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

274 / ANARCHISM
recognize laws as binding on them when they have had no hand in making them, or
to be deprived of their nationality-and I, in the fulfillment of my military duty, must
go and shoot them for it. How can I help asking myself when I take part in such punishments,
whether they are just, and whether I ought to assist in carrying them out
Universal service is the extreme limit of violence necessary for the support of
the whole state organization, and it is the extreme limit to which submission on the
part of the subjects can go. It is the keystone of the whole edifice, and its fall will
bring it all down.
76. Jean Grave: Against Militarism and Colonialism (1893)
III the followillg extracts from Voltairille de C1eyre's trallslatioll oIJeall Grave's Moribund Society
and Anarchy (Sail Frallcisco: A. Isaak, 1899), Grave draws tile collllection betweell lllilitarislll
and colonialism, dellOllllcing botll. Anti-militarism was a collsistent t/Jellle in anarchist
literature alld within the anarchist movement. It was lIIainly as a result of publishing these passap;es
that Grave was imprisolled by tile Frmch autllorities in 1894.
WHAT, IN REALITY, DOES THE WORD "country" represent, beyond the natural aflcction
one has for his family and his neighbours, and the attachment engendered by
the habit of living upon one's native soil Nothing, less than nothing, to the major
portion of those who go off to get their heads broken in wars of whose causes they
are ignorant and whose cost they alone pay, as workers and combatants! Successful
or disastrous, these wars cannot alter their situation in the least. Conquerors or conquered
they are the ever-to-be-exploited, submissive cattle, subject to impress,
'-\,hich the capitalist class is anxious to keep undcr its thumb.
If we agree to the interpretation given it by those who talk the most about it,
"the country" is the soil, the territory belonging to the State of which one is a subject.
But States have only arbitrary limits; such limitation most frequently depends upon
the issue of battles. Political groups were not always constituted in the same manner
as they exist today, and tomorrow, if it pleases those who exploit us to make war, the
issue of another battle may cause a portion of the country to pass under the yoke of
another nationality. Has it not always been the same throughout the ages As, in consequence
of the wars they have made upon each other, nations have appropriated,
then lost again or retaken the provinces which separated their frontiers, it follows
that the patriotism of these provinces, tossed first to this side then to that, consisted
in fighting sometimes under one flag, sometimes under another, in killing their allies
of the day before, in struggling side by side with their enemies of the day after-first
proof of the absurdity of patriotism!