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"I am a woman. I know the old priests' proverb: 'A chicken is not a bird; a woman is not a person.' Four years ago when you elected me, men met me on the road with grins. Even to my face they told me that I could do nothing. That solid man, Peter Zhitov, can't run this village and you, a woman, try! I wept sometimes from the insults and thought of giving up entirely. But I remembered Lenin's word that every kitchen maid must learn to rule the State, That applied to me, for I worked from the age of 12 as cowherd and later as kitchen girl at General Solomon's: And I said: 'Who will ever make over this old life unless we ourselves do it?' "

The Voice of the Soviet Village, Anna Louise Strong (1935)

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In Gulinka, a village overnight by train from Moscow plus a two-hour walk through the mud, there was no reason for rushing the election. But Maria Kurkina, the village President, thought the holidays on the anniversary of the Revolution offered an excellent chance to hold both an election and an Old Home Week. "We are rather a backward village," she said. "We have only a four-year school and frightful roads and no electricity yet. But we've stirred up in these past four years a lot of public spirit that is ready for great achlevements. Most of us have not seen the world and don't know the many things there are to get. Yet from our backward Gulinka no less than fifty people have gone to honorable tasks in our Soviet country- some engineers, an army commander, a doctor, a surveyor, an assistant editor, the foremen of the marten ovens in Stalingrad, many promislng students and several other notables. Let us invile them to tell us what is this Soviet power and what it offers. Let them tell us the shortcomings of our Gulinka, that we may know how to instruct our Deputies; then we shall be behind nobody in all new blessings there are to acquire."

Every one in the village thought the idea splendid, and as there was no opposing voice President Kurkina went to the township election commission and asked that commissioners be sent to see that Gulinka's election was held properly. "All your grain deliveries in?" asked the township commission. "Potato deliveries too? No village campaigns unfinished? No work which the outgoing Soviet has still to do? Then hold it when you like; it's your affair. Have you made your report yet ?" "Made it and printed it, and every one has discussed it," Kurkina replied proudly, producing a neat little folder, My Report to the Voters. Such reports, though not always printed, are made by all Soviet officials to their constituents. The reports, telling how the instructions given at the previous election have been carried out, must be discussed at least a week before the voting so that the election meeting may confine itself to candidates.

Kurkina's report was homely enough in its detalla. Nowhere in its sixteen printed pages did she brag of her own work; nowhere did she ask for votes. She told of great improvements in the village and described how they were accomplished.

"During your daily work you hardly notice how life is changing," President Kurkina's report began. But when you look back to sum up these four years you note a very great difference in our life, our village and our people. Many new brick houses replace the broken huts, A radio central rereiver gives Moscow conoerto to our homes. Outside the villago great brick structures are rising- the slables, barns and granaries of our collective farms. Cottage windows that formerly frightened one by their blackness are bright with flowers and white curtains People also are changing. The children of former farmhands become doctors , engineers, commanders."

The Voice of the Soviet Village, Anna Louise Strong (1935)

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We believe that alliances with social democracy are an opportunistic manifestation of class collaboration and a serious obstacle to revolutionary struggle; the conformation of fronts of that nature will always be a liquidating element of the Communist Party; and the absence of a communist party is the biggest attack on the working class and its immediate and historical objectives.

There are, for example, expressions of those alliances that have no justification, and one of them is support for the Democratic Party of the US Communist Party. And it is that when the perspective of the interests of the working class is set aside and the logic of the “lesser evil” is placed even the imperialist policy of the Democratic Party may seem better to the imperialist policy of the Republican Party. Thus several communist parties justify their support for bourgeois policies under the pretext of struggle against the "ultra-right" and fascism.

We have great respect for the communists' policy against fascism during World War II, but we cannot deny that some elements of that policy are connected to browderism, to the opportunist platform of the 20th Congress of the CPSU, to Eurocommunism, and in some way they form a platform of certain similarities to that of opportunism in the II International.

It is a paradox that those who oppose the elaboration of a unified revolutionary strategy hold a common opportunist strategy on the grounds that the generalization of experience excludes the importance of national struggle, the specificities, the particularities; as a contraband they have a general strategy based on the possibility of a peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism - which has already demonstrated its unfeasibility in Chile and in the strongholds of Eurocommunism (Italy and France); in national ways to socialism, all of them with the same components: denial of the dictatorship of the proletariat, alliance with social democracy, pluriclassist political formations, capitalist management of economy, elevation of bourgeois democracy to absolute value, or if to put it roughly, that the communists manage the governments of capitalism.

