Sunday, December 31, 2006

Criminal Capitalist Super Villans

The superhero world of D.C. and Marvel comics have shared a common class of criminal, Doctor Octopus and the Goblin in the case of Marvels Spiderman. And in the case of D.C.'s Flash here is a supervillan that reminds us today of the less than 'super' villans of real life capitalist crime, the boys from Enron and Lord Black.

Dr. Alchemy/Mr. Element was created in 1958, the same time as the Criminal Capitalist enterprise the IOS was being started by Bernie Cornfeld. IOS which pushed mutual funds and a vast pyramid financial scheme of offshore looting. Mutual funds once considered as shady as junk bonds and hedge funds, are todays standard for retirees.

[Dr. Alchemy] Real Name: Albert/Alvin Desmond
Known Relatives: Rita (ex-wife), Mr. and Mrs. Peter Desmond (parents)
Occupation: Scientist


Former Occupation: Financial Consultant, Criminal

Group Affiliation: The Rogues
Base of Operations: Central City, Missouri
First Appearance: (as Mr. Element) Showcase #13 (April 1958); (as Dr. Alchemy) Showcase #14 (June 1958); (Alvin) Flash (first series) #287 (July 1980)
Created By: John Broome and Carmine Infantino
See Also: The Alchemist, Mr. Element II





See:

Green Latern and Doughboy

Crime

Comics

Comic Books


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Year End Nude Newz Revue

Its been an exciting year for nude and naked news stories, so much so that this column will not mention the recent escapades of Britney Spears or Katie Rees; Miss Nevada.

Well frankly we already did stories on them.

And of course any mention of such celebrity gossip is well frankly just a cheap attempt to gain hits.

And we would never do that.....;)


After all we all know that photographing celebraties is voyerism. Even when it is art.

Portrait of star photographer Leibovitz lacks a bit of focus

The question is: Is it art? Not surprisingly, for the most part the answer is “yes.”

There is, though, a designated scold: Vicki Goldberg, photo critic for the New York Times.

She does not think Leibovitz’s high-concept photos — Bette Midler in a bed of roses when she starred in “The Rose,” the Blues Brothers with their faces painted blue — are all that insightful. They’re not narratives, she says; they’re jokes.

(Of course, this does not discredit them as magazine covers. They have great impact, the kind that would obviously inspire impulse buys on the newsstand.)

More broadly, Goldberg has little use for the celebrity culture that Leibovitz documents, lionizes and propagates with her photography.

Photography expanded moderninst Nude Art and one of its greatest artists, again a woman, has passed on. Nudity must be good for you she lived to be 101.

Greatest photographer of the nude'

SAN FRANCISCO - Renowned photographer Ruth Bernhard, whose black-and-white images of compelling shapes from female nudes to seashells were regarded as still-life art, has died. She was 101. Bernhard, who was born in Germany, died Monday in her San Francisco apartment, the city Medical Examiner's Office said.

With the advent of capitalism in China the wealthy can now afford the ultimate bourgeois art form;

Boudoir Photography.

A 54-year-old woman in Guiyang, Guizhou Province recently took her daughter to a photography studio to have semi-nude pictures taken of her body.

The woman, Chen, said she could not afford to have pictures taken of herself when she was younger. But as she could afford it now, she wanted the pictures taken so that her daughter could appreciate them when she was older.

The studio said Chen was the sixth customer this year with this request.


If you are a politician at a nude beach make sure your companion is your wife or partner.

"Aroused media" get it...aroused... naked, nude....nudge nudge, wink wink...yeah we get it already.

Gunter Verheugen, the German Vice-president of the EU has aroused the media's interest in him in the past with his fiery tirades against fellow EU bureaucrats whom he accused of having too much power, but this time the media's interest is not in what he said, but in what he bared.

A German magazine has issued a statement that it has pictures of Verheugen on vacation in August with his chief-of-staff, Petra Erler, sunbathing and playing in the water at a nudist beach in Lithuania. His wife of 19 years was no where to be seen.

These photographs and the allegations made by some of his peers, such as German conservative MEP Markus Ferber who accused Verheugen in April of "nepotism" when he promoted Erler to his chief-of-staff have raised some questions as to how innocent their relationship is.

"In appointing Frau Erler it was apparently not only the professional qualifications which played a role," Ferber insisted.

Herbert Reul, a conservative German European parliamentarian indignantly stated: "I find it unacceptable that an EU commissioner is running around a beach nude with a high-ranking colleague." But his objection seems not against the nudity, but of him doing so with his aide.

Of course not everyone is excited about seeing men in the buff even if they are buff.

Brits decide 100 naked iron men have to leave Liverpool beach


India is less uptight about male nudity in public. It's ok for wrinkled old men to go naked in India.

Naked hermits join procession ahead of Ardh Kumbh

This is not a crude attempt to raise the dead, rather to raise money for the dead.

All I want at my funeral is a couple of strippers

In terms of sexual culture, China has come a long way since the days of the Cultural Revolution. Then, men and woman were often segregated and any overt display of sexuality, whether in dress or public affection, including kissing, invited condemnation if not worse. Today, much of China remains conservative, especially in the countryside.

In some parts of rural China one old tradition hangs on: ­ the nude funeral performance. As retold by Reuters, China's Xinhua news agency reported that the police in Donghai County, Jiangsu province, broke up two groups of strippers who gave "obscene performances" at a farmer's funeral. According to the Chinese source, "Striptease used to be a common practice at funerals in Donghai's rural areas to allure viewers." It was especially popular with wealthier families who often employed strippers to attract a crowd. "Local villagers believe that the more people who attend the funeral, the more the dead person is honored," it noted. The report claims that two hundred showed up at the farmer's funeral and five strippers were detained. Xinhua claimed that officials "issued notices concerning funeral management" and that they now must submit plans for funerals within 12 hours after a villager dies. Officials even set up a hotline so residents can report "funeral misdeeds."

In China they have discovered that nudity is not only good for advertising the dead but for advertising booze as well, gee would never have thought of that, and hey it has an environmental message as well.....

Police in central China have scotched a wine maker’s plans for a mass Christmas Eve “nude run” which the company said was a public interest event to discourage the use of “excessive packaging” in the industry.

Jixiang Ruyi Tobacco and Alcohol Company offered 284 people 10,000 yuan ($1,280) in cash and prizes to participate in a naked dash through Zhengzhou, capital of Henan province, the People’s Daily reported on its website on Thursday.


And I am sure wearing a bathing or scuba suit would have made her less attractive to the shark.....

Underwater Nude Model Bitten by Shark on Book Shoot; 'We Push the Envelope'

You have heard of how addicting the Blackberry can be, it now has a medical condition associated with it, Blackberry thumb. And apparently it can also cause blindness.....

Scarlett Johanssen says she and actress Keira Knightley were ignored by the crew when they were naked during a photo shoot, it's been reported.

The Black Dahlia star had expected to receive more attention when she and Brit Keira shed their clothes for the cover of Vanity Fair earlier this year.

But according to The Sun, one worker on the set was more concerned with checking his BlackBerry.

"Keira and I, and we're totally naked, and some guy is on his BlackBerry computer," the 22-year-old explained.

Hmm too bad Christina Aguilera wasn't on the set. She wouldn't be using her thumb on the blackberry.

Pop star
Christina Aguilera wants you to let you in on all her dirty secrets and what really turns her on. She recently revealed that she often finds nude girls more of a turn-on than guys. “We should all be allowed to enjoy whatever we enjoy. Women are beautiful beings and I often find the sight of a naked female more arousing than a naked man.”


And Neve Campbell didn't have a problem getting noticed when she was nude in the shower. "The only weird bit was that I was naked and shooting the scene in the shower with four cameramen."


Not Ugly Betty?

Salma Hayek Wins Best Nude Movie Scene 2006

The popularity of public nudity has led to at least a better understanding of nudism and the naturalist movement...

According to the American Association for Nude Recreation, nude recreation and travel has grown from a $200 million business in 1992 to a more than $400 million industry. "The competition is stiff in this industry," said Bev Axelrod, president and 12-year member of the Sequoians in Castro Valley. "Nudism is a huge money maker.

Yes he did say that with a straight face and no clothes on.

