people’s faith in them, are doomed. The changed attitude toward the
once honored and sacred conditions, now evident throughout the land,
symbolizes the complete bankruptcy of the existing order. The old
conceptions and ideas underlying present-day society are fast
disintegrating. New ideals are germinating in the hearts of the masses—a
prolific soil, rich with the promise of a brighter future. America is on
the threshold of the Social Revolution.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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