As to fearing a worse condition, the stoppage of progress in case a nation should disappear, this is failing to take into account what international relations are nowadays, and the general diffusion of ideas. A nation, today, might be divided, parceled out, dismembered, its name taken away, yet you could not succeed, short of utter extermination, in changing its proper foundation, which is diversity of character and temperament, the very nature of the races composing it. And if war were declared, all these liberties, real or pretended, which are claimed as our especial lot, would be speedily suspended, the Socialist propaganda muzzled, authority reinstated in the hands of the military power; and we should no longer have anything for the most thorough absolutism to envy.
War, consequently, can bring no good to the workers; we have no interests engaged in it, nothing to defend but our skins; it is our lookout to defend them still better by not exposing ourselves to get holes put through them, for the greater profit of those who exploit and govern us. The bourgeoisie, on the other hand, have an interest in war; it enables them to preserve the armies which keep the people respectful, and defend their institutions; through it they can succeed in forcing the products of “their industry” on others, opening up new markets with cannon shots. They alone subscribe to the loans which war necessitates, the interest upon which we, the workers, alone pay. Let the capitalists fight themselves, then, if they want to; once more: it is no concern of ours. And, moreover, let us revolt once for all; let us endanger the privileges of the bourgeoisie, and it will not be long till we see those who preach patriotism to us, appealing to the armies of their conquerors, be they German, Russian, or of no matter what country. They are like Voltaire, their patron: he did not believe in God, but judged that some religion was necessary to the common people; they have frontiers between their slaves, but for themselves they mock at such when their interests are at stake.
There is no “country” for the man truly worthy of the name; or at least there is but one—that in which he struggles for true right, in which he lives and has his affections; but it may extend over the whole earth! Humanity is not to be chucked into little pigeonholes, wherein each is to shut himself up in his corner, regarding the rest as enemies. To the genuine individual all men are brothers and have equal rights to live and to evolve according to their own wills, upon this earth which is large enough and fruitful enough to nourish all. As to your countries by convention, the workers have no interest in them, and nothing in them to defend, consequently, on whichever side of the frontier they may chance to have been born, they should not, on that account, have any motive for mutual hatred. Instead of going on cutting each other’s throats, as they have done up to the present, they ought to stretch out their hands across the frontiers and unite all their efforts in making war upon their real, their only, enemies: authority and capital.
XII
The Patriotism of the Governing Classes
We have shown that “the country” is a sonorous word designed to induce the workers to defend an order of things which oppresses them. We shall see now if the “love of country,” this “holy sentiment,” this “love of the soil which is born in everyone,” is so deeply rooted in those who make the declaration; whether it rises from purely subjective causes, as among the workers, or from purely material causes, from vulgar preoccupations of mercantile interests. It is among the writings published by themselves for their own use that we must search for their innermost conviction. It is edifying.
To hear them when they are addressing the workers there is nothing so sacred as the country; every citizen should be ready to sacrifice his life or his liberty for the defense of the country. In fine, according to them the country represents the highest degree of the general interest; to make sacrifices for it is to sacrifice for one’s own and one’s self. We have only to rummage among their treatises on political economy to convict them of lying; to see that all these high-sounding phrases, these sentiments which they parade, are nothing but bluffs for the benefit of the simpletons who let themselves be duped by the like, masks which they take care to leave in the dressing-room when among their intimates. Here is what one of their political doctors, whose authority is officially recognized, says:
“It is the interest of the governing classes, of the preponderance which they hold and for which they are indebted precisely to a continuation of the state of war, which artificially maintains that state among civilized peoples.”4
Could anything be neater? And our good capitalists, who declaim so loudly against the frightful Anarchists that have the audacity to demonstrate to the workers how their interest is antagonistic to the interests of the bourgeois class, make no mistake among themselves in properly defining this antagonism, in order to find