Public Nudity is socially challenging for some individuals not for moral reasons but because personal feelings.

Tackling my fear of nudity — and naked people

This year saw the suicide of "The Naked Guy" who was still dealing with his own personal demons despite using nudity as a form of liberatory protest.

Andrew Martinez | b. 1972 The Naked Guy

The image “http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/12/28/learning/31zeng600.1.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

The nude-in made the Naked Guy a media favorite. The feminist writer Naomi Wolf hailed Martinez for making himself “more vulnerable to the eye than women were.” Playgirl magazine photographed him. And tabloid TV hosts like Montel Williams and Maury Povich had him as a guest on their shows. That Martinez was invited on these programs mainly to be mocked didn’t seem to bother him. He’d gamely take his seat alongside his fellow guests — sex enthusiasts and porn stars — and patiently, almost sheepishly, explain his cause. Martinez came off not as a freak but as a sweet kid.

Until his death, Martinez’s family and friends did their best to keep his mental illness a secret. This was at his request. “Andrew did not want people to know about his illness,” his mother said, “because then they would think he was crazy the whole time.” In his moments of lucidity, there was one thing he desperately wanted to convey: “When he was the Naked Guy,” one friend said, “he was completely sane.”


While for the voluntary nudist the experience is liberating, for some people nudity is used to humiliate those who are already the most humiliated and downtrodden . In the case of India's Racist Caste Culture, the Dalits.

Dalit woman paraded nude for stealing fruit
Web posted at: 12/26/2006 0:38:41
Source ::: IANS

Patna • A middle-aged Dalit woman was tonsured and paraded half-naked in Bihar on the orders of the husband of a woman village head for allegedly stealing a few bananas. Basra Devi, in her mid 50s, of Balua Basanta village in Vaishali district was meted out the “punishment” on Saturday. “I was forcibly tonsured and paraded half-naked in the village by the people despite pleading that I was innocent,” Besra Devi said.

According to villagers, after she refused to pay a fine her head was shaved. “How can I pay a fine when I don’t have enough to eat?” she said.

Satyanarayan Chaurasia, the landowner husband of the village woman head, has denied torturing and humiliating Besra Devi. “I have nothing to do with it,” he said.

But villagers say it was done on his orders. A few days ago, some landowners chopped off the fingers of a 10-year-old Dalit girl, Khusbu, for plucking a few leaves of spinach from a vegetable field in a village in Bhagalpur district.

But she was not the only one.

If you dare to be a tom boy or suspected of being a lesbian in India well look out.....


Girl with ‘boyish’ ways paraded nude

As usual where would we be without someone getting upset about nude art, especially nude art where women are not idealized but painted in their full glory....

A painting of a nude woman — on display after years in storage — is causing a flap at Rochester Community and Technical College.

The stir began this summer when the piece, which depicts an American Indian woman with bare breasts, was hung overlooking a cafeteria.

“I think one of the reasons the painting is so controversial is because of the powerful picture,” said RCTC art director Simon Huelsbeck. “Nudes are frequently portrayed, like Michelangelo, as being sort of idealized, and she’s a full-sized woman.”

Naked and the Nude: Representations of the Body



Emil Nolde, German (1867-1956). Christ and the Sinner, 1911. Etching and drypoint. Gift of Jane Wade in memory of Curt Valentin, 55-73/13.

KANSAS CITY.- The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art presents The Naked and the Nude: Representations of the Body on view through April 29, 2007. The words “naked” and “nude” are defined as synonyms by the American Heritage Dictionary. “Naked” entered the English language from the German nakt, while “nude” derives from the French nu. Through centuries of use, the words have taken on subtle distinctions.

The ideal nude, often inspired by the poses of classical sculpture, has been viewed as the most noble subject in Western art since antiquity. During the 19th century, this tradition remained strong, even as Impressionist artists sought to represent the naked body with a new, unwavering realism.

The Modern tendency toward abstracted and expressive form means that depictions of the body diverge from classical, academic and realist ideals. Yet, the notion that to be naked is to be exposed and vulnerable, while to be nude is to be comfortable and at ease, remains valid in 20th-century art.


With this ruling Missouri remains the Show Me State.

The Missouri Supreme Court struck down a state law Tuesday barring nude dancing and touching between strippers and customers.

The Supreme Court upheld a lower judge's ruling that the law was unconstitutional because the bill changed too much from its original purpose as it moved through the Legislature.

And in Pasadena you can fight City Hall, no nude dancing ordinances......

City takes no action against all-nude club
- Neither City Hall nor a newly opened strip club appeared ready to blink in the days after new rules for adult businesses went into effect. The city has thus far taken no action against the Peppermint Garden, a week after the all-nude cabaret opened in defiance of a revised ordinance, which took effect Wednesday, that was expected to keep its doors shut.

Where would the Nude Newz be without our compulsorary story about the male who gets drunk or stoned and goes out naked into the world with nary a care. And we always say gee they should know better, and in this case it applies even moreso....

Lions assistant suspended for drunken, nude driving
The NFL has suspended him for one game as the result of two arrests -- one for drunken driving and one for nude driving. Cullen also was fined 20-thousand ...

When you have the best damn cup of coffee in town this is bound to happen. But twice?

MAN ARRESTED TWICE FOR NAKED VISITS TO COFFEE STAND

So if these guys want to really be nude in public, in the outdoors, well there is a perfectly legal way to do it.....

Nude Runners Calendar

Running Naked

So I guess all they need is nude shoes.


United Nude Shoes

mobius3.jpg

Co-founded by the Dutch architect Rem D. Koolhaas (yes, he’s the nephew of Mr. OMA himself) and shoe-maker Galahad JD Clark, United Nude elevates the shoe to a true art form—where design, architecture and abstraction meet footwear. With an aim to create nothing less than contemporary iconic shoe design, "the products are conceptual: re-interpretations of architecture, archetypes, or existing classic objects." Like, for example, the sexy form of the Mobius shoe (pictured), which is inspired by the frame of Mies Van der Rohe’s famed Barcelona chair. Made from a single strip of high-tech Kevlar, the sole and upper are an unbroken form.


And speaking of nude running where Nude Newz would be without the mandatory reference to PETA.....

Running Of The Nudes: Out With The Old-In With the Nude!

For the Nude Year make sure you do some star gazing with your naked eye....

Free Guide to Naked-Eye Astronomy

And don't forget to listen to nude radio live on New Years Eve...

X-PRESS 2 AND RADIO SLAVE PLAY NUDE YEAR'S EVE




Also See:

Nude

Naked

Sexuality

Gender


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Dr. Who Curse


Is there a curse hanging over the current production of Dr. Who. The scripts have wandered deeply into the alternative universe style of sci-fi, dabbled in the occult, and created a subtext of conspiracy theory. All very deep stuff. But it appears they are about to lose another Dr. Who in less than two years. Tennant set to quit as Dr Who

What gives. Are the Daleks really running the show?

And bye the bye Tennants depiction of the Doctor was one of the best yet.

For reviews of the recent Dr. Who series and its two Doctors check out James Bow's excellent articles.

And could this budding relastionship on the set have anything to do with Tennants decision to cut and run?



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Saturday, December 30, 2006

Bakunin RIP

Revolution Is Progress

Mikhail Bakunin

1814-1876

"All Anarchists are socialists, but not all Socialists are anarchists.


Today marks the 130th anniversary of the death of the anarchist philosopher and revolutionary; Mikhail Bakunin.

Michael Alexandrovich Bakunin and the Non-Political Political Theory


Before going into Bakunin theoretical ideas it is necessary to discuss the two thinkers that most influenced Bakunin: Ludwig Feuerbach and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. According to Richard Saltman, Bakunin's political thought was a combination of Lamarckian evolution and Feuerbach's repudiation of Absolutes. I would add Proudhon to this list because, though Bakunin and Proudhon disagreed on many things, Bakunin did get his anarchism from Proudhon. Thus, Bakunin was a Social Lamarckian, rejected absolutes and history as an entity and, rejected the state and all forms of coercive authority. Bakunin's theoretical works will to serve to highlight these ideas.


A founding member of the International Workingmans Association he was
'Mike' to his friends, tête de merde to his political rivals.

