Graham R (Ed.) - Anarchism - A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas Volume One - From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)

258 / ANARCHISM
annulment in the transformation of that morbid environment, and not in the simple
murder of the tyrant. The isolated death of one man, be he tsar, sultan, dictator or
president, is ineffective if one wishes to destroy tyranny. It would be like tlying to dry
up a swamp by, from time to time, killing the reptiles that are born in it.
If things were otherwise, nothing would be more practical or simple than to go
to the individual and to destroy him ...
For most people, revolution and war have the same meaning: a mistake which,
ill the light of misplaced judgments, makes the last resort of the oppressed look like
barbarity. War has the invariable characteristics of hatred and national or personal
ambitions; it creates a relative benefit for an individual or a group, paid fo r with the
blood and the sacrifice of the masses. Revolution is the abrupt upheaval of the human
tendency toward improvement, when a fa irly numerous part of humanity is subjected
by violence to a state incompatible to its needs and aspirations. Wars can be
fought against a man, but never a revolution; the first destroys, perpetuating injustices;
the latter mixes, shakes, confuses, disrupts, and casts the purifYing fire of new
ideas-the old elements poisoned by prejudices and eaten away by moths-to produce,
from the scalding pot of the catastrophe, a more benign environment fo r the
development and expansion of all beings. Revolution is the flood that spills over the
chyncss ofthe dead countryside, spreading the mud oflife that transforms the uncultivated
land of fo rced peace, where only reptiles live, into fe rtile fields suitable fo r
the splendid blooming of higher species.
Tyrants do not just appear in nations through a phenomenon of self-generation.
The universal law of determinism lifts them on the backs of the people. The same
law, manifested in the powerful rpvoiutionary transformation, will make them fa ii
forever, asphyxiated, like a fish deprived of its liquid environment. (Regeneraci6n,
September 17, 1910)
The Means And The End
Could there exist a tyrant over a people who did not provide him with the elements
to sllstain himself A common wrongdoer can commit his misdeeds without the complicity
of his victims; a despot cannot live or tyrannize without the cooperation of his,
or a numerous part of them. Tyranny is the crime of the llconscious collectivities
against themselves and must be attacked as a social disease by means of the Revolution,
considering the death ofthe tyrants as an unavoidable incident of the struggle,
an incident, and nothing more, but not an act of justice .
. , .Science, by denying the free will of the enemy, destroys the basis of the present
barbaric penal institutions; revolutionaries do not establish different criteria fo r