Preamble

Even throughout the endless, barren lands of the bleak deserts flowers bloom. Flowers that put out a sinful perfume and the make the very hands of those who pick them bleed, but that still have their own splendid history of joy, sorrow and love. I repeat, they are strange, wild flowers that arise from the nothing that creates. They were fertilized by the sun and then cruelly battered by the storm, thus!

These flowers are thoughts that sprouted in the deep and meditative solitude of my mind, while outside in the world that is no longer mine, madness rages furiously, lashed by the electrifying fire of lightning that strikes relentlessly.

And I, an unrepentant vagabond who loves to run wild on the joyous and frightening paths of this my solitary and deserted realm, will take my pleasure by periodically gathering a bunch of these wild flowers to crown this rebel banner. It was once already brutally crushed in a cowardly way, but it still sings the joyful chorus of eternal return.

*

Only those who have found themselves again after a long, hard desperate search and placed themselves on the margins of society, contemptuous and proud, denying anyone the right to judge them, are anarchists.

Those who are not able to recognize themselves in the greatness of their actions, they alone being their own judge, may believe that they are anarchists, but they are not.

The strength of will and potentiality (not to be confused with power), the spirit of self-elevation and individualization are the first rungs on a long and endless ladder that those who want to surpass themselves along with everything else climb.

Only those who, with impetuous violence, know how to appraise the rusty gates that enclose the house of the great lie where the lewd thieves of the I (god, state, society, humanity) have arranged to meet, in order to take their greatest treasure back from clammy, greedy hands adorned with the false gold of love, pity and civilization, from the baleful predators, can consider themselves lord and master of himself and call themselves anarchists.

*

Along with being the greatest rebel, the anarchist also has the merit of being a King. The King of himself, it is understood!

Those who believe that Christ might be the symbol that man should wave in order to achieve the libertarian synthesis of life would have to be a socialist or christian negator of anarchism.

Despite everything, Socrates was undoubtedly much greater than the brutishness of those among his people who condemned him. Nonetheless, when he accepted the hemlock that they sentenced him to drink, he carried out the sort of act of cowardice and devotion that anarchism mercilessly condemns.

*

When an individual uses any means to escape the insurmountable brutishness of a populace made ferocious and brutal by cannibalistic prejudices and frightening ignorance, or the sadistic corruption of a rotten society which believes it has the right to judge and condemn an individual because he carried out a specific action that the above-mentioned society is never at the level to understand, this is a superbly rebellious and individualistic act that can only find its reason for being and its glorification in anarchism.

*

Alas! Up to now, consciousness itself has been an atavistic and fearsome phantom. And it will only cease to be so when a human being has learned how to make it the image and mirror of his own unique will.

*

The first human being who said: “There is no god,” was undoubtedly an athlete of human thought. But the one who limited himself to saying that: “The god of the priest does not exist,” cheats through equivocation, leaving if sufficiently clear that he is a shady partisan who is already planning to kill people, perhaps with a new lie.

Remain very suspicious of those who limit themselves to the mere negation of god.

 

Cronaca Libertaria, volume 1 #8, Milano, September 20, 1917