Chapter 12 : 
A Good Example
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19081908

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Author : Victor Serge

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A Good Example

 
(Editor’s note: Jean-Jacques Liabeuf was an apache, or member of a
Parisian street gang, who, upon his release for his unjust imprisonment as
a pimp, sought out the policemen responsible for his arrest and killed a
policeman attempting to detain him. His became a cause célèbre of the
Left. Despite a campaign that involved socialists, syndicalists, and
anarchists, Liabeuf was executed on July 2, 1910.)

THE OTHER DAY A “TERROR” OF THE CITY BARRIERS, WHO THE COPS WERE
arresting for some misdeed I don’t know a thing about, rightly wiped the
floor with four of them. Four cops taken down like that by a guy they were
getting ready to quietly rough up—now that’s a job well done. It took a
few hundred of Ferrer’s avengers on the October 13 of glorious memory to
take down just one!

For having done his job so well I find this Liabeuf quite sympatico, much
more so than certain fearsome revolutionaries who, after having suffered
the third degree, vehemently protest … journalistically.

And yet, the apaches in general don’t interest me very much. They differ
too little from honest people. With certain rare (and estimable)
exceptions, their mentality and methods are identical. Both recognize
authority and make use of it. Both have a view of life that is illogical
and lacking in beauty, which is verified by everything they do. Just as the
honest citizen considers his wife as his property and denies her any
individual will, the pimp sees his hooker as a profit center. Both
shamelessly exploit. The honest merchant robs through deception under the
protection of the law; the apache operates through violence against the
law. Only the way they end differ in any way. While the financier will end
peacefully, honored, and decorated, Charlot de Menilmuche or the Bastoche
will likely end up in the penal colony, unless a final bit of bad luck
acquaints him with the widow-maker.[51]

I would say that nine times out of ten the apaches are nothing but poorly
adapted or unlucky bourgeois. But we must render them this justice: they
are less cowardly, less spineless than honest people, and because of this
resemble men a bit more.

For example, this Liabeuf, arrested two weeks ago on the Rue
Aubry-le-Boucher, in wiping the floor with four cops, acted like a man
where almost everyone else—including revolutionaries and
anarchists—ordinarily act like cowards.

I don’t know why they were arresting him, and in any case that seems to
me to be secondary. Whatever the official causes the fact remains: in the
name of the lawmen pounced on another man because in the struggle for life
he had transgressed the rules of the code.

He had transgressed the law! But did he ever subscribe to it? Had he
recognized it?

Is it not the height if illogic to accuse an individual of not recognizing
the rules he is perhaps ignorant of, to which no one ever asked him to
subscribe, and which others unknown to him decreed?

I am ignorant of the law and I repudiate it. In my eyes nothing justifies
it. It is imposed on me by brute force. It is only respected and obeyed by
the weakest because of phalanxes of prison guards, cops, and soldiers.

For a word, a writing, an act—simply that, for such is the fantasy of a
judge or policeman—the abstract power of the law is made real and
delivers a blow. Its dogs attack the rebel. Magistrates deliberately cut so
many days, months, and years from his life, which he’ll pass in the
horror of prison. They coldly torture him through solitude, silence,
darkness; they turn him into a formless gray thing without any activity of
his own.

There is nothing more natural than the fact that, their gilded abjection
being threatened by rebels—conscious resistors or not—the masters of
the day defend themselves; that they pitilessly suppress the rebel; that
they make Brennus’s famous word their motto: “Woe on the vanquished!”
and that they kill the apache whose knife threatens their bellies, the poet
and the thinker who awaken people’s consciousness, and the anarchist
conquering his life against theirs. Let them kill! The battle will be
merciless on both sides, but at least we won’t know the infamy and
torment of jails.

It is logical that in order to live a man should kill another when the
latter gets in his way. It is logical that the dispossessed attack the
possessors and that the possessors respond with fusillades. It is logical
that the apache, the rebel against the prison of labor, kills a rentier,
and logical when the rentier kills him when they have him in their hands.

Kill. That’s your right, and ours. But don’t torture. That is the true
crime, the evil, repugnant act. To deprive a man of air and light, to gag
him, tie his arms and legs, take from him all of life’s joys and leave
him nothing but suffering, that is the crime par excellence.

Existence without freedom becomes the worst of agonies. And every law being
one more hindrance to individual freedom, every individual endowed with
will is, by definition, a rebel. So every time that a man is attacked in
the name of that law—which creates theft, fraud, and falsehood, which
stifles and tortures—if there is even the least drop of virile strength
left in him he must defend himself, ferociously, desperately.

The right to live implies the right to kill whoever prevents me from
living. The will to live imposes on me the duty (the necessity) of killing
whoever wants to rob me of freedom, without which there is no life.

But people are so cowardly these days. Accumulated slaveries have made man
so flabby and senile that even the primordial instinct of the animal
retaliating for a bite with a blow with his claw has fallen asleep in him.
If the wolves who the winter exasperates leave the woods, their mouths
burning to wrest their nourishing pittance; if every animal fights back
against hunger or the yoke, the poor stoically support their poverty, and
all men allow themselves to be oppressed, ridiculed, and tortured without
rebelling.

These are no longer the days of open carnage when violent and clearly
defined forces collided. A weak humanitarianism lulls masters and slave.
They want peace—international, social, individual, all possible peace.
And hypocritically, their faces veiled in smiles, they fight through use of
corruption, betrayal, and deceit. Fear reigns, the fear of blood and
effort, the fear of leaving sweet somnolence behind.

This explains the carefree casualness of the privileged, juggling with the
fate of the common run of mortals. Insults, vexations, spoliations, and the
arbitrary relentlessly whip the individual on. Men exploit with impunity
other men who are a hundred times more numerous than they.

Amid so much weakness and cowardice I admire the person who dares to defend
himself. It’s necessary that there arise more often the figure of the
apache in order to teach poltroons and tormentors respect for the
individual.

For the cops received a good lesson, and it was a scathing one, as sharp a
one as being whipped. And for those—the anarchist rebels—who push their
way through mocking the authorities and who the law waits for in ambush at
every turning, this apache gave a good lesson.

(l’anarchie, January 27, 1910)

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     From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org

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     Chapter 12 -- Publication : November 30, 1907

     Chapter 12 -- Added : January 11, 2021

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