TIME.com: Marx Debunked -- May 19, 1947 -- Page 2

THE RED PRUSSIAN, THE LIFE & LEGEND OF KARL MARX (422 pp.)— eopold Schwarzschlld—Scribner ($4).

Character Assassination. Another victim was Michael Bakunin, an ardent Russian anarchist who threatened Marx's, control of the First International (founded in 1864 in London). Marx charged Bakunin with shady financial dealings and with being a Czarist agent. He could not make the charge stick, but Bakunin withdrew to lick his wounds.


It was this rivalry with Marx that was the historical break of Anarchism from Authoritarian State Socialism (which would as Bakunin predicted decline into Social Democracy).

Dissolving the Right-Wing "Left"

Mikhail Bakunin adamantly disagreed with Karl Marx about the historical role of the state. While Marx believed the state's historical role to be "progressive" and that centralization was an advance over localism and regionalism, Bakunin correctly understood a federalist structure that embraced localism and regionalism to be the most direct means through which the individual would control his/her life. "These seemingly abstract theoretical differences between Marx and Bakunin lead to opposing conclusions of a very concrete and political nature. For Marx, whose concept of freedom is vitiated by preconditions and abstractions, the immediate goal of the revolution is to seize political power and replace the bourgeois state by a highly centralized 'proletarian' dictatorship. The poletariat must thus organize a mass centralized political party and use every means, including parlimentary and electoral methods, to enlarge its control over society...A revolutionary group that turns into a political party, structuring itself along hierarchical lines and participating in elections, Bakunin warns, will eventually abandon its revolutionary goals. It will become denatured by the needs of political life and finally become coopted by the very society it seeks to overthrow." The historical record of these highly centralized "dictatorships of the proletariat," has continually proved Bakunin to be prophetic.

Bakunin, the death penalty & seeds of the future, Noam Chomsky Blog.

Bakunin's point was, I think, pretty simple. Within the larger society, it is possible to build structures that capture hopes for the future. For example, free schools, or self-managed cooperatives (like South End press, or worker-run factories in Argentina), or innumerable other examples in communities and workplaces, extending as feasible to larger enterprises, such as the very extensive Mondragon complex in Spain (significant, though limited in extent of worker control). And in fact whatever the energies and commitment of participants will make feasible.
He is buried in Bern, Switzerland.




A CD of his complete works is available, unfortunately it is in French and awaits translation into English.

Research on Anarchy has a bio page on Bakunin with interesting original articles.





Canadian labour historian Mark Leier has published a new biography of Bakunin, here reviewed by the MoscowTimes. After all Mike was a homeboy.




Enemy of the State

Mark Leier's book on Mikhail Bakunin gets inside the mind of a revolutionary who was determined to reorganize society from the bottom up - by bringing the old order to its knees.

Thomas Dunne Books

Bakunin: The Creative Passion
By Mark Leier
Thomas Dunne Books
320 pages. $25.95


He remains a modern figure of contradictions that is Anarchism; Googlism what is bakunin

Marx's last battle

My point, then, is that Bakuninism and Marxism cannot be understood as two adversaries, each external to the other. Rather, they were doctrines which had certain communalities and overlapped at important points. Each had a living part of his enemy in himself. I have already indicated that, in one part, Bakunin was a Marxist, and ready to acknowledge this debt generously. Indeed, the authoritarianism of some of Bakunin's organizational schemes sometimes ldquowent far beyond the most extreme ambitions of the dogmatic and dictatorial Marx.rdquo

It seems fitting in light of recent postings to reprint Chapter Two of his seminal Anarchist critique; God and the State.

It is currently also being prepared for podcast by LibriVox

And I am reprinting Chapter II in toto because it is the key to understanding Bakunins revolutionary athiesm which is an antitode to the slanders that he was Anti-Semitic.

Bakunin’s denunciation of Nationalism and the State led him to denouncing Polish Nationalism in favour of Pan-Slavism. At the same time Bakunin denounced the Zionism of Herzl, who wanted Jews in Russia to leave for a new utopia, rather than to fight against the Tsarist Pogroms and for a social revolution. Anarchism opposes nationalism and the Nationalist State in all its forms.


GOD AND THE STATE

"God being everything, the real world and man are nothing. God being truth, justice, goodness, beauty, power, and life, man is falsehood, iniquity, evil, ugliness, impotence, and death. God being master, man is the slave." While Satan is "the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds."



I have stated the chief practical reason of the power still exercised today over the masses by religious beliefs. These mystical tendencies do not signify in man so much an aberration of mind as a deep discontent at Heart. They are the instinctive and passionate protest of the human being against the narrowness, the platitudes, the sorrows, and the shame of a wretched existence. For this malady, I have already said, there is but one remedy - Social Revolution.

In the meantime I have endeavored to show the causes responsible for the birth and historical development of religious hallucinations in the human conscience. Here it is my purpose to treat this question of the existence of a God, or of the divine origin of the world and of man, solely from the standpoint of its moral and social utility, and I shall say only a few words, to better explain my thought, regarding the theoretical grounds of this belief.

All religions, with their gods, their demigods, and their prophets, their messiahs and their saints, were created by the credulous fancy of men who had not attained the full development and full possession of their faculties. Consequently, the religious heaven is nothing but a mirage in which man, exalted by ignorance and faith, discovers his own image, but enlarged and reversed - that is, divinized. The history of religion, of the birth, grandeur, and decline of the gods who have succeeded one another in human belief, is nothing, therefore, but the development of the collective intelligence and conscience of mankind. As fast as they discovered, in the course of their historically progressive advance, either in themselves or in external nature, a power, a quality, or even any great defect whatever, they attributed them to their gods, after having exaggerated and enlarged them beyond measure, after the manner of children, by an act of their religious fancy. Thanks to this modesty and pious generosity of believing and credulous men, heaven has grown rich with the spoils of the earth, and, by a necessary consequence, the richer heaven became, the more wretched became humanity and the earth. God once installed, he was naturally proclaimed the cause, reason, arbiter and absolute disposer of all things: the world thenceforth was nothing, God was all; and man, his real creator, after having unknowingly extracted him from the void, bowed down before him, worshipped him, and avowed himself his creature and his slave.

Christianity is precisely the religion par excellence, because it exhibits and manifests, to the fullest extent, the very nature and essence of every religious system, which is the impoverishment, enslavement, and annihilation of humanity for the benefit of divinity.

God being everything, the real world and man are nothing. God being truth, justice, goodness, beauty, power, and life, man is falsehood, iniquity, evil, ugliness, impotence, and death. God being master, man is the slave. Incapable of finding justice, truth, and eternal life by his own effort, he can attain them only through a divine revelation. But whoever says revelation says revealers, messiahs, prophets, priests, and legislators inspired by God himself; and these, once recognized as the representatives of divinity on earth, as the holy instructors of humanity, chosen by God himself to direct it in the path of salvation, necessarily exercise absolute power. All men owe them passive and unlimited obedience; for against the divine reason there is no human reason, and against the justice of God no terrestrial justice holds. Slaves of God, men must also be slaves of Church and State, in so far as the State is consecrated by the Church. This truth Christianity, better than all other religions that exist or have existed, understood, not excepting even the old Oriental religions, which included only distinct and privileged nations, while Christianity aspires to embrace entire humanity; and this truth Roman Catholicism, alone among all the Christian sects, has proclaimed and realized with rigorous logic. That is why Christianity is the absolute religion, the final religion; why the Apostolic and Roman Church is the only consistent, legitimate, and divine church.

With all due respect, then, to the metaphysicians and religious idealists, philosophers, politicians, or poets: The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, both in theory and practice.

Unless, then, we desire the enslavement and degradation of mankind, as the Jesuits desire it, as the mômiers, pietists, or Protestant Methodists desire it, we may not, must not make the slightest concession either to the God of theology or to the God of metaphysics. He who, in this mystical alphabet, begins with A will inevitably end with Z; he who desires to worship God must harbor no childish illusions about the matter, but bravely renounce his liberty and humanity.

If God is, man is a slave; now, man can and must be free; then, God does not exist.

I defy anyone whomsoever to avoid this circle; now, therefore, let all choose.