Communist Party of Mexico (PCM), Our Tribute to the Communist International: Keeping the Flag of Proletarian Internationalism High, 2020

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But contempt for a writer, who sinks to shouting about "autocracy" and "subordination," does not relieve us of the duty of disentangling the confusion that such people create in the minds of their readers, and here we can demonstrate to the world the nature of the catchwords like "broad democracy." We are accused of forgetting the committees, of desiring or attempting to drive them into the kingdom of shadows, etc. How can we reply to these charges when, owing to considerations of secrecy, we are not in a position to tell the reader anything about our real relationships with the committees? The people who broadcast slashing accusations which excite the people appear to be ahead of us because of their recklessness and their neglect of the duty of a revolutionist carefully to conceal from the eyes of the world the relationships and contacts he has, which he is establishing or trying to establish. Naturally, we absolutely refuse once for all to compete with such people on the field of "democracy."

What is to be Done? Vladimir Lenin, 1902

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[T]he proletariat must take care: 1) that by sharp practices local authorities and government commissioners do not, under any pretext whatsoever, exclude any section of workers; 2) that workers’ candidates are nominated everywhere in opposition to bourgeois-democratic candidates. As far as possible they should be League members and their election should be pursued by all possible means. Even where there is no prospect of achieving their election the workers must put up their own candidates to preserve their independence, to gauge their own strength and to bring their revolutionary position and party standpoint to public attention. They must not be led astray by the empty phrases of the democrats, who will maintain that the workers’ candidates will split the democratic party and offer the forces of reaction the chance of victory. All such talk means, in the final analysis, that the proletariat is to be swindled. The progress which the proletarian party will make by operating independently in this way is infinitely more important than the disadvantages resulting from the presence of a few reactionaries in the representative body. If the forces of democracy take decisive, terroristic action against the reaction from the very beginning, the reactionary influence in the election will already have been destroyed.

Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1850

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Only the proletarians of the present day, who are completely shut off from all self-activity, are in a position to achieve a complete and no longer restricted self-activity, which consists in the appropriation of a totality of productive forces and in the thus postulated development of a totality of capacities. All earlier revolutionary appropriations were restricted; individuals, whose self-activity was restricted by a crude instrument of production and a limited intercourse, appropriated this crude instrument of production, and hence merely achieved a new state of limitation. Their instrument of production became their property, but they themselves remained subordinate to the division of labour and their own instrument of production. In all expropriations up to now, a mass of individuals remained subservient to a single instrument of production; in the appropriation by the proletarians, a mass of instruments of production must be made subject to each individual, and property to all. Modern universal intercourse can be controlled by individuals, therefore, only when controlled by all.

The German Ideology, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1845-46

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The object before us, to begin with, material production. Individuals producing in society – hence socially determined individual production – is, of course, the point of departure. The individual and isolated hunter and fisherman, with whom Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs among the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades, which in no way express merely a reaction against over-sophistication and a return to a misunderstood natural life, as cultural historians imagine. As little as Rousseau’s contrat social, which brings naturally independent, autonomous subjects into relation and connection by contract, rests on such naturalism. This is the semblance, the merely aesthetic semblance, of the Robinsonades, great and small.

Grundrisse, Karl Marx, 1857-61

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We must not forget that in the long run the legalisation of the working class movement will be to our advantage, and not to the Zubatovs. On the contrary, our campaign of exposure will help to separate the tares from the wheat. What the tares are, we have already indicated. By the wheat we mean attracting the attention of increasing numbers of the more backward sections of the workers to social and political questions, and to freeing ourselves, the revolutionists, from functions which are essentially legal (the distribution of legal books, mutual aid, etc.), the development of which will inevitably provide us with an increasing quantity of material for agitation. Looked at from this point of view, we may say, and we should say to the Zubatovs and the Ozerovs, "Keep at it, gentlemen, do your best!" We shall expose your efforts to place a trap in the path of the workers (either by way of direct provocation, or by the "honest" corruption of the workers with the aid of Struveism), but we shall be grateful for every real step forward even if it is timid and vacillating; we shall say: Please continue! A real step forward can only result in a real, if small, extension of the workers' field of action. And every such extension must be to our advantage and help to hasten the advent of legal societies, not of the kind in which agent-provacteurs hunt for Socialists, but of the kind in which Socialists will hunt for adherents. In a word, our task is to fight down the tares. It is not our business to grow wheat in flower-pots. By pulling up the tares, we clear the soil for the wheat. And while the old-fashioned folk are tending their flower-pot crops, we must prepare reapers, not only to cut down the tares of to-day, but also to reap the wheat of tomorrow.

