THE CHOICE OF COMRADES
Silone, Ignazio
The last 40 years have witnessed the collapse of most of the great politico-social myths bequeathed to us by the 19th century. As a result, certain kinds of people who had relied on these myths...
...This is not an individual case...
...It is founded, in the last analysis, on the certainty that we human beings are free and responsible...
...Today the nihilist cult of force and success is universal...
...They are neither true nor false: they are "bourgeois," dead leaves...
...In his subsequent works, among which may be mentioned the pages on pain, the novel Auf den Marmorklippen, and the diary he kept during the invasion of France in the Second World War, his condemnation of nihilism is increasingly explicit and increasingly based on human motives...
...Here I should like to recall the terrible letter that Simone Weil wrote to Georges Bernanos in the spring of 1938 about the Spanish Civil War...
...Any portrait of modern man, if at all faithful to the original, cannot but be deformed, split, fragmentary— in a word, tragic...
...Camus opens Le Mythe de Sisyphe with the concept of suicide, in order to distill from it an explanation of the meaning of life...
...If at first one happens to feel some revulsion, one hides it, stifles it, fearing to seem lacking in virility...
...But since it is no longer class that decides, but conscience, we are back where we started...
...Does anything at all remain to us...
...Revolutions, like trees, are to be judged by their fruits, and not by the effort they cost...
...The big difficulty is this: nihilism is not an ideology, it cannot be legislated about, it is not a subject for school curricula...
...Now indeed the heorism of Junger's proletarian robot would therefore be all the more sublime the remoter it was from the traditional human sphere and the more closely it resembled that of highly perfected machines...
...Altogether similar—and just as it should be— is the opposite process of abjurement...
...I am not using the pronoun "we" as a puffed-up form of the first person singular...
...Threateningly they demand: "Are you with us or against us...
...It is nihilistic to exalt courage and heroism independently of the cause they serve, thus equating the martyr with the hired assassin...
...In the deplorable event of someone having a scruple, all he need do is bring his problem to the propaganda office...
...The horse of Carlo Cattaneo has thrown its rider and gone wild again...
...And so in many ways we are back where we were, except that we are once again free to discuss the moral situation of man without having to make concessions to a false optimism, dissimulation not being a civic virtue in a democracy...
...existence has no meaning beyond itself...
...Traditional moral and religious values, rashly invoked to prop up the vested interests which were being threatened, were thereby compromised...
...Love of the oppressed is born of it as a corollary that the disillusionments of history—the love devoid of self-interest---can never place in doubt...
...However, literature cannot take up a permanent abode in a nihilist situation, and the only way out for it, I think, is to explore courageously the entire surface of this situation...
...The experience of Albert Camus is different but analogous...
...For our part, the vital resource that saves us from the extremist situation of nihilism can be easily identified: the same emotional charge which impelled us to our initial choice has not been exhausted by disillusionment...
...There are really a great many, belonging to no church or political party, who now bear in secret these same burning stigmata...
...But the last writings of these men before death, or their last confidences to their friends, are invariably a confession of anguish or despair at the effort and the futility of living...
...but the labor union, despite its police origin, became of its own accord a revolutionary organization, so that the Okhrana was soon obliged to disband it...
...How did we come to this pass...
...The trust is founded on something more stable and more universal than the mere compassion of Albert Camus...
...In a situation where the premises of metaphysics and even of history are uncertain and open to question, the moral sense is forced to extend its scope, taking on the additional function of guide to knowledge...
...He had as yet heard nothing of Rosa Luxemburg's theory of the natural impulse to revolution of the working class, or of Lenin's theory of the forces which propel modern society on the path of progress...
...And the claim of the new orthodoxy, which one has accepted so completely, to be scientific and objective —that is not the least of the inconsistencies that you will vainly seek to force on the attention of the convert...
...This amounts to saying that the spiritual situation I have just described admits neither of defense nor of arrogance...
...Only within these limits can we reach a true definition of ourselves...
...There will always be a number of perfectly respectable people who interpret in their own fashion, by their haircut or the way they knot their ties, the spirit of the age in which they live...
...It seems to me that however much they may differ outwardly, the majority of these episodes have a common source: what Nietzsche called the nihilism of modern times...
...The problems that beset us are those of our present existence, of our responsibility as men of today...