Is it necessary to point out to what extent and in what manner religions debase and corrupt the people? They destroy their reason, the principal instrument of human emancipation, and reduce them to imbecility, the essential condition of their slavery. They dishonor human labor, and make it a sign and source of servitude. They kill the idea and sentiment of human justice, ever tipping the balance to the side of triumphant knaves, privileged objects of divine indulgence. They kill human pride and dignity, protecting only the cringing and humble. They stifle in the heart of nations every feeling of human fraternity, filling it with divine cruelty instead.

All religions are cruel, all founded on blood; for all rest principally on the idea of sacrifice - that is, on the perpetual immolation of humanity to the insatiable vengeance of divinity. In this bloody mystery man is always the victim, and the priest - a man also, but a man privileged by grace - is the divine executioner. That explains why the priests of all religions, the best, the most humane, the gentlest, almost always have at the bottom of their hearts - and, if not in their hearts, in their imaginations, in their minds (and we know the fearful influence of either on the hearts of men) - something cruel and sanguinary.

None know all this better than our illustrious contemporary idealists. They are learned men, who know history by heart; and, as they are at the same time living men, great souls penetrated with a sincere and profound love for the welfare of humanity, they have cursed and branded all these misdeeds, all these crimes of religion with an eloquence unparalleled. They reject with indignation all solidarity with the God of positive religions and with his representatives, past, present, and on earth.

The God whom they adore, or whom they think they adore, is distinguished from the real gods of history precisely in this - that he is not at all a positive god, defined in any way whatever, theologically or even metaphysically. He is neither the supreme being of Robespierre and J. J. Rousseau, nor the pantheistic god of Spinoza, nor even the at once immanent, transcendental, and very equivocal god of Hegel. They take good care not to give him any positive definition whatever, feeling very strongly that any definition would subject him to the dissolving power of criticism. They will not say whether be is a personal or impersonal god, whether he created or did not create the world; they will not even speak of his divine providence. All that might compromise him. They content themselves with saying "God" and nothing more. But, then, what is their God? Not even an idea; it is an aspiration.

It is the generic name of all that seems grand, good, beautiful, noble, human to them. But why, then, do they not say, "Man." Ah! because King William of Prussia and Napoleon III, and all their compeers are likewise men: which bothers them very much. Real humanity presents a mixture of all I that is most sublime and beautiful with all that is vilest and most monstrous in the world. How do they get over this? Why, they call one divine and the other bestial, representing divinity and animality as two poles, between which they place humanity. They either will not or cannot understand that these three terms are really but one, and that to separate them is to destroy them.

They are not strong on logic, and one might say that they despise it. That is what distinguishes them from the pantheistical and deistical metaphysicians, and gives their ideas the character of a practical idealism, drawing its inspiration much less from the severe development of a thought than from the experiences, I might almost say the emotions, historical and collective as well as individual, of life. This gives their propaganda an appearance of wealth and vital power, but an appearance only; for life itself becomes sterile when paralyzed by a logical contradiction.

This contradiction lies here: they wish God, and they wish humanity. They persist in connecting two terms which, once separated, can come together again only to destroy each other. They say in a single breath: "God and the liberty of man," "God and the dignity, justice, equality, fraternity, prosperity of men" - regardless of the fatal logic by virtue of which, if God exists, all these things are condemned to non-existence. For, if God is, he is necessarily the eternal, supreme, absolute master, and, if such a master exists, man is a slave; now, if he is a slave, neither justice, nor equality, nor fraternity, nor prosperity are possible for him. In vain, flying in the face of good sense and all the teachings of history, do they represent their God as animated by the tenderest love of human liberty: a master, whoever he may be and however liberal he may desire to show himself, remains none the less always a master. His existence necessarily implies the slavery of all that is beneath him. Therefore, if God existed, only in one way could he serve human liberty - by ceasing to exist.

A jealous lover of human liberty, and deeming it the absolute condition of all that we admire and respect in humanity, I reverse the phrase of Voltaire, and say that, if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.

The severe logic that dictates these words is far too evident to require a development of this argument. And it seems to me impossible that the illustrious men, whose names so celebrated and so justly respected I have cited, should not have been struck by it themselves, and should not have perceived the contradiction in which they involve themselves in speaking of God and human liberty at once. To have disregarded it, they must have considered this inconsistency or logical license practically necessary to humanity's well-being.

Perhaps, too, while speaking of liberty as something very respectable and very dear in their eyes, they give the term a meaning quite different from the conception entertained by us, materialists and Revolutionary Socialists. Indeed, they never speak of it without immediately adding another word, authority - a word and a thing which we detest with all our heart.

What is authority? Is it the inevitable power of the natural laws which manifest themselves in the necessary concatenation and succession of phenomena in the physical and social worlds? Indeed, against these laws revolt is not only forbidden - it is even impossible. We may misunderstand them or not know them at all, but we cannot disobey them; because they constitute the basis and fundamental conditions of our existence; they envelop us, penetrate us, regulate all our movements, thoughts, and acts; even when we believe that we disobey them, we only show their omnipotence.

Yes, we are absolutely the slaves of these laws. But in such slavery there is no humiliation, or, rather, it is not slavery at all. For slavery supposes an external master, a legislator outside of him whom he commands, while these laws are not outside of us; they are inherent in us; they constitute our being, our whole being, physically - intellectually, and morally: we live, we breathe, we act, we think, we wish only through these laws. Without them we are nothing, we are not. Whence, then, could we derive the power and the wish to rebel against them?

In his relation to natural laws but one liberty is possible to man - that of recognizing and applying them on an ever-extending scale in conformity with the object of collective and individual emancipation or humanization which he pursues. These laws, once recognized, exercise an authority which is never disputed by the mass of men. One must, for instance, be at bottom either a fool or a theologian or at least a metaphysician, jurist, or bourgeois economist to rebel against the law by which twice two make four. One must have faith to imagine that fire will not burn nor water drown, except, indeed, recourse be had to some subterfuge founded in its turn on some other natural law. But these revolts, or, rather, these attempts at or foolish fancies of an impossible revolt, are decidedly, the exception; for, in general, it may be said that the mass of men, in their daily lives, acknowledge the government of common sense - that is, of the sum of the natural laws generally recognized - in an almost absolute fashion.

The great misfortune is that a large number of natural laws, already established as such by science, remain unknown to the masses, thanks to the watchfulness of these tutelary governments that exist, as we know, only for the good of the people. There is another difficulty - namely, that the major portion of the natural laws connected with the development of human society, which are quite as necessary, invariable, fatal, as the laws that govern the physical world, have not been duly established and recognized by science itself.

Once they shall have been recognized by science, and then from science, by means of an extensive system of popular education and instruction, shall have passed into the consciousness of all, the question of liberty will be entirely solved. The most stubborn authorities must admit that then there will be no need either of political organization or direction or legislation, three things which, whether they emanate from the will of the sovereign or from the vote of a parliament elected by universal suffrage, and even should they conform to the system of natural laws - which has never been the case and never will be the case - are always equally fatal and hostile to the liberty of the masses from the very fact that they impose upon them a system of external and therefore despotic laws.

The liberty of man consists solely in this: that he obeys natural laws because he has himself recognized them as such, and not because they have been externally imposed upon him by any extrinsic will whatever, divine or human, collective or individual.

Suppose a learned academy, composed of the most illustrious representatives of science; suppose this academy charged with legislation for and the organization of society, and that, inspired only by the purest love of truth, it frames none but laws in absolute harmony with the latest discoveries of science. Well, I maintain, for my part, that such legislation and such organization would be a monstrosity, and that for two reasons: first, that human science is always and necessarily imperfect, and that, comparing what it has discovered with what remains to be discovered, we may say that it is still in its cradle. So that were we to try to force the practical life of men, collective as well as individual, into strict and exclusive conformity with the latest data of science, we should condemn society as well as individuals to suffer martyrdom on a bed of Procrustes, which would soon end by dislocating and stifling them, life ever remaining an infinitely greater thing than science.

The second reason is this: a society which should obey legislation emanating from a scientific academy, not because it understood itself the rational character of this legislation (in which case the existence of the academy would become useless), but because this legislation, emanating from the academy, was imposed in the name of a science which it venerated without comprehending - such a society would be a society, not of men, but of brutes. It would be a second edition of those missions in Paraguay which submitted so long to the government of the Jesuits. It would surely and rapidly descend to the lowest stage of idiocy.

