Читать книгу The Complete Works of Malatesta Vol. III - Errico Malatesta - Страница 12

Translated from “A proposito di Candia,” L’Agitazione (Ancona) 1,

no. 1 (March 14, 1897).

Just the other day, the Corriere della Sera carried a wire report in these terms:

“Today the first Greek court sat in Candia. On trial was a rebel charged with having stolen a rifle. Even though it transpired that the theft had been carried out in order to use the rifle against the Turks, the rebel was convicted.”

The Milanese newspaper added not one single word of comment and this, to tell the truth, did not surprise us in the least. Deep down, today’s liberals and right-thinking folk—the very same people who only yesterday were leading demonstrations in support of rebel Candia, all in the name of trampled-on justice, freedom, and righteousness—have a notion of justice, freedom, and righteousness that we might call, to borrow the current parlance, Turkish.

Look at what is going on in our own country, here in the Italy where we enjoy all such freedoms and rights as, from a legal perspective, should make the Italian people the happiest of peoples, past, present, and maybe even future.

When it comes to practicalities, however, we face the same thing as would befall Trento and Trieste tomorrow, were they to be reunited with the mother country, or Candia, if the yearned for annexation to Greece were to come to pass.

The people’s lot, Balzac writes, is the lot that befell Sancho Panza—Don Quixote’s squire—the day he became king of that island… on terra firma. King, yes, but the moment he tried to exercise his sovereignty, someone popped up immediately and forbid him from doing so.

As a working man, I am actually entitled to the fruits of my labors, notwithstanding which, come the end of the week, I am reminded that the bulk of what I have earned finishes up in the master’s pockets.

They have granted me the right of association, but lo and behold, there are disbandment orders and, behind these, the specter of the Penal Code. Never mind: I can join a hundred, two hundred and indeed a thousand people in public; but should I make so bold as to do so, the least that will befall me is that I will earn a sound thrashing from the no less sound guardians of law and order. More? I am granted the right to think what I will, as best suits me, yet I know that despite the repeal of the emergency powers laws, my finest comrades, guilty only of aspiring to a society less squalid than this one, are still being banished into forced residence.121

It is shouted from the rooftops that we are free to write and free to publish anything that enters our heads, but we know from past experience what fate awaits our very humble paper if, through no fault of our own, we should fall foul of the king’s Prosecutor. —And finally, they will add that justice is the same for everyone, and, in truth, it is so equal for all, that the magistrate will acquit the commendatore and send me to prison for having been so foolhardy as to steal some trifle: just as the first Greek court set up in Candia yesterday convicted the rebel who had stolen a rifle for the noble purpose of defending his native land, and will shut both eyes to the thieves of a different stripe who will, tomorrow, prey upon the very same homeland to the liberation of which they contribute not at all.

So the issue to be resolved, we believe, is a far cry from the so-called nationality question. We believe—though our sympathies with those who rebel are a lot more authentic than those exhibited by certain politicians for sordid electioneering purposes—that the resolution of every other issue is dependent upon the economic question, and that our material and moral efforts should be geared towards persuading the proletariat that it will not attain real freedom until such time as society’s wealth ceases to be the monopoly of the parasitical few.

121 [Author’s note] Galileo Palla, Silvio Majolini, Luigi Burbassi to Ustica—Luigi Galleani, Emilio Santarelli, Serafino Mazzotti to Pantelleria, etc.

And the other islands? The government of gentlemen will see to those anon!