...Nor did he know of Sorel or other prophets of the new Messiah...
...Class consciousness is no longer a natural product of class...
...This was a final point beyond which it was impossible to advance...
...To pin responsibility for them on any one political regime would clearly be a misrepresentation, since we know that they occurred under widely differing regimes, in Russia, America, and Western Europe...
...he can be Blackshirt or partisan, executioner or victim, or simply, in rich and peaceful countries, a lazy philistine with no ideals, insured against unemployment, old age, illness, and also against the risk that the insurance company might go bankrupt...
...The Communist revolt of the colored peoples seemed to offer him hope...
...It is nihilistic to sacrifice oneself for a cause in which one does not believe, while pretending to believe in it...
...he had seen him standing in front of a shop decked out for Christmas, with Jeanne bending toward him, telling him she was happy...
...What characterized our revolt was the choice of comrades...
...And events seemed to indicate that Rosa Luxemburg was right...
...in fact, they find it serves their purposes...
...He was certainly not thinking of politics as a career...
...Mankind today is in poor shape...
...That is not the sort of problem that can give us sleepless nights...
...And moreover, at the stage to which things are now reduced, I as a writer see no other way, outside the freedom of art, of placing before the minds of men the problems that elude them, and of presenting them with a truer image of themselves than that which they see daily in the mirror...
...Tears were streaming down the cheeks of the old clerk...
...He can still be Christ, taking on himself the sins of others...
...With these certainties as a basis for existence, how can we resign ourselves to seeing man's noblest faculties stifled in so many human creatures born to poverty and wretchedness...
...It is not a matter, be it said, even in its subsidiary aspects, of literary diversion...
...but this small circle of light that remains to us enables us at least to see where to place our feet for the next step...
...He could even remember the day when the poor fellow had got engaged to be married...
...Frankly, these traditional problems do not even trouble us...
...A distaste for verbalism and facile consolations holds us back from more general statements...
...The mere fact that men throw themselves into, the fray, even though they are knotted up with a fear that no discipline and no love of country can dispel, makes them, like martyrs, bear witness to an ultra-human reality that is beyond and within them...
...Few people realize that the tyranny of means over ends is the death of even the noblest ends...
...But did this •member act on his own initiative or by order of the party machine...
...To speak in old-fashioned terms, the head, even in the process of relearning, is towed along by the heart—or, according to the health of the person in question, by the stomach...
...Were Gobetti and Matteotti wrong...
...Besides, he as yet knew nothing of the proud Marxist prophecy acclaiming the proletariat as the legitimate heir of modern philosophy...
...And so on...
...It is a matter of personal honor to keep faith with those who are being persecuted for their love of freedom and justice...
...Of course there will be people foolish enough to dismiss Simone Weil's letter as defeatist...
...It is multiform...
...They spend most of their time telling one another the story of their lives...
...This is too little to constitute a profession of faith, but it is enough for a declaration of trust...
...In compassion Camus finds the cure for this desolate sense of the absurd...
...Men to all appearances courageous, when dining with friends, would relate with a warm, comradely smile how they had killed priests or "fascists"—a word of elastic meaning...
...To judge men, it is no longer enough to see if they have calloused hands: one must look into their eyes...
...But generally, in poor countries, because of his relative political simplicity, he can still be the prey of extremists...
...and he can also be Barabbas, an ignoble totalitarian Barabbas, trampling on all that is most human in man...
...It expresses a sensitive woman's horror at the useless massacres which accompanied these events...
...THE CHOICE OF COMRADES 171 One need only look around one to see the state to which consciences have been reduced...
...Ernst Junger retreated from it in time, while Hitler was still in power...
...To be valid, it does not need success...
...For others less fortunate, however, times of crisis may bring graver consequences...
...or at least one smiles, encouragingly at those who kill...
...There seems to be in this some impulse or intoxication which it is impossible to resist without a strength of mind which I am obliged to consider exceptional, since I have not found it in anyone...
...Nihilism has spread from the upper classes over the entire surface of the social fabric: the epidemic has not spared the working-class districts...
...There is one duty, however, that we cannot evade: to be aware of what is happening...
...but how ambiguous was his adherence to it...
...that's how it will always be...
...What do you think refugees do from morning to night...
...but the defeat had preceded it, as an illness precedes its diagnosis...