But there is still a third reason which would render such a government impossible - namely that a scientific academy invested with a sovereignty, so to speak, absolute, even if it were composed of the most illustrious men, would infallibly and soon end in its own moral and intellectual corruption. Even today, with the few privileges allowed them, such is the history of all academies. The greatest scientific genius, from the moment that he becomes an academician, an officially licensed savant, inevitably lapses into sluggishness. He loses his spontaneity, his revolutionary hardihood, and that troublesome and savage energy characteristic of the grandest geniuses, ever called to destroy old tottering worlds and lay the foundations of new. He undoubtedly gains in politeness, in utilitarian and practical wisdom, what he loses in power of thought. In a word, he becomes corrupted.

It is the characteristic of privilege and of every privileged position to kill the mind and heart of men. The privileged man, whether politically or economically, is a man depraved in mind and heart. That is a social law which admits of no exception, and is as applicable to entire nations as to classes, corporations, and individuals. It is the law of equality, the supreme condition of liberty and humanity. The principal object of this treatise is precisely to demonstrate this truth in all the manifestations of human life.

A scientific body to which had been confided the government of society would soon end by devoting itself no longer to science at all, but to quite another affair; and that affair, as in the case of all established powers, would be its own eternal perpetuation by rendering the society confided to its care ever more stupid and consequently more in need of its government and direction.

But that which is true of scientific academies is also true of all constituent and legislative assemblies, even those chosen by universal suffrage. In the latter case they may renew their composition, it is true, but this does not prevent the formation in a few years' time of a body of politicians, privileged in fact though not in law, who, devoting themselves exclusively to the direction of the public affairs of a country, finally form a sort of political aristocracy or oligarchy. Witness the United States of America and Switzerland.

Consequently, no external legislation and no authority - one, for that matter, being inseparable from the other, and both tending to the servitude of society and the degradation of the legislators themselves.

Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant.savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism censure. I do not content myself with consulting authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognize no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such an individual, I have no absolute faith in any person. Such a faith would be fatal to my reason, to my liberty, and even to the success of my undertakings; it would immediately transform me into a stupid slave, an instrument of the will and interests of others. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor the

If I bow before the authority of the specialists and avow my readiness to follow, to a certain extent and as long as may seem to me necessary, their indications and even their directions, it is because their authority is imposed upon me by no one, neither by men nor by God. Otherwise I would repel them with horror, and bid the devil take their counsels, their directions, and their services, certain that they would make me pay, by the loss of my liberty and self-respect, for such scraps of truth, wrapped in a multitude of lies, as they might give me.

I bow before the authority of special men because it is imposed upon me by my own reason. I am conscious of my inability to grasp, in all its details and positive developments, any very large portion of human knowledge. The greatest intelligence would not be equal to a comprehension of the whole. Thence results, for science as well as for industry, the necessity of the division and association of labor. I receive and I give - such is human life. Each directs and is directed in his turn. Therefore there is no fixed and constant authority, but a continual exchange of mutual, temporary, and, above all, voluntary authority and subordination.

This same reason forbids me, then, to recognize a fixed, constant, and universal authority, because there is no universal man, no man capable of grasping in that wealth of detail, without which the application of science to life is impossible, all the sciences, all the branches of social life. And if such universality could ever be realized in a single man, and if be wished to take advantage thereof to impose his authority upon us, it would be necessary to drive this man out of society, because his authority would inevitably reduce all the others to slavery and imbecility. I do not think that society ought to maltreat men of genius as it has done hitherto; but neither do I think it should indulge them too far, still less accord them any privileges or exclusive rights whatsoever; and that for three reasons: first, because it would often mistake a charlatan for a man of genius; second, because, through such a system of privileges, it might transform into a charlatan even a real man of genius, demoralize him, and degrade him; and, finally, because it would establish a master over itself.

To sum up. We recognize, then, the absolute authority of science, because the sole object of science is the mental reproduction, as well-considered and systematic as possible, of the natural laws inherent in the material, intellectual, and moral life of both the physical and the social worlds, these two worlds constituting, in fact, but one and the same natural world. Outside of this only legitimate authority, legitimate because rational and in harmony with human liberty, we declare all other authorities false, arbitrary and fatal.

We recognize the absolute authority of science, but we reject the infallibility and universality of the savant. In our church - if I may be permitted to use for a moment an expression which I so detest: Church and State are my two bêtes noires - in our church, as in the Protestant church, we have a chief, an invisible Christ, science; and, like the Protestants, more logical even than the Protestants, we will suffer neither pope, nor council, nor conclaves of infallible cardinals, nor bishops, nor even priests. Our Christ differs from the Protestant and Christian Christ in this - that the latter is a personal being, ours impersonal; the Christian Christ, already completed in an eternal past, presents himself as a perfect being, while the completion and perfection of our Christ, science, are ever in the future: which is equivalent to saying that they will never be realized. Therefore, in recognizing absolute science as the only absolute authority, we in no way compromise our liberty.

I mean by the words "absolute science," which would reproduce ideally, to its fullest extent and in all its infinite detail, the universe, the system or coordination of all the natural laws manifested by the incessant development of the world. It is evident that such a science, the sublime object of all the efforts of the human mind, will never be fully and absolutely realized. Our Christ, then, will remain eternally unfinished, which must considerably take down the pride of his licensed representatives among us. Against that God the Son in whose name they assume to impose upon us their insolent and pedantic authority, we appeal to God the Father, who is the real world, real life, of which he (the Son) is only a too imperfect expression, whilst we real beings, living, working, struggling, loving, aspiring, enjoying, and suffering, are its immediate representatives.

But, while rejecting the absolute, universal, and infallible authority of men of science, we willingly bow before the respectable, although relative, quite temporary, and very restricted authority of the representatives of special sciences, asking nothing better than to consult them by turns, and very grateful for such precious information as they may extend to us, on condition of their willingness to receive from us on occasions when, and concerning matters about which, we are more learned than they. In general, we ask nothing better than to see men endowed with great knowledge, great experience, great minds, and, above all, great hearts, exercise over us a natural and legitimate influence, freely accepted, and never imposed in the name of any official authority whatsoever, celestial or terrestrial. We accept all natural authorities and all influences of fact, but none of right; for every authority or every influence of right, officially imposed as such, becoming directly an oppression and a falsehood, would inevitably impose upon us, as I believe I have sufficiently shown, slavery and absurdity.

In a word, we reject all legislation, all authority, and all privileged, licensed, official, and legal influence, even though arising from universal suffrage, convinced that it can turn only to the advantage of a dominant minority of exploiters against the interests of the immense majority in subjection to them.

This is the sense in which we are really Anarchists.

The modern idealists understand authority in quite a different way. Although free from the traditional superstitions of all the existing positive religions, they nevertheless attach to this idea of authority a divine, an absolute meaning. This authority is not that of a truth miraculously revealed, nor that of a truth rigorously and scientifically demonstrated. They base it to a slight extent upon quasi-philosophical reasoning, and to a large extent also on sentiment, ideally, abstractly poetical. Their religion is, as it were, a last attempt to divinise all that constitutes humanity in men.

This is just the opposite of the work that we are doing. On behalf of human liberty, dignity and prosperity, we believe it our duty to recover from heaven the goods which it has stolen and return them to earth. They, on the contrary, endeavouring to commit a final religiously heroic larceny, would restore to heaven, that divine robber, finally unmasked, the grandest, finest and noblest of humanity's possessions. It is now the freethinker's turn to pillage heaven by their audacious piety and scientific analysis.

The idealists undoubtedly believe that human ideas and deeds, in order to exercise greater authority among men, must be invested with a divine sanction. How is this sanction manifested? Not by a miracle, as in the positive religions, but by the very grandeur of sanctity of the ideas and deeds: whatever is grand, whatever is beautiful, whatever is noble, whatever is just, is considered divine. In this new religious cult every man inspired by these ideas, by these deeds, becomes a priest, directly consecrated by God himself. And the proof? He needs none beyond the very grandeur of the ideas which he expresses and the deeds which he performs. These are so holy that they can have been inspired only by God.

