Anarchism; Atheism; Christianity -- Controversial literature
In a word, it is not at all difficult to prove, history in hand, that
the Church, that all the Churches, Christian and non-Christian, by the
side of their spiritualistic propagandism, and probably to accelerate
and consolidate the success thereof, have never neglected to organize
themselves into great corporations for the economic exploitation of the
masses under the protection and with the direct and special blessing of
some divinity or other; that all the States, which originally, as we
know, with all their political and judicial institutions and their
dominant and privileged classes, have been only temporal branches of
these various Churches, have likewise had principally in view this same
exploitation for the benefit of lay minorities indirectly sanctioned by
the Church; finally and in general, that the action of the good God and
of all the divine idealities on earth has ended at last, always and
everywhere, in founding the prosperous materialism of the few over the
fanatical and constantly famishing idealism of the masses.
We have a new proof of this in what we see to-day. With the exception
of the great hearts and great minds whom I have before referred to as
misled, who are to-day the most obstinate defenders of idealism? In the
first place, all the sovereign courts. In France, until lately, Napoleon
III. and his wife, Madame Eugénie; all their former ministers,
courtiers, and ex-marshals, from Rouher and Bazaine to Fleury and
Piétri; the men and women of this imperial world, who have so completely
idealized and saved France; their journalists and their _savants_--the
Cassagnacs, the Girardins, the Duvernois, the Veuillots, the Leverriers,
the Dumas; the black phalanx of Jesuits and Jesuitesses in every garb;
the whole upper and middle bourgeoisie of France; the doctrinaire
liberals, and the liberals without doctrine--the Guizots, the Thiers,
the Jules Favres, the Pelletans, and the Jules Simons, all obstinate
defenders of the bourgeoise exploitation. In Prussia, in Germany,
William I., the present royal demonstrator of the good God on earth; all
his generals, all his officers, Pomeranian and other; all his army,
which, strong in its religious faith, has just conquered France in that
ideal way we know so well. In Russia, the Czar and his court; the
Mouravieffs and the Bergs, all the butchers and pious proselyters of
Poland. Everywhere, in short, religious or philosophical idealism, the
one being but the more or less free translation of the other, serves
to-day as the flag of material, bloody, and brutal force, of shameless
material exploitation; while, on the contrary, the flag of theoretical
materialism, the red flag of economic equality and social justice, is
raised by the practical idealism of the oppressed and famishing masses,
tending to realize the greatest liberty and the human right of each in
the fraternity of all men on the earth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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