...And from them, skepticism and corruption spread and seeped downward to the very foundation of society...
...The authoritarian restoration which followed the war—first in Italy and the Balkans, later in Germany and elsewhere—was a remedy worse than the disease...
...It is futile to think that this fact can be abolished, or that any democracy can maintain itself for very long, propped by police tribunals in the face of working-class opposition...
...The stories are anything but amusing, but they tell them to one another, really, in an effort to make themselves understood...
...The fact that spiritual communion is possible—surely this is the irrefutable proof of human brotherhood...
...Yes, fear has played a part in these killings...
...These suicides are not to be easily explained away...
...that we feel the need of reaching out to touch the inmost reality of our fellowmen...
...I know that these are isolated examples, and that one or even two swallows do not make a summer...
...Are the dead, are the weak always in the wrong...
...The Czarist secret police, the Okhrana, decided to encourage the formation of a labor union in the hope of drawing underground agitators into it and arresting them...
...The virile sense of a new brotherhood of man alternated, in the pages of La Condition Humaine, with the intoxication of action for its own sake...
...We are confronted with the need for reassessment, not only of the problems of human behavior but also of the greater question of the meaning of our existence...
...We are all familiar with the picture that post-Nietzschean and existentialist literature has drawn of the predicament of present-day man...
...And is fear of the hydrogen bomb the fear of a stronger right, a right therefore more convincing than the others...
...This by no means excludes, incidentally, a double game with the opposing party, which might be the winner tomorrow...
...This dilemma we can no longer evade, because the executioners themselves are forcing it on us...
...This amounts to saying that we are not believers, we are not atheists, and still less are we skeptics...
...No doubt but that Jeanne's fresh voice was echoing now to Grand across the distant years...
...It is not to be wondered at that a young man already secretly disgusted with his surroundings, witnessing this unaccustomed ferment, should undergo a profound change of heart and become convinced that in an old, tired, decrepit, blase society such as the one in which he lived, the poor represented the final refuge of life—something real, to which it would be wholesome to attach oneself...
...To sacrifice oneself for a faith [wrote Ernst Junger] means to reach one's maximum, irrespective of whether that faith is true or false...
...So far I have found no exceptions to the pattern I have just described, and if any do exist, I think they are rare...
...Political regimes may come and go, bad habits remain...
...No reader of his books can fail to discern the sharp contrast dividing Le Mythe de Sisyphe and L'Etranger on the one hand, from La Peste and the book of essays entitled L'Homme Revolte on the other...
...To my way of feeling, they are Christian certainties...
...Translated by DARINA SILONE THE CHOICE OF COMRADES 175...
...In his novel La Peste the existence of the characters is presented, not as the impassive unfolding of arbitrary and meaningless facts, but as the compassionate encounter of human beings suffering and struggling against a common destiny...
...It is hardly surprising that rarely should anything learned in the catechism and schoolbooks hinder one's docile acceptance of the new orthodoxy...
...The Catholicroyalist writer's vehement indictment of the excesses of the Franco repression in Majorca is countered by the anguished confession of the young revolutionary intellectual, then a volunteer on the Republican side...
...In this age of ours, it is the real touchstone...
...The advantages are by no means negligible, because they are completely absolved from all personal responsibility...
...But if the new revolutionary theories of the historical mission of the proletariat had not yet reached that remote district of Southern Italy, emigrants returned from America were -already prompting the landless peasants to form their first resistance leagues...
...In reality, even beyond one's frontiers of awareness, one remains a creature of flesh and blood, a man of a certain region, a certain class, and a certain time...
...Do we side with the inmates of the slave-labor camps or with their jailers...
...The recent examples of the Nazi labor unions, those of Salazar and Peron and, in a broader sense, all reformist and cooperative unions, have at last convinced of this even those who were reluctant to admit it on the sole grounds of the totalitarian degeneration of Communism...
...This confession of humility does not cost us an effort, since we have no answers to the THE CHOICE OF COMRADES 173 supreme questions about man's origin and his destiny...
...Perhaps the time for it will come again, but at present we feel very remote from the serenity and harmony it represents...
...On it depends the freedom of mankind, and much else...
...If the matter is delicate, the answer will be delivered to him at home...