Such, in so few words, is their whole philosophy: a philosophy of sentiments, not of real thoughts, a sort of metaphysical pietism. This seems harmless, but it is not so at all, and the very precise, very narrow and very barren doctrine hidden under the intangible vagueness of these poetic forms leads to the same disastrous results that all the positive religions lead to - namely, the most complete negation of human liberty and dignity.

To proclaim as divine all that is grand, just, noble, and beautiful in humanity is to tacitly admit that humanity of itself would have been unable to produce it - that is, that, abandoned to itself, its own nature is miserable, iniquitous, base, and ugly. Thus we come back to the essence of all religion - in other words, to the disparagement of humanity for the greater glory of divinity. And from the moment that the natural inferiority of man and his fundamental incapacity to rise by his own effort, unaided by any divine inspiration, to the comprehension of just and true ideas, are admitted, it becomes necessary to admit also all the theological, political, and social consequences of the positive religions. From the moment that God, the perfect and supreme being, is posited face to face with humanity, divine mediators, the elect, the inspired of God spring from the earth to enlighten, direct, and govern in his name the human race.

May we not suppose that all men are equally inspired by God? Then, surely, there is no further use for mediators. But this supposition is impossible, because it is too clearly contradicted by the facts. It would compel us to attribute to divine inspiration all the absurdities and errors which appear, and all the horrors, follies, base deeds, and cowardly actions which are committed, in the world. But perhaps, then, only a few men are divinely inspired, the great men of history, the virtuous geniuses, as the illustrious Italian citizen and prophet, Giuseppe Mazzini, called them. Immediately inspired by God himself and supported upon universal consent expressed by popular suffrage - Dio e Popolo; - such as these should be called to the government of human societies.3

But here we are again fallen back under the yoke of Church and State. It is true that in this new organization, indebted for its existence, like all the old political organisations, to the grace of God, but supported this time - at least so far as form is concerned, as a necessary concession to the spirit of modern times, and just as in the preambles of the imperial decrees of Napoleon III. - on the (pretended) will of the people, the Church will no longer call itself Church; it will call itself School. What matters it? On the benches of this School will be seated not children only; there will be found the eternal minor, the pupil confessedly forever incompetent to pass his examinations, rise to the knowledge of his teachers, and dispense with their discipline - the people.4 The State will no longer call itself Monarchy; it will call itself Republic: but it will be none the less the State - that is, a tutelage officially and regularly established by a minority of competent men, men of virtuous genius or talent, who will watch and guide the conduct of this great, incorrigible, and terrible child, the people. The professors of the School and the functionaries of the State will call themselves republicans; but they will be none the less tutors, shepherds, and the people will remain what they have been hitherto from all eternity, a flock. Beware of shearers, for where there is a flock there necessarily must be shepherds also to shear and devour it.

The people, in this system, will be the perpetual scholar and pupil. In spite of its sovereignty, wholly fictitious, it will continue to serve as the instrument of thoughts, wills, and consequently interests not its own. Between this situation and what we call liberty, the only real liberty, there is an abyss. It will be the old oppression and old slavery under new forms; and where there is slavery there is misery, brutishness, real social materialism, among the privileged classes as well as among the masses.

In defying human things the idealists always end in the triumph of a brutal materialism. And this for a very simple reason: the divine evaporates and rises to its own country, heaven, while the brutal alone remains actually on earth.

Yes, the necessary consequence of theoretical idealism is practically the most brutal materialism; not, undoubtedly, among those who sincerely preach it - the usual result as far as they are concerned being that they are constrained to see all their efforts struck with sterility - but among those who try to realise their precepts in life, and in all society so far as it allows itself to be dominated by idealistic doctrines.

To demonstrate this general fact, which may appear strange at first, but which explains itself naturally enough upon further reflection, historical proofs are not lacking.

Compare the last two civilisations of the ancient world - the Greek and the Roman. Which is the most materialistic, the most natural, in its point of departure, and the most humanly ideal in its results? Undoubtedly the Greek civilisation. Which on the contrary, is the most abstractly ideal in its point of departure - sacrificing the material liberty of the man to the ideal liberty of the citizen, represented by the abstraction of judicial law, and the natural development of human society to the abstraction of the State - and which became nevertheless the most brutal in its consequences? The Roman civilisation, certainly. It is true that the Greek civilisation, like all the ancient civilisations, including that of Rome, was exclusively national and based on slavery. But, in spite of these two immense defects, the former none the less conceived and realised the idea of humanity; it ennobled and really idealised the life of men; it transformed human herds into free associations of free men; it created through liberty the sciences, the arts, a poetry, an immortal philosophy, and the primary concepts of human respect. With political and social liberty, it created free thought. At the close of the Middle Ages, during the period of the Renaissance, the fact that some Greek emigrants brought a few of those immortal books into Italy sufficed to resuscitate life, liberty, thought, humanity, buried in the dark dungeon of Catholicism. Human emancipation, that is the name of the Greek civilisation. And the name of the Roman civilisation? Conquest, with all its brutal consequences. And its last word? The omnipotence of the Caesars. Which means the degradation and enslavement of nations and of men.

Today even, what is it that kills, what is it that crushes brutally, materially, in all European countries, liberty and humanity? It is the triumph of the Caesarian or Roman principle.

Compare now two modern civilisations - the Italian and the German. The first undoubtedly represents, in its general character, materialism; the second, on the contrary, represents idealism in its most abstract, most pure, and most transcendental form. Let us see what are the practical fruits of the one and the other.

Italy has already rendered immense services to the cause of human emancipation. She was the first to resuscitate and widely apply the principle of liberty in Europe, and to restore to humanity its titles to nobility: industry, commerce, poetry, the arts, the positive sciences, and free thought. Crushed since by three centuries of imperial and papal despotism, and dragged in the mud by her governing bourgeoisie, she reappears today, it is true, in a very degraded condition in comparison with what she once was. And yet how much she differs from Germany! In Italy, in spite of this decline - temporary let us hope - one may live and breathe humanly, surrounded by a people which seems to be born for liberty. Italy, even bourgeois Italy, can point with pride to men like Mazzini and Garibaldi. .In Germany one breathes the atmosphere of an immense political and social slavery, philosophically explained and accepted by a great people with deliberate resignation and free will. Her heroes - I speak always of present Germany, not of the Germany of the future; of aristocratic, bureaucratic, political and bourgeoisie Germany, not of the Germany of the prolétaires - her heroes are quite the opposite of Mazzini and Garibaldi: they are William I., that ferocious and ingenuous representative of the Protestant God, Messrs, Bismarck and Moltke, Generals Manteuffel and Werder. In all her international relations Germany, from the beginning of her existence, has been slowly, systematically invading, conquering, ever ready to extend her own voluntary enslavement into the territory of her neighbours; and, since her definitive establishment as a unitary power, she has become a menace, a danger to the liberty of entire Europe. Today Germany is servility brutal and triumphant.

To show how theoretical idealism incessantly and inevitably changes into practical materialism, one needs only to cite the example of all the Christian Churches, and, naturally, first of all, that of the Apostolic and Roman Church. What is there more sublime, in the ideal sense, more disinterested, more separate from all the interests of this earth, than the doctrine of Christ preached by that Church? And what is there more brutally materialistic than the constant practice of that same Church since the eighth century, from which dates her definitive establishment as a power? What has been and still is the principal object of all her contests with the sovereigns of Europe? Her temporal goods, her revenues first, and then her temporal power, her political privileges. We must do her the justice to acknowledge that she was the first to discover, in modern history, this incontestable but scarcely Christian truth that wealth and power, the economic exploitation and the political oppression of the masses, are the two inseparable terms of the reign of divine ideality on earth: wealth consolidating and augmenting power, power ever discovering and creating new sources of wealth, and both assuring, better than the martyrdom and faith of the apostles, better than divine grace, the success of the Christian propagandism. This is a historical truth, and the Protestant Churches do not fail to recognise it either. I speak, of course, of the independent churches of England, America, and Switzerland, not of the subjected churches of Germany. The latter have no initiative of their own; they do what their masters, their temporal sovereigns, who are at the same time their spiritual chieftains, order them to do, It is well known that the Protestant propagandism, especially in England and America, is very intimately connected with the propagandism of the material, commercial interests of those two great nations; and it is known also that the objects of the latter propagandism is not at all the enrichment and material prosperity of the countries into which it penetrates in company with the Word of God, but rather the exploitation of those countries with a view to the enrichment and material prosperity of certain classes, which in their own country are very covetous and very pious at the same time.

