ON A FEW OLD TOPICAL QUESTIONS CONCERNING ANARCHISTS AND NOT ONLY

text first appeared on the Italian anarchist website Anarcotico in 2003
today might be a good day to reread it

I am certainly not nonviolent. All the same I can understand someone who hates violence to the point of wanting to banish it from their life; someone who would never kill, would never use force in order to be heard; who, because of their character and aptitude, prefers not to have recourse to it. But I can only understand all this if it is a question of individual choice. When nonviolence is presented as a method of struggle, a road to be followed, when individual ethics become morals and a collective project, it seems absolute nonsense to me, useful only to justify lack of action and an obstacle against those who rebel, an absolute value to impose on the weak to allow the strong to forget them in comfort. On the edge of the abyss, with the earth more and more under enemy fire, the invitation to use only good manners can look just like that. Do as you like but don’t preach to me.That said, I am not a fanatic of violence either. Idon’t like those who boast about their own feats in such a context, I don’t justify their apology as an end in itself, I detest those who consider it the only solution possible. I consider it a necessity in the struggle against power, nothing more. Like Malatesta, I too don’t believe in ‘placid sunsets’. I don’t believe that the reinforced concrete with which power has covered our existence will melt upon the blooming of the flower of freedom lovingly planted by the spreading of our ideas.Precisely because I am not nonviolent I cannot stand moralistic condemnation of acts of violence. The hypocrisy makes me sick. But precisely because Iam not a fanatic of violence, I also cannot stand any acritical exaltation of these acts. The stupidity of that really gets on my nerves.
Read on....
http://turbellaria.blogspot.com/2010/03/on-few-questions-concerning-anarchists.html