What is to be Done? Vladimir Lenin, 1902

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When it comes to the so-called ideology of the fascists, we have to say that this is the ideology of robbery and barbarism. It is difficult to find any semblance of “correspondence” between what the fascists do and how they explain their “deeds.” There is a lot of robbery, incredibly more than ideology. Nevertheless, the leaders of the robbers are trying to justify their robbery and invent something like an ideology. This “ideology” is the outlook of people without honor and conscience. Hitler says to his thugs: “I liberate a person from the humiliating chimera called conscience ... Conscience, like education, cripples a person.” Down with conscience, down with honor! Do whatever you like, none of the atrocious acts of the young men from the Hitlerite party are subject to moral condemnation, for conscience is nothing, honor does not exist. Putting together an army of criminals calling itself the National Socialist Party, Hitler, addressing the scum of society, said: “I need people with a strong fist who are not stopped by principles when it is necessary to kill someone. And if they ruin a watch or jewelry on occasion, I don’t give a damn about that.”

What is the language of this “programmatic” position of the “Führer” worth! This is the language of a professional bandit, but not a leader of a political party or a head of state. Boasting that he has no scientific education, Hitler says about himself that he is alien to any moral considerations: “I have the advantage that I am not held back by any considerations of a theoretical or moral order.” This really is an advantage over all the bandits in the world. Psychologists-criminologists find a well-known ethic even among the most inveterate bandits. Professional bandits of the pre-Hitler formation did not consider it ethical to kill defenseless women, old people, children for nothing, for nothing. They considered this business obscene. Unless, as they say, “they will fall under the arm” – to remove unnecessary evidence, – they will kill a defenseless old man or a child. For bandits brought up by the Hitlerite party, the murder of a person, human blood is elevated to a cult. They completely discard all kinds of considerations of humanity and morality.

“Humanism, culture, international law are empty words for us,” says Goebbels, known throughout the world as a rogue, swindler, embezzler, pimp and world liar. “Kill everyone who is against you, kill, kill, you are not responsible for this, but I, so kill!” – shouts the international executioner and murderer Goering. This is the so-called program of the Nazi Party. The program is terrible, wild, barbaric.

Who are the National Socialists? Pavel Yudin, 1942

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The German fascist party is the party of the enemies of culture and human progress. Hatred of culture and the desire to destroy it is one of the important principles of the Nazi worldview. Hitler is the leader of all barbarians and enemies of human culture. The Nazi Party believes that culture, even in its simplest expression – the elementary literacy of a person – is unnecessary and harmful to the people. Hitler said that “once and for all we must put an end to what is called universal education. General education is a poison, the most dangerous and most corrupting that liberalism has found to destroy.” “... The lower the cultural level of the working class and the entire people, the more chances we have to retain power.” This is the programmatic position of the modern Huns, clad in armor of tanks and aircraft. To Hitler also belong the following words characterizing the attitude of the fascist party to culture: “We are barbarians, and we want to be barbarians. This is an honorary title ... The modern world is coming to an end. Our only task is to destroy this world ... Culture, civilization, humanity, etc. is an expression of a mixture of stupidity, cowardice and conceit. The people of science will never be able to storm the heavens, they are even unable to ensure our existence on this earth, especially since scientists have no will and they are only cowardly pacifists.”

It is difficult for the modern educated world to imagine that in the twentieth century in Germany, in a country that more than once amazed the world with the rise of the human mind to the great heights of wisdom and nobility, such wild views are expressed and implemented. Only the last waste of humanity, people who have no idea of either culture or science, but who know only one passion – murder and destruction, can think and act like that. Hitler publicly declares that being ignorant is genuine human happiness. “I,” he says, “thank fate for depriving me of my scientific education. I can be free from many prejudices. I feel good. I judge everything dispassionately and coldly,” This is truly an obscurantist, who imagined that ignorance is the happiness of mankind. A bandit, returning from a bloody “case,” always considers himself a lucky person in life and the happiest person. But the psychology of an ordinary bandit, a lone bandit never reaches the dream of everyone becoming bandits. After all, then it will be “difficult” for him to “work.” And here the gangster hatred of culture, elevated to the state worldview, aims to make everyone ignorant and a bandit, in the appearance and likeness of the “Führer” himself.

Goering (so to speak, the first person after the “Führer”) declares: “I affirm that the one who thinks a lot, reads and considers himself especially clever, is the very greatest coward.” Another robber and enemy of culture, Ernst Bergmann, proclaims: “On the ruins of the world, the race that will be the strongest and will turn the entire cultural world into smoke and ashes will plant its victorious banner.” Well, of course, only the “race” of the Nazis can become such a race! Who else can dream of such “happy” times when the entire cultural world will be turned into smoke and ash?