In a word, it is not at all difficult to prove, history in hand, that the Church, that all the Churches, Christian and non-Christian, by the side of their spiritualistic propagandism, and probably to accelerate and consolidate the success thereof, have never neglected to organise themselves into great corporations for the economic exploitation of the masses under the protection and with the direct and special blessing of some divinity or other; that all the States, which originally, as we know, with all their political and judicial institutions and their dominant and privileged classes have been only temporal branches of these various Churches have likewise had principally in view this same exploitation for the benefit of lay minorities indirectly sanctioned by the Church; finally and in general, that the action of the good God and of all the divine idealities on earth has ended at last, always and everywhere, in founding the prosperous materialism of the few over the fanatical and constantly famishing idealism of the masses.

We have a new proof of this in what we see today. With the exception of the great hearts and great minds whom I have before referred to as misled, who are today the most obstinate defenders of idealism? In the first places all the sovereign courts. In France, until lately, Napoleon III. and his wife, Madame Eugénie; all their former ministers, courtiers, and ex-marshals, from Rouher and Bazaine to Fleury and Piétri; the men and women of this imperial world, who have so completely idealised and saved France; their journalists and their savants - the Cssagnacs, the Girardins, the Duvernois, the Veuillots, the Leverriers, the Dumas; the black phalanx of Jesuits and Jesuitesses in every garb; the whole upper and middle bourgeoisie of France; the doctrinaire liberals, and the liberals without doctrine - the Guizots, the Thiers, the Jules Favres, the Pelletans, and the Jules Simons, all obstinate defenders of the bourgeoisie exploitation. In Prussia, in Germany, William I., the present royal demonstrator of the good God on earth; all his generals, all his officers, Pomeranian and other; all his army, which, strong in its religious faith, has just conquered France in that ideal way we know so well. In Russia, the Czar and his court; the Mouravieffs and the Bergs, all the butchers and pious proselyters of Poland. Everywhere, in short, religious or philosophical idealism, the one being but the more or less free translation of the other, serves today as the flag of material, bloody, and brutal force, of shameless material exploitation; while, on the contrary, the flag of theoretical materialism, the red flag of economic equality and social justice, is raised by the practical idealism of the oppressed and famishing masses, tending to realise the greatest liberty and the human right of each in the fraternity of all men on the earth.

Who are the real idealists - the idealists not of abstraction, but of life, not of heaven, but of earth - and who are the materialists?

It is evident that the essential condition of theoretical or divine idealism is the sacrifice of logic, of human reason, the renunciation of science. We see, further, that in defending the doctrines of idealism one finds himself enlisted perforce in the ranks of the oppressors and exploiters of the masses. These are two great reasons which, it would seem, should be sufficient to drive every great mind, every great heart, from idealism. How does it happen that our illustrious contemporary idealists, who certainly lack neither mind, nor heart, nor good will, and who have devoted their entire existence to the service of humanity - how does it happen that they persist in remaining among the representatives of a doctrine henceforth condemned and dishonoured?

They must be influenced by a very powerful motive. It cannot be logic or science, since logic and science have pronounced their verdict against the idealistic doctrine. No more can it be personal interests, since these men are infinitely above everything of that sort. It must, then, be a powerful moral motive. Which? There can be but one. These illustrious men think, no doubt, that idealistic theories or beliefs are essentially necessary to the moral dignity and grandeur of man, and that materialistic theories, on the contrary, reduce him to the level of the beasts.

And if the truth were just the opposite!

Every development, I have said, implies the negation of its point of departure. The basis or point of departure, according to the materialistic school, being material, the negation must be necessarily ideal. Starting from the totality of the real world, or from what is abstractly called matter, it logically arrives at the real idealisation - that is, at the humanisation, at the full and complete emancipation of society. Per contra; and for the same reason, the basis and point of departure of the idealistic school being ideal, it arrives necessarily at the materialisation of society, at the organization of a brutal despotism and an iniquitous and ignoble exploitation, under the form of Church and State. The historical development of man according to the materialistic school, is a progressive ascension; in the idealistic system it can be nothing but a continuous fall.

Whatever human question we may desire to consider, we always find this same essential contradiction between the two schools. Thus, as I have already observed, materialism starts from animality to establish humanity; idealism starts from divinity to establish slavery and condemn the masses to an endless animality. Materialism denies free will and ends in the establishment of liberty; idealism, in the name of human dignity, proclaims free will, and on the ruins of every liberty founds authority. Materialism rejects the principle of authority, because it rightly considers it as the corollary of animality, and because, on the contrary, the triumph of humanity, the object and chief significance of history, can be realised only through liberty. In a word, you will always find the idealists in the very act of practical materialism, while you will see the materialists pursuing and realising the most grandly ideal aspirations and thoughts.

History, in the system of the idealists, as I have said, can be nothing but a continuous fall. They begin by a terrible fall, from which they never recover - by the salto mortale; from the sublime regions of pure and absolute idea into matter. And into what kind of matter ! Not into the matter which is eternally active and mobile, full of properties and forces, of life and intelligence, as we see it in the real world; but into abstract matter, impoverished and reduced to absolute misery by the regular looting of these Prussians of thought, the theologians and metaphysicians, who have stripped it of everything to give everything to their emperor, to their God; into the matter which, deprived of all action and movement of its own, represents, in opposition to the divine idea, nothing but absolute stupidity, impenetrability, inertia and immobility.

The fall is so terrible that divinity, the divine person or idea, is flattened out, loses consciousness of itself, and never more recovers it. And in this desperate situation it is still forced to work miracles ! For from the moment that matter becomes inert, every movement that takes place in the world, even the most material, is a miracle, can result only from a providential intervention, from the action of God upon matter. And there this poor Divinity, degraded and half annihilated by its fall, lies some thousands of centuries in this swoon, then awakens slowly, in vain endeavouring to grasp some vague memory of itself, and every move that it makes in this direction upon matter becomes a creation, a new formation, a new miracle. In this way it passes through all degrees of materiality and bestiality - first, gas, simple or compound chemical substance, mineral, it then spreads over the earth as vegetable and animal organization till it concentrates itself in man. Here it would seem as if it must become itself again, for it lights in every human being an angelic spark, a particle of its own divine being, the immortal soul.

How did it manage to lodge a thing absolutely immaterial in a thing absolutely material; how can the body contain, enclose, limit, paralyse pure spirit? This, again, is one of those questions which faith alone, that passionate and stupid affirmation of the absurd, can solve. It is the greatest of miracles. Here, however, we have only to establish the effects, the practical consequences of this miracle.

After thousands of centuries of vain efforts to come back to itself, Divinity, lost and scattered in the matter which it animates and sets in motion, finds a point of support, a sort of focus for self-concentration. This focus is man his immortal soul singularly imprisoned in a mortal body. But each man considered individually is infinitely too limited, too small, to enclose the divine immensity; it can contain only a very small particle, immortal like the whole, but infinitely smaller than the whole. It follows that the divine being, the absolutely immaterial being, mind, is divisible like matter. Another mystery whose solution must be left to faith.

If God entire could find lodgment in each man, then each man would be God. We should have an immense quantity of Gods, each limited by all the others and yet none the less infinite - a contradiction which would imply a mutual destruction of men, an impossibility of the existence of more than one. As for the particles, that is another matter; nothing more rational, indeed, than that one particle should be limited by another and be smaller than the whole. Only, here another contradiction confronts us. To be limited, to be greater and smaller are attributes of matter, not of mind. According to the materialists, it is true, mind is only the working of the wholly material organism of man, and the greatness or smallness of mind depends absolutely on the greater or less material perfection of the human organism. But these same attributes of relative limitation and grandeur cannot be attributed to mind as the idealists conceive it, absolutely immaterial mind, mind existing independent of matter. There can be neither greater nor smaller nor any limit among minds, for there is only one mind - God. To add that the infinitely small and limited particles which constitute human souls are at the same time immortal is to carry the contradiction to a climax. But this is a question of faith. Let us pass on.