...Ever since this situation arose, ever since there ceased to exist a worldwide trend of the working classes toward freedom, human life has acquired a new aspect, spiritually as well as politically...
...Morals, art, philosophy were all directly influenced by it...
...The members of the group in question are unruffled by this procedure...
...For example, it never starts from philosophical or scientific conviction, but almost always from simple instinctive revolt against family or social surroundings...
...The lives of writers are, I think, not less significant than the books they write...
...One fine Sunday some of us stopped going to Mass, not because Catholic dogma seemed to us, all of a sudden, false, but because the people who went began to bore us and we were drawn to the company of those who stayed -away...
...Since then, as we all know, the myth of the liberating power of the proletariat has dissolved along with that other myth of the inevitability of progress...
...Those were the declining years of an epoch in which a number of events had seemed to prove the myth about the liber170 IGNAZIO SILONE ating mission of the proletariat...
...Nihilism is the conviction that beliefs and ideas are, ultimately, a mere facade with nothing real behind them, and that consequently only one thing really matters, really counts: success...
...Nihilism, as Nietzsche conceived it, is the identification of goodness, justice, and truth with self-interest...
...And to the opportunism of individuals obsessed with their own security and that of their families, there is added the usurping tendency of collective organizations...
...Because the aim can be formulated only in terms of the public good, the good of human beings...
...This is the rule...
...Nevertheless it would be unjust to consider it as a superficial movie-hero affair...
...Inhibition is more deadly than sincerity...
...The letter has been published only recently...
...To die voluntarily," he writes, "implies that one has recognized, at least instinctively, the absurd nature of this habit, the absence of any serious reason for living, the senselessness of this daily agitation and the futility of suffering...
...No other single element is so powerful...
...This is no abstract hypothesis, but the plain truth of what has happened to quite a number of people...
...What could the landless peasants of his Southern Italian village have meant to a young student, in the years immediately preceding the First World War, that he should embrace their cause...
...There is no mistaking the look of Cain...
...At that point, one of two things will happen to him: either he will find the abyss of suicide yawning at his feet, or else he will rediscover some valid meaning in human existence...
...We proclaim ourselves revolutionaries or conservatives for motives, often ill-defined, that are deep within us, and before choosing we are, unknown to ourselves, chosen...
...The First World War is generally blamed as the cause and origin of the disaster...
...I have read a certain number of biographies of anarchists, socialists, communists and fascists, and I am more or less familiar with the circumstances that led some of my acquaintances into political activity...
...Rieux knew what the old, weeping man was thinking of at that moment, and he too thought that without love this world of ours is a dead world, and that there always comes a time when, weary of the prisons of work and courage, one wants the face of another human being and a heart filled with the wonder of tenderness...
...but where I was I did not find that it played as large a part as you ascribe to it...
...This situation is one aspect of the general crisis of capitalism and anticapitalism...
...It was the great popular alternative to the nihilist decadence of Nietzsche's prophecy—the promise of a new earth and a new heaven...
...Today an experiment such as the Okhrana made in 1905 would not necessarily be doomed to failure...
...If ideological criticisms and moral campaigns cannot shake the compactness of the mass parties, if they leave the majority of their members indifferent, it is precisely for the reason mentioned earlier: those joining the mass parties out of inner ideological conviction are very few...
...In this description of a new type of proletarian, depersonalized and standardized, without heart, soul, or brain —a living robot—he depicted the protagonist of the transformation which is taking place in modern society...
...At a certain point in La Peste one of the 168 IGNAZIO SILONE characters—Rieux, ,a doctor—meets a municipal clerk named Grand whose wife has just left him, with no ill-will on either side...
...Neither did he know that, after the Milanese revolution of 1848, Carlo Cattaneo had declared the cause of the proletariat to be indissolubly linked thenceforth with that of freedom, one destined to travel through the coming ages with the other, like horseman and rider...
...As for the new ideology, we learn it, usually, at the schools of the party to which we have already pledged allegiance by an act of faith...
...How could conservatives ever have deluded themselves into thinking that political tyranny of any kind would eliminate nihilism...
...The choice is emotional, beyond logic...
...Frankly, I cannot think of a single collective organization today that could be said to be untainted by the leprosy of nihilism...
...There is no more melancholy image than that of the persecuted who in their turn become persecutors...
...The examples are far from insignificant...