Who are the National Socialists? Pavel Yudin, 1942

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Socialism, as we know, presupposes public ownership of the means of production. Under socialism, the exploitation of man by man is abolished. Of course, the Nazis have nothing of the kind. The coming of the Nazis to power and their domination for 8 years in Germany showed the whole world that these “socialists,” like no one before them, ensured the growth of profits for Krupp and Borsig. Suffice it to point out that during the years of fascist domination in Germany, the largest joint-stock companies grew unusually quickly. So, for example, in 1937 in Germany there were 6 supergiant concerns with a capital of over 100 million marks, in 1939 there were already 9 such concerns. Some joint-stock companies (Harpener Bergbau, Siemens-Halske, etc.) doubled and tripled their capital during the years of the domination of the fascists. Only in 1939, the profits of the joint-stock mining company Hibernia AG increased by a fabulous figure – 100 million marks. The German Chemical Trust (IG Farbenindustrie) made a net profit in 1939 of about 60 million marks. This is what Hitler’s “socialism” is! This is the “socialism” of the monopoly tycoons, the largest capitalists in the world.

The fascist leaders themselves stole huge sums of money. It is widely known that the Hermann Goering company has a capital of 800 million marks. This is quite eloquent evidence of the monstrous, predatory fever of enrichment that the “socialists” Hitler, Goering, Goebbels and Co. are gripping. This is what Hitler’s “socialism” looks like in industry. The same kind of “socialism” is carried out by the fascists in agriculture. After the fascists came to power, the old landowners’ farms began to gain strength and new landowners’ estates began to emerge. A former associate of Hitler, Hermann Rauschning, who fled from Hitler, says that he once asked Hitler: “But what about those points of the program that relate to agrarian reform, the destruction of wage labor and the nationalization of banks?” Hitler replied: “Do I really have to explain to you the meaning of this program? Are you so primitive that you take it literally and do not see that this is only a decoration for our performance? In this program, established for the masses, I will never change anything ... To nourish the hopes of the masses, it is necessary to establish some visible stages.” Thus, Hitler once again declared that the program and all sorts of talk about socialism are all the decoration of a spectacle played out by the imperialists in order to deceive the masses. Hitler’s Minister of Agriculture Darre in the first days after the Nazis came to power said: “I will not touch a single estate, no matter how large it may be (and I know that I say this in full agreement with the Reich Chancellor’s opinion) ... I also will not allow the violation of the property rights of the pledged large land holdings.” Indeed, the Nazis kept their promise. Not only did they not touch a single estate, but the number of landowners was increased: the leaders of fascism themselves became large landowners.

Who are the National Socialists? Pavel Yudin, 1942

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The fascist party was one of the first to be financed by the largest industrialist in Germany, Hugo Stinnes. In the period from 1924 to 1927, the Hitlerite party was already supported by a number of major concerns and banks. At that time, the party was financed by the metal industrialist Ernst Borsig, the manufacturer Edwin Bechstein and the head of the Deutsche Bank Emil Kirdorf and others. Starting from 1928, the aces of heavy industry, the Gelsenkirchen concern, the capital magnates Fritz Thyssen, Albert Vögler, the Krupps (Gustav and Alfred Krupp) and others, have been especially strenuously supplying the fascist party with money. Thus, the fascist German party, as they say, was nurtured from birth, nourished and raised by the German secret police and the German imperialists. This party was bought in the bud by the German imperialist bourgeoisie. The whole gang, all these “Führers” and Führerlings, starting with Hitler himself, are people who sold themselves entirely to the imperialists, their faithful dogs and obedient servants unquestioningly fulfilling the will of their masters – the largest bankers, industrialists and landowners of Germany. These “masters” dreamed of military revenge, dreamed of the seizure and plunder of all countries.

The fact that the Hitlerite party is the party of the largest imperialist predators and the worst enemies of socialism is quite eloquently told by the capitalists themselves. The well-known tycoon of German predatory capital, the owner of the largest metallurgical concern in the Ruhr, Thyssen, says in his letter published in America to the New York Times on June 9, 1940, “For several years, during which I had the opportunity to observe the Hitler regime as a state adviser and industrial leader, I realized with increasing clarity what a grave mistake I made in the summer of 1932 when, together with Krupp, Kirdorf, Schroeder and others who subsidized the National Socialist Party, I took upon myself, so to speak, the guaranteed responsibility for Hitler’s good behavior towards Germany and the whole world and helped him to come to power.” The “socialist” Hitler, along with his entire party, were bought by Thyssen, Krupp, Kirdorf, Schroeder and others. And Thyssen speaks about this with all frankness in the above letter.

