Luigi Galleani by Antonio Senta

Author:Antonio Senta
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AK Press
Published: 2019-08-29T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter XXI: La salute è in voi!

Within this bitter class conflict, the central theme of Cronaca Sovversiva was the need to improve strategies for action, with the awareness that one cannot “confront troops with stones,” and that revolution required material preparation.1 As Galleani stressed: “The triumph of proletarian emancipation will only be celebrated on the ruins of all the bastions of the bourgeoisie: destruction is necessary!”2

Precisely in order to improve the techniques of destruction, in February 1906, the first notice appeared for a pamphlet entitled “La salute è in voi!” [Health Is In You!]. This “typographical jewel,” costing 25 cents, had a red cover featuring a portrait of Ravachol, the very incarnation of iconoclastic revolt, with a guillotine behind him and a rising sun in the background. The following verses appeared as an epigraph:

From Conselice to Santa Susanna you

have seen

the painful passion and the horrendous torment

of defenseless law.3

You cursed, you wept

reaping

prison, poverty, pity.

Blasphemy is fruitless, it beautifies weeping,

Listen!

History warns you, Science teaches you,

it murmurs to you from the bloody earth

the death rattle of the fathers:

Between the iron of the spades and the flames of the stake

god triumphs.

From conspiracies, from martyrdom, from battles

the homeland leaps free and undivided.

On the ruins of the Bastille,

Two worlds crushed with iron and fire,

they will build your bosses fortune and glory

History opens the way for you, gives you science, weapons

From unavenged tombs, those dead from pellagra and grapeshot,

the fathers

entrust your with their vendetta.

Dare!

From audacious revolts

redemption will sprout.

The pamphlet recalled previous publications such as Johann Most’s Science of Revolutionary Warfare. It made use of Ettore Molinari’s technical knowledge, and contained “simple, practical, impeccably scientific and experimental formulas” to create explosive devices.4 Undoubtedly the most publicized among the many publications released by the Circolo di studi sociali, it was highly recommended by Cronaca Sovversiva: “To us, it seems that this [pamphlet] by anonymous publishing comrades is a precious work of opportunity, strategy, and reasoning. Why do we constantly cry out to the proletariat: rebel! rise up! destroy! if we do not know how to give them the means of revolt, insurrection, and destruction?”5

For some time Galleani had urged readers to “dynamite” the US authorities, starting with the observation that “dynamite is found everywhere in North America at fifteen cents a pound.”6 More generally, in previous years, he had never stopped propagandizing the extensive use of arms, the tools needed for the masses to be able to create as widespread an insurrection as possible. Since the beginning of the publication of Cronaca Sovversiva, he had focused attention on the necessity of destroying the current order. An “immense, fierce period of destruction and demolition” was the “unavoidable condition to reconstruct” social life on a new basis, he wrote, adding: “Let us destroy all causes of our discontents: laws, armies, sgherri, courts, prisons, churches, brothels, parliaments: the privileges of private ownership, borders, and countries […], the family based on selfishness.”7

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