...With the collapse of these regimes, the basic nihilism remained, buried deep in people's consciences...
...The stormy curve of his life's journey does indeed seem the adventure of a "superman" seeking tests and opportunities for his own dreams of glorification...
...In this worldwide moral shipwreck, what scrap of driftwood can one clutch in order not to drown...
...Even the revolt born of pity alone can restore meaning to life...
...We must call a spade a spade...
...Mayakovsky was the poet of a victorious revolution, and the others, from Zweig to Pavese, were deeply rooted in the humanist or religious traditions of the society from which they came...
...Economic servitude is hard," old Alvear was to say in L'Espoir, "but if in order to destroy it we are obliged to strengthen political or military or religious or police servitude, then what does it matter to me in comparison...
...And the widespread view that identifies History with the winning side, the ignoble cowardice that leads so many intellectuals to Communism or to McCarthy—that too is nihilism...
...Since then, wars and revolutions in constant succession have borne out Nietzsche's prophecy, making evident what in his day was still perhaps obscure...
...The decadence of our age, however, had already begun prior to these tragic episodes...
...The worker, as we have seen and as we continue to see, can work for the most conflcting causes...
...Was Trotsky wrong only because he was defeated...
...Suicide among writers in various countries during the past 30 years has reached an unparalleled figure...
...nor of the inferior groups on the margin of the productive process (the socalled Lumpenproletariat)—but of the normal working classes...
...How can we conceive of a moral life from which this fundamental concern is absent...
...The German writer reached the farthest limit of nihilism in his famous message Der Arbeiter...
...You talk of fear...
...A choice once made, the rest, as experience shows, follows automatically...
...But to return to my point...
...The deathly mechanism is always the same: every group or institution arises in defense of an ideal, with which it rapidly comes to identify itself and for which it finally substitutes itself altogether, proclaiming its own interests as the supreme value: "Whoever injures the Party is against History...
...Was Mazzini wrong...
...It was an active sympathy, consecrated by the sacrifices which culminated in the act of an unknown comrade who saved Kassner, the Communist leader, from Nazi torture...
...This keeping faith is a better rule than any abstract program or formula...
...To kill oneself means "simply to recognize that life is not worth the trouble...
...Man disintegrates when they are denied...
...The particular spiritual condition I wish to discuss has affinities with the instances I have just mentioned...
...And the letter ends: "One sets out as a volunteer, with ideas of sacrifice, only to find oneself in a war of mercenaries, with a great deal of unnecessary cruelty thrown in...
...On the contrary, I have seen sober Frenchmen whom I had not previously despised—men who of their own accord would never have thought of killing anyone—plunging with obvious relish into that blood-soaked atmosphere...
...These labels, with their conventional implications, do not concern us...
...Anyone who tries to attach them to us will merely increase terminological confusion...
...The fascination of that myth spread far beyond the narrow limits of party politics...
...It resembles a refugee encampment in no-man's-land, an exposed makeshift encampment...
...Anyone undertaking to do so with absolute intellectual honesty and an uncorrupted heart should sooner or later be able to reach its farthest limit...
...what is human is reduced to mere vitality...
...Group living, it would almost seem, creates the most favorable temperature, for the incubation of its germs...
...In Le Temps du Mepris, brotherhood was invoked more wholeheartedly, as the last resort against nihilist desperation...
...Andre Malraux presents a more remarkable case because this French descendant of Nietzsche, through his progress from Communism back to nationalism, gives the impression of having remained a Nietzschean at heart all the time...
...Either way, he is a protagonist on the world stage...
...From a distance he looked at Grand, who was standing almost glued to a shop window full of roughly carved wooden toys...
...and that spiritual communion is possible...
...Still less can we blame the pernicious influence of some pessimistic doctrine...
...There is no panacea for social evils...
...Indeed, a certain episode occurred around 1905 in Moscow which has remained a classic in the history of the workers' movement and seemed to have been created for the express purpose of proving even to skeptics how well-founded was the theory of Rosa Luxemburg about the liberating impulse of the working class...
...The clear, ancient Mediterranean sky, once filled with shining constellations, is overcast...
...Frankly we must confess that we have 174 IGNAZIO SILONE no panacea...
...And did Gramsci begin to be right only after April 1945...
...Furthermore, it contains a rule of life...