In 1932, Hitler spoke at the Industrialists’ Club in Düsseldorf in front of the Ruhr capitalists’ meeting. Before his masters, Hitler spoke frankly, without the usual hysteria of antics and playing at socialism. This is what he told them then: “You, gentlemen, stand on the point of view that the German national economy can be restored exclusively on the basis of private property. But you can only keep the idea of private property if it is logically justified. This idea must be morally grounded. It is necessary to prove to the masses that private property is inherent in the very nature of things. It would be wrong to conclude that we National Socialists are against capitalism. On the contrary, if we were not there, there would be no bourgeoisie in Germany.” Needless to say, Hitler was frank with his masters. And here he is, indeed, right. The Nazis are not against capitalism. They are the real servants of the imperialists. But why do they still call themselves socialists? Hitler gave an answer to this question to his imperialist masters as well. They are called socialists in order to be able to deceive the people. “Do not deprive people of hope,” Hitler said at the same meeting, “for a better future. On the contrary, inflate it. After all, the garrison of the besieged fortress fights only as long as he hopes that he will receive help from somewhere.”

Who are the National Socialists? Pavel Yudin, 1942

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Secret organizations began to emerge in Germany at that time [after the Versailles Treaty]: the Free Committee for the Struggle for the German Workers’ World, the Free Workers’ Committee for the Struggle for a Just Peace, the Union for the People’s Offensive and Defense, the People’s Union of Struggle, the Union of Struggle for the Destruction of Interest Slavery, etc. Along with the civil ones, paramilitary organizations were created from the former officers and soldiers, all kinds of “defense squads,” the Viking Union, the Organization Consul, etc. Among other organizations that called themselves workers’, a circle, founded by the anti-Semite Anton Drexler, arose in Munich, the German Workers’ Party. Most of the organizations with the names workers’ and people’s were created by the secret police, the rest were under the strict supervision of this police through agents sent there to infiltrate them. The head of the political department of the Munich secret police, German Lieutenant Colonel Ernst Röhm, sent undercover secret agent Adolf Hitler to the circle called the German Workers’ Party so that Hitler, a spy, would keep an eye on the party. To this end, Hitler joined this circle, which consisted of only six members. Hitler was accepted as the seventh member of the German Workers’ Party. Secret police agent Adolf Hitler reported to his superiors that the German Workers’ Party is not dangerous at all, moreover, it is of a certain interest to the police and may become quite suitable for fighting actual workers’ revolutionary organizations.

At the same time, unemployed officers and police officials began to be recruited into this party. In the same year 1919, the head of the political department of the Munich secret police, Ernst Röhm, joined this party. The historian of German fascism Konrad Heiden writes in his History of National Socialism: “Röhm was about the sixtieth member of the German Workers’ Party” and gradually involved many of his friends from the Reichswehr – officers and soldiers ... Until 1923, the backbone of the movement was almost exclusively the soldiers of the Reichswehr and the police.” In April 1920, the first congress of the fascist party took place in one of the Munich pubs. At this congress the name “National Socialist German Workers’ Party” was adopted. In the same pub, the program of the fascist party was adopted.

This program, consisting of 25 points, was filled with demagogic slogans, where, along with demands for the abolition of Versailles, there were slogans calling for the abolition of “interest slavery” and for the fight against Jews, allegedly guilty of all the difficulties experienced by Germany in the field of domestic and foreign policy. However, even then it became obvious that this party went beyond the demands for the abolition of the Versailles Peace. The third point of the program says: “We demand territory and land (colonies) to feed our people and to accommodate our surplus population.” Thus, the imperialist character of the German fascist party began to take shape as early as 1920.

Neither in the first years of its existence, nor after the seizure of power by the Hitlerite party, did this party have anything to do with socialism. This was understood by the organizers of this party, and first of all by Hitler. Back in 1922 and 1923. Hitler repeatedly spoke out and explained that socialism, from his point of view, means any strengthening of private property. The names “national,” “workers,” “socialist” – all this is just a disguise necessary to get into the confidence of the masses, since the ideas of the revolutionary role of the working class and the ideas of socialism were especially popular among the German people in those years. Anyone who then wanted to win over the masses to their side could not do this without disguised as a “socialist.” So did the fascists, these bourgeois police “socialists.”

