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

84 / ANARCHISM
done for the greater glory of the State, for the preservation or the extension ofits power,
it is all transformed into duty and virtue. And this virtue, this duty, are obligatory for each
patriotic citizen; everyone is supposed to exercise them not against foreigners only but
against one's own fellow citizens, members or subjects of the State like himself, whenever
the welfare of the State demands it.
This explains why, since the birth of the State, the world of politics has always
been and continues to be the stage fo r unlimited rascality and brigandage, brigandage
and rascality which, by the way, are held in high esteem, since they are sanctified
by patriotism, by the transcendent morality and the supreme interest of the State.
This explains why the entire history of ancient and modern states is merely a series of
revolting crimes; why kings and ministers, past and present, of all times and all countries-statesmen,
diplomats, bureaucrats, and warriors-if judged from the standpoint
of simple morality and human justice, have a hundred, a thousand times over
earned their sentence to hard labour or to the gallows. There is no horror, no cruelty,
sacrilege, or perjury, no imposture, no infamous transaction, no cynical robbery, no
bold plunder or shabby betrayal that has not been or is not daily being perpetrated
by the representatives ofthe states, under no other pretext than those elastic words,
so convenient and yet so terrible: ''for reasons af state."
21. Bakunin: Program of the International Brotherhood (1868)
In this passage, BakU/Jill elllpllU:)izes ti,e cuunter-revolutionary nature oj terrorism and dictatorship.
Auguste Blanqui (1805 -1881) was a French revolutionmy who tried to institute a revolutionary dictatorship
on several occasions. He spent much of II is adult life imprisonedfor his revolutionary activities.
Towards the end of his life, well after this was written, Blanqui finally proclaimed "Neither
God, nor master!" which was to become the battle cry of the anarchist movement. The translatioll is
taken from Bakunin on Anarchism.
EVERY HUMAN INDIVI DUAL IS the involuntary product of a natural and social environment
within which he is born, and to the influence of which he continues to submit
as he develops. The three great causes of all human immorality are: political,
economic, and social inequality; the ignorance resulting naturally from all this; and
the necessary consequence of these, slavery.
Since the social organization is always and everywhere the only cause of crimes
committed by men, the punishing by society of criminals who can never be guilty is
an act of hypocrisy or a patent absurdity. The theory of guilt and punishment is the
offspring of theology, that is, of the union of absurdity and religious hypocrisy ... AII
the revolutionaries, the oppressed, the sufferers, victims of the existing social organi-