...They appear to me so deeply immured in human existence as to be identified with it...
...Whenever I happen to consider the sense of bewilderment, tedium, and disgust characteristic of our age, my mind turns not to the books of Heidegger, Jaspers, and Sartre but to the suicides of Essenin, Mayakovsky, Ernst Toiler, Kurt Tucholsky, Stefan Zweig, Klaus Mann, Drieu La Rochelle, F. 0. Matthiessen, Cesare Pavese, and other lesser-known figures...
...To the general feeling of personal insecurity, which in our age has been engendered by the economic crisis and the intrusion of the state and politics into every field of human activity, there corresponds the anxious search of individuals for some kind of security and protection in one or other of the political mass parties...
...Indeed, one does not even feel the need of refuting them, because all of that has become part of the world one has left behind...
...it is a disease of the spirit which can be diagnosed only by those who are immune from it or have been cured of it, but to which most people are quite oblivious, since they think it corresponds to a perfectly natural mode of being: "That'ts how it has always been...
...The very aim of the struggle is blotted out by an atmosphere of this kind...
...I felt that whenever a certain group of human beings is relegated, by some temporal or spiritual authority, beyond the pale of those whose life has a price, then one finds it perfectly natural to kill such people...
...As long as there remains a determination to understand and to share one's understanding with others, perhaps we need not altogether despair...
...It should be apparent from the foregoing why humanism in general, literary or philosophical, means very little to us...
...And those tears shook Rieux, because he understood them and could feel them in the dryness of his own throat...
...We are certainly not going to sacrifice the poor to the cause of freedom, nor freedom to the poor, or rather to the usurping bureaucrats who have climbed on the shoulders of the poor...
...The war merely demonstrated how fragile were the myths of progress on which capitalist civilization was based...
...And if we are not too proud to confess that .there have been moments of anguish and solitude when our thoughts returned with piercing nostalgia to the tradition-bound order, the peace and security of the home we knew in childhood, we are nevertheless obliged to add that love of truth has always ended by prevailing over considerations of personal convenience...
...Even in the victorious countries, venerable institutions were subjected to such terrible ordeals that they began to totter like rotten scaffolding...
...and human beings have no value...
...When one knows one can kill without risk or punishment or blame, one kills...
...Between La Tentation de 1'Occident and La Psychologie de 1'Art there is more than a change of scene...
...Still they do point to a path of salvation, a true way out of nihilism, which springs from a sure and indestructible element deep-rooted in man...
...Nietzsche was the first to define this decadence, calling it nihilism, as I said, and giving the word a new meaning that it has retained, a meaning different from that found in Turgenev's famous novel...
...The vital role of the workers in production, their numbers, their greater social compactness and homogeneity—the sum of these factors in every country gives them the decisive voice in politics...
...Our number is an ever-swelling legion: the legion of refugees from the International...
...My concern in these pages is with them...
...Yes, there are some unshakable certainties...
...A young man's revolt against tradition is a frequent occurrence in every age and every country, and his reasons are not 'always clear to the onlooker...
...Here I shall only mention two: the literary path of Ernst JUnger and that of Albert Camus...
...The world in which I live repels me," he wrote later, in L'Homme Revolte, "but I feel with its suffering inhabitants...
...To use the oppressed as a stepping-stone to power and then betray them is undoubtedly the most wicked of all sacrileges, because of all human beings they are the most defenseless...
...Frankly, it is merely an expedient...
...Among the reflections of Simone Well collected under the title La Pesanteur et la Grace, we find this indirect answer, the validity of which goes far beyond politics: one must, she says, "always be ready to change sides with justice, that fugitive from the winning camp...
...Ideology is now given the same rough treatment once meted out to the catechism and to patriotic stories...
...The initial choice must now be followed by another...
...These, however, scented a trap and kept clear of it...
...We are forced to pick our steps beneath a sky that is, ideologically speaking, dark...
...V .^ a have come -a long way now from the very simple situation in which some of us revolted against our family surroundings and went over to the side of the proletariat...
...It can be summarized as follows: all links between the existence and the being of man are broken...
...We have stopped pondering the riddle of egg-orchicken priority, for what is perhaps a very banal reason: we are not responsible for it, and whichever way things may originally have happened, it was not our fault...