Who are the National Socialists? Pavel Yudin, 1942

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They [the Makhnovists] raised the slogan of Soviets without Parties, or more concretely Soviets without Bolsheviks. But it was the Bolshevik Party that strengthened the Soviets to first repel the Kornilov coup, and then overthrow the provisional (bourgeois) government, gathering all power in the hands of the Soviets. From February to October, no other party could defend the establishment of Soviet power by overthrowing the bourgeois government, even at the level of slogans. Lenin and the Bolsheviks insisted on “all power to the Soviets!”, putting forth this slogan where the Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionaries (Srs) dared not, even while other parties were in their majority in the Soviets. It was the Bolshevik Communist Party that brought the Soviets to power. If it hadn’t been for the October Revolution, the option for Russia would have been a tyrannical bourgeois power in which the Soviets were completely liquidated-and probably a white General of the Kornilov type would have been at the head of that regime.

During this period, the imperialist West also adopted and used the slogan “Soviets without Bolsheviks”. The counter-revolutionary Ataman Grigoryev also said that “the Soviets are fighting for their real power against the commissars” (!) (Arshinov, 1998). Because Soviets without Bolsheviks would be like a lion without teeth, would be destroyed in a few months, and the White Army generals would enter Moscow on horseback. Thus, in the context of the civil war, the slogan “Soviets without Bolsheviks” was synonymous with abandoning Soviet power.

These were the outlines of the order declared by Makhno’s Land Army. But behind this “libertarian” rhetoric, Makhno also did not shy away from building similar institutions to those Soviet ones he had banned under his own Black Flag. The Red Army was forbidden, but he had his Black Army. The Bolshevik Party was forbidden, but in areas ruled by Makhno, power was invested in his anarchist organisation. Although he might not have declared a party and did not appear as the leader of such before the masses, the organised political power of the Makhnovist anarchist movement was the only political movement in all “free” Soviets. The Cheka was forbidden, but Makhno had set up his own secret service under the label of “counter-intelligence”. Makhno’s Intelligence Department also did everything that the Cheka did (prosecution, imprisonment, trial, executions).

The Makhno Movement and Bolshevism, abstrakt, 2020

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One ought again to remember that all cultures impose corrections upon raw reality, changing it from free-floating objects into units of knowledge. The problem is not that conversion takes place. It is perfectly natural for the human mind to resist the assault on it of untreated strangeness; therefore cultures have always been inclined to impose complete transformations on other cultures, receiving these other cultures not as they are but as, for the benefit of the receiver, they ought to be. To the Westerner, however, the Oriental was always like some aspect of the West; to some of the German Romantics, for example, Indian religion was essentially an Oriental version of Germano-Christian pantheism. Yet the Orientalist makes it his work to be always converting the Orient from something into something else: he does this for himself, for the sake of his culture, in some cases for what he believes is the sake of the Oriental. This process of conversion is a disciplined one: it is taught, it has its own societies, periodicals, traditions, vocabulary, rhetoric, all in basic ways connected to and supplied by the prevailing cultural and political norms of the West. And, as I shall demonstrate, it tends to become more rather than less total in what it tries to do, so much so that as one surveys Orientalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the overriding impression is of Orientalism’s insensitive schematization of the entire Orient.

How early this schematization began is clear from the examples I have given of Western representations of the Orient in classical Greece. How strongly articulated were later representations building on the earlier ones, how inordinately careful their schematization, how dramatically effective their placing in Western imaginative geography, can be illustrated if we turn now to Dante’s Inferno. Dante’s achievement in The Divine Comedy was to have seamlessly combined the realistic portrayal of mundane reality with a universal and eternal system of Christian values. What Dante the pilgrim sees as he walks through the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso is a unique vision of judgment. Paolo and Francesca, for instance, are seen as eternally confined to hell for their sins, yet they are seen as enacting, indeed living, the very characters and actions that put them where they will be for eternity. Thus each of the figures in Dante’s vision not only represents himself but is also a typical representation of his character and the fate meted out to him.

“Maometto”—Mohammed—turns up in canto 28 of the Inferno. He is located in the eighth of the nine circles of Hell, in the ninth of the ten Bolgias of Malebolge, a circle of gloomy ditches surrounding Satan’s stronghold in Hell. Thus before Dante reaches Mohammed, he passes through circles containing people whose sins are of a lesser order: the lustful, the avaricious, the gluttonous, the heretics, the wrathful, the suicidal, the blasphemous. After Mohammed there are only the falsifiers and the treacherous (who include Judas, Brutus, and Cassius) before one arrives at the very bottom of Hell, which is where Satan himself is to be found. Mohammed thus belongs to a rigid hierarchy of evils, in the category of what Dante calls seminator di scandalo e di scisma. Mohammed’s punishment, which is also his eternal fate, is a peculiarly disgusting one: he is endlessly being cleft in two from his chin to his anus like, Dante says, a cask whose staves are ripped apart. Dante’s verse at this point spares the reader none of the eschatological detail that so vivid a punishment entails: Mohammed’s entrails and his excrement are described with unflinching accuracy. Mohammed explains his punishment to Dante, pointing as well to Ali, who precedes him in the line of sinners whom the attendant devil is splitting in two; he also asks Dante to warn one Fra Dolcino, a renegade priest whose sect advocated community of women and goods and who was accused of having a mistress, of what will be in store for him. It will not have been lost on the reader that Dante saw a parallel between Dolcino’s and Mohammed’s revolting sensuality, and also between their pretensions to theological eminence.