Here then we have Divinity torn up and lodged, in infinitely small particles, in an immense number of beings of all sexes, ages, races, and colours. This is an excessively inconvenient and unhappy situation, for the divine particles are so little acquainted with each other at the outset of their human existence that they begin by devouring each other. Moreover, in the midst of this state of barbarism and wholly animal brutality, these divine particles, human souls, retain as it were a vague remembrance of their primitive divinity, and are irresistibly drawn towards their whole; they seek each other, they seek their whole. It is Divinity itself, scattered and lost in the natural world, which looks for itself in men, and it is so demolished by this multitude of human prisons in which it finds itself strewn, that, in looking for itself, it commits folly after folly.

Beginning with fetishism, it searches for and adores itself, now in a stone, now in a piece of wood, now in a rag. It is quite likely that it would never have succeeded in getting out of the rag, if the other; divinity which was not allowed to fall into matter and which is kept in a state of pure spirit in the sublime heights of the absolute ideal, or in the celestial regions, had not had pity on it.

Here is a new mystery - that of Divinity dividing itself into two halves, both equally infinite, of which one - God the Father - stays in the purely immaterial regions, and the other - God the Son - falls into matter. We shall see directly, between these two Divinities separated from each other, continuous relations established, from above to below and from below to above; and these relations, considered as a single eternal and constant act, will constitute the Holy Ghost. Such, in its veritable theological and metaphysical meaning, is the great, the terrible mystery of the Christian Trinity.

But let us lose no time in abandoning these heights to see what is going on upon earth.

God the Father, seeing from the height of his eternal splendour that the poor God the Son, flattened out and astounded by his fall, is so plunged and lost in matter that even having reached human state he has not yet recovered himself, decides to come to his aid. From this immense number of particles at once immortal, divine, and infinitely small, in which God the Son has disseminated himself so thoroughly that he does not know himself, God the Father chooses those most pleasing to him, picks his inspired persons, his prophets, his "men of virtuous genius," the great benefactors and legislators of humanity: Zoroaster, Buddha, Moses, Confucius, Lycurgus, Solon, Socrates, the divine Plato, and above all Jesus Christ, the complete realisation of God the Son, at last collected and concentrated in a single human person; all the apostles, Saint Peter, Saint Paul, Saint John before all, Constantine the Great, Mahomet, then Charlemagne, Gregory VII Dante, and, according to some, Luther also, Voltaire and Rousseau, Robespierre and Danton, and many other great and holy historical personages, all of whose names it is impossible to recapitulate, but among whom I, as a Russian, beg that Saint Nicholas may not be forgotten.

Then we have reached at last the manifestation of God upon earth. But immediately God appears, man is reduced to nothing. It will be said that he is not reduced to nothing, since he is himself a particle of God. Pardon me! I admit that a particle of a definite, limited whole, however small it be, is a quantity, a positive greatness. But a particle of the infinitely great, compared with it, is necessarily infinitely small, Multiply milliards of milliards by milliards of milliards - their product compared to the infinitely great, will be infinitely small, and the infinitely small is equal to zero. God is everything; therefore man and all the real world with him, the universe, are nothing. You will not escape this conclusion.

God appears, man is reduced to nothing; and the greater Divinity becomes, the more miserable becomes humanity. That is the history of all religions; that is the effect of all the divine inspirations and legislations. In history the name of God is the terrible club with which all divinely inspired men, the great "virtuous geniuses," have beaten down the liberty, dignity, reason, and prosperity of man.

We had first the fall of God. Now we have a fall which interests us more - that of man, caused solely by the apparition of God manifested on earth.

See in how profound an error our dear and illustrious idealists find themselves. In talking to us of God they purpose, they desire, to elevate us, emancipate us, ennoble us, and, on the contrary, they crush and degrade us. With the name of God they imagine that they can establish fraternity among men, and, on the contrary, they create pride, contempt; they sow discord, hatred, war; they establish slavery. For with God come the different degrees of divine inspiration; humanity is divided into men highly inspired, less inspired, uninspired. All are equally insignificant before God, it is true; but, compared with each other, some are greater than others; not only in fact - which would be of no consequence, because inequality in fact is lost in the collectivity when it cannot cling to some legal fiction or institution - but by the divine right of inspiration, which immediately establishes a fixed, constant, petrifying inequality. The highly inspired must be listened to and obeyed by the less inspired, and the less inspired by the uninspired. Thus we have the principle of authority well established, and with it the two fundamental institutions of slavery: Church and State.

Of all despotisms that of the doctrinaires; or inspired religionists is the worst. They are so jealous of the glory of their God and of the triumph of their idea that they have no heart left for the liberty or the dignity or even the sufferings of living men, of real men. Divine zeal, preoccupation with the idea, finally dry up the tenderest souls, the most compassionate hearts, the sources of human love. Considering all that is, all that happens in the world from the point of view of eternity or of the abstract idea, they treat passing matters with disdain; but the whole life of real men, of men of flesh and bone, is composed only of passing matters; they themselves are only passing beings, who, once passed, are replaced by others likewise passing, but never to return in person. Alone permanent or relatively eternal in men is humanity, which steadily developing, grows richer in passing from one generation to another. I say relatively; eternal, because, our planet once destroyed - it cannot fail to perish sooner or later, since everything which has begun must necessarily end - our planet once decomposed, to serve undoubtedly as an element of some new formation in the system of the universe, which alone is really eternal, who knows what will become of our whole human development? Nevertheless, the moment of this dissolution being an enormous distance in the future, we may properly consider humanity, relatively to the short duration of human life, as eternal. But this very fact of progressive humanity is real and living only through its manifestations at definite times, in definite places, in really living men, and not through its general idea.

The general idea is always an abstraction and, for that very reason, in some sort a negation of real life. I have stated in the Appendix that human thought and, in consequence of this, science can grasp and name only the general significance of real facts, their relations, their laws - in short, that which is permanent in their continual transformations - but never their material, individual side, palpitating, so to speak, with reality and life, and therefore fugitive and intangible. Science comprehends the thought of the reality, not reality itself; the thought of life, not life. That is its limit, its only really insuperable limit, because it is founded on the very nature of thought, which is the only organ of science.

Upon this nature are based the indisputable rights and grand mission of science, but also its vital impotence and even its mischievous action whenever, through its official licensed representatives, it arrogantly claims the right to govern life. The mission of science is, by observation of the general relations of passing and real facts, to establish the general laws inherent in the development of the phenomena of the physical and social world; it fixes, so to speak, the unchangeable landmarks of humanity's progressive march by indicating the general conditions which it is necessary to rigorously observe and always fatal to ignore or forget. In a word, science is the compass of life; but it is not life. Science is unchangeable, impersonal, general, abstract, insensible, like the laws of which it is but the ideal reproduction, reflected or mental - that is cerebral (using this word to remind us that science itself is but a material product of a material organ, the brain). Life is wholly fugitive and temporary, but also wholly palpitating with reality and individuality, sensibility, sufferings, joys, aspirations, needs, and passions. It alone spontaneously creates real things and; beings. Science creates nothing; it establishes and recognises only the creations of life. And every time that scientific men, emerging from their abstract world, mingle with living creation in the real world, all that they propose or create is poor, ridiculously abstract, bloodless and lifeless, still-born, like the homunculus created by Wagner, the pedantic disciple of the immortal Doctor Faust. It follows that the only mission of science is to enlighten life, not to govern it.

The government of science and of men of science, even be they positivists, disciples of Auguste Comte, or, again, disciples of the doctrinaire; school of German Communism, cannot fail to be impotent, ridiculous, inhuman, cruel, oppressive, exploiting, maleficent. We may say of men of science, as such, what I have said of theologians and metaphysicians: they have neither sense nor heart for individual and living beings. We cannot even blame them for this, for it is the natural consequence of their profession. In so far as they are men of science, they have to deal with and can take interest in nothing except generalities; that do the laws .........................................................they are not exclusively men of science, but are also more or less men of life.







See

Bakunin

Anarchy

Anarchism

Anarchists

Libertarian

Libertarianism

Libertarian Socialism

Libertarian Communism



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