...they are no longer the incarnation of a myth, and if one were to follow them blindly and unconditionally one might find oneself where least one wants to be...
...It has not merely engulfed a number of cultivated and hypersensitive individuals...
...Without the slightest attempt at resistance, indeed with the wellknown fervor of neophytes, one accepts the language, symbols, organization, discipline, tactics, program and doctrine of the party to which one's new comrades belong...
...According to circumstances, THE CHOICE OF COMRADES 169 it can lead to the Foreign Legion, to common crime, to a film career, to a monastery, or to political extremism...
...All we have—and it is a great deal—is this trust that makes it possible for us to go on living...
...it has invaded entire classes and institutions, not even sparing the people...
...For Marxists the moral to be drawn is clear: a similar way of living no longer determines an identical or analogous way of thinking...
...The pitfall of abstract and superficial moralism can be a real one, but only if the moral sense is operating on a tabula rasa...
...It was not their psychology that we were drawn to: it was their plight...
...In those years one did not yet risk contradiction if one claimed that wherever a workers' organization was active, under whatever regime, in whatever climate or social conditions, despite its shortcomings it would move "naturally" toward freedom and renewal...
...The greatest freedom of this human robot would consist in being mechanically employed in the series of civil and imperialist wars on which we have already embarked and which will dominate the coming centuries...
...I have never seen [she writes] either among the Spaniards or among the French who have come here to fight or to amuse themselves (the latter often being gloomy, harmless intellectuals) anyone who expressed, even in private conversation, repugnance or 172 IGNAZIO SILONE disgust for, or even only disapproval of, unnecessary bloodshed...
...Persecution, exile, isolation, poverty, illness, abnormality—one or the other of these external reasons has been suggested in each case to explain how a man of talent could have sought such a desperate end...
...but would that war ever have broken out in the first place had the civilized world not already been in a state of crisis...
...To us it seems that the self-complacency of man implicit in humanism has scant foundation nowadays...
...He felt Grand's unhappiness as his own, and something gnawed at his heart at that moment—the fierce anger that comes over one at the suffering which human beings have to endure...
...Outside our village church stood the landless peasants...
...A proper awe of the transcendental prevents us from taking its name in vain and using it as a narcotic...
...He is the deus ex machina of modern politics...
...It is no longer merely a question of a few privileged workers (the so-called proletarian aristocracy of the imperialist countries, made possible by the exploitation of colonial peoples...
...As a result, certain kinds of people who had relied on these myths as a compass find themselves in a state of spiritual vagueness and ambiguity that is still far from being clarified...
...Now, however, the decline of that myth must be obvious to anyone who takes the trouble to inform himself of the conditions prevailing in the world beyond his own backyard...
...But she had witnessed something else that had made an even more painful impression on her than brute violence...
...Will he cease to be right if the strength of his party declines...
...The workers' world is spiritually broken up...
...Human stupidity is so monotonous...
...Indeed, one might well reverse the explanation and say it was precisely because they were not pessimistic enough, because they had banished Angst from their doctrine 166 and their art, that some of them were to end by succumbing to it so miserably...
...indeed, with their atmosphere of fear and servility, they aggravated and exacerbated the general decadence...
...On the contrary, fascism in all its forms meant that nihilism was installed in power...
...What a flock of terrifying ghosts they seem, when one names them all together...
...In 1926 Malraux was announcing the historical downfall of Europe, "this cemetery where only dead conquerors sleep...
...The dictatorships strengthened the old instruments of coercion and created new ones, but they did not create a new moral order...
...Before commenting on what I consider the provisional and transient nature of this representation, I feel bound to state that in some respects I find it praiseworthy...
...And it is a mere mystification to claim that the reduction of human beings to the status of instruments and raw materials can ever ensure human happiness...
...The proletariat of this world are no longer in agreement among themselves...
...A purer-hearted witness or a more exemplary circumstance would be hard to find...
...However, it follows a different path and has a significance of its own...
...He bluntly defines as absurd the reasons for living...
...I think sincerity is always to be admired, THE CHOICE OF COMRADES 167 especially if it requires a certain amount of courage, for without sincerity neither morality nor art can exist...
...And can brotherhood be founded on anything but freedom and personal responsibility...
...Need I add that this is not to be interpreted in political terms of power or tyranny...
Vol. 21 • April 1974 • No. 2