But this is not all that Dante has to say about Islam. Earlier in the Inferno, a small group of Muslims turns up. Avicenna, Averroës, and Saladin are among those virtuous heathens who, along with Hector, Aeneas, Abraham, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, are confined to the first circle of the Inferno, there to suffer a minimal (and even honorable) punishment for not having had the benefit of Christian revelation. Dante, of course, admires their great virtues and accomplishments, but because they were not Christians he must condemn them, however lightly, to Hell. Eternity is a great leveler of distinctions, it is true, but the special anachronisms and anomalies of putting pre-Christian luminaries in the same category of “heathen” damnation with post-Christian Muslims does not trouble Dante. Even though the Koran specifies Jesus as a prophet, Dante chooses to consider the great Muslim philosophers and king as having been fundamentally ignorant of Christianity. That they can also inhabit the same distinguished level as the heroes and sages of classical antiquity is an ahistorical vision similar to Raphael’s in his fresco The School of Athens, in which Averroës rubs elbows on the academy floor with Socrates and Plato (similar to Fénelon’s Dialogues des morts [1700–1718], where a discussion takes place between Socrates and Confucius).

The discriminations and refinements of Dante’s poetic grasp of Islam are an instance of the schematic, almost cosmological inevitability with which Islam and its designated representatives are creatures of Western geographical, historical, and above all, moral apprehension. Empirical data about the Orient or about any of its parts count for very little; what matters and is decisive is what I have been calling the Orientalist vision, a vision by no means confined to the professional scholar, but rather the common possession of all who have thought about the Orient in the West. Dante’s powers as a poet intensify, make more rather than less representative, these perspectives on the Orient. Mohammed, Saladin, Averroës, and Avicenna are fixed in a visionary cosmology—fixed, laid out, boxed in, imprisoned, without much regard for anything except their “function” and the patterns they realize on the stage on which they appear.

Orientalism, Edward Said, 1978

[reddest-flower]

It is perfectly possible to argue that some distinctive objects are made by the mind, and that these objects, while appearing to exist objectively, have only a fictional reality. A group of people living on a few acres of land will set up boundaries between their land and its immediate surroundings and the territory beyond, which they call “the land of the barbarians.” In other words, this universal practice of designating in one’s mind a familiar space which is “ours” and an unfamiliar space beyond “ours” which is “theirs” is a way of making geographical distinctions that can be entirely arbitrary. I use the word “arbitrary” here because imaginative geography of the “our land-barbarian land” variety does not require that the barbarians acknowledge the distinction. It is enough for “us” to set up these boundaries in our own minds; “they” become “they” accordingly, and both their territory and their mentality are designated as different from “ours.” To a certain extent modern and primitive societies seem thus to derive a sense of their identities negatively. A fifth-century Athenian was very likely to feel himself to be nonbarbarian as much as he positively felt himself to be Athenian. The geographic boundaries accompany the social, ethnic, and cultural ones in expected ways. Yet often the sense in which someone feels himself to be not-foreign is based on a very unrigorous idea of what is “out there,” beyond one’s own territory. All kinds of suppositions, associations, and fictions appear to crowd the unfamiliar space outside one’s own.

The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard once wrote an analysis of what he called the poetics of space. The inside of a house, he said, acquires a sense of intimacy, secrecy, security, real or imagined, because of the experiences that come to seem appropriate for it. The objective space of a house—its corners, corridors, cellar, rooms—is far less important than what poetically it is endowed with, which is usually a quality with an imaginative or figurative value we can name and feel: thus a house may be haunted, or homelike, or prisonlike, or magical. So space acquires emotional and even rational sense by a kind of poetic process, whereby the vacant or anonymous reaches of distance are converted into meaning for us here. The same process occurs when we deal with time. Much of what we associate with or even know about such periods as “long ago” or “the beginning” or “at the end of time” is poetic—made up. For a historian of Middle Kingdom Egypt, “long ago” will have a very clear sort of meaning, but even this meaning does not totally dissipate the imaginative, quasi-fictional quality one senses lurking in a time very different and distant from our own. For there is no doubt that imaginative geography and history help the mind to intensify its own sense of itself by dramatizing the distance and difference between what is close to it and what is far away. This is no less true of the feelings we often have that we would have been more “at home” in the sixteenth century or in Tahiti.

Yet there is no use in pretending that all we know about time and space, or rather history and geography, is more than anything else imaginative. There are such things as positive history and positive geography which in Europe and the United States have impressive achievements to point to. Scholars now do know more about the world, its past and present, than they did, for example, in Gibbon’s time. Yet this is not to say that they know all there is to know, nor, more important, is it to say that what they know has effectively dispelled the imaginative geographical and historical knowledge I have been considering.

Orientalism, Edward Said, 1978

[reddest-flower]

It is natural for men in power to survey from time to time the world with which they must deal. Balfour did it frequently. Our contemporary Henry Kissinger does it also, rarely with more express frankness than in his essay “Domestic Structure and Foreign Policy.” The drama he depicts is a real one, in which the United States must manage its behavior in the world under the pressures of domestic forces on the one hand and of foreign realities on the other. Kissinger’s discourse must for that reason alone establish a polarity between the United States and the world; in addition, of course, he speaks consciously as an authoritative voice for the major Western power, whose recent history and present reality have placed it before a world that does not easily accept its power and dominance. Kissinger feels that the United States can deal less problematically with theindustrial, developed West than it can with the developing world. Again, the contemporary actuality of relations between the United States and the so-called Third World (which includes China, Indochina, the Near East, Africa, and Latin America) is manifestly a thorny set of problems, which even Kissinger cannot hide.

Kissinger’s method in the essay proceeds according to what linguists call binary opposition: that is, he shows that there are two styles in foreign policy (the prophetic and the political), two types of technique, two periods, and so forth. When at the end of the historical part of his argument he is brought face to face with the contemporary world, he divides it accordingly into two halves, the developed and the developing countries. The first half, which is the West, “is deeply committed to the notion that the real world is external to the observer, that knowledge consists of recording and classifying data—the more accurately the better.” Kissinger’s proof for this is the Newtonian revolution, which has not taken place in the developing world: “Cultures which escaped the early impact of Newtonian thinking have retained the essentially pre-Newtonian view that the real world is almost completely internal to the observer.” Consequently, he adds, “empirical reality has a much different significance for many of the new countries than for the West because in a certain sense they never went through the process of discovering it.”

Unlike Cromer, Kissinger does not need to quote Sir Alfred Lyall on the Oriental’s inability to be accurate; the point he makes is sufficiently unarguable to require no special validation. We had our Newtonian revolution; they didn’t. As thinkers we are better off than they are. Good: the lines are drawn in much the same way, finally, as Balfour and Cromer drew them. Yet sixty or more years have intervened between Kissinger and the British imperialists. Numerous wars and revolutions have proved conclusively that the pre-Newtonian prophetic style, which Kissinger associates both with “inaccurate” developing countries and with Europe before the Congress of Vienna, is not entirely without its successes. Again unlike Balfour and Cromer, Kissinger therefore feels obliged to respect this pre-Newtonian perspective, since “it offers great flexibility with respect to the contemporary revolutionary turmoil.” Thus the duty of men in the post-Newtonian (real) world is to “construct an international order before a crisis imposes it as a necessity”: in other words, we must still find a way by which the developing world can be contained. Is this not similar to Cromer’s vision of a harmoniously working machine designed ultimately to benefit some central authority, which opposes the developing world?

Kissinger may not have known on what fund of pedigreed knowledge he was drawing when he cut the world up into pre-Newtonian and post-Newtonian conceptions of reality. But his distinction is identical with the orthodox one made by Orientalists, who separate Orientals from Westerners. And like Orientalism’s distinction Kissinger’s is not value-free, despite the apparent neutrality of his tone. Thus such words as “prophetic,” “accuracy,” “internal,” “empirical reality,” and “order” are scattered throughout his description, and they characterize either attractive, familiar, desirable virtues or menacing, peculiar, disorderly defects. Both the traditional Orientalist, as we shall see, and Kissinger conceive of the difference between cultures, first, as creating a battlefront that separates them, and second, as inviting the West to control, contain, and otherwise govern (through superior knowledge and accommodating power) the Other. With what effect and at what considerable expense such militant divisions have been maintained, no one at present needs to be reminded.

Orientalism, Edward Said, 1978