Extremism

“ Intolerance, the spirit of violence, are at work among the extremists on both sides, both narrow-minded and ignorant, both asking for trouble, both believing in force rather than in argument, arbitration, and law. In England, by the grace of God and long tradition, there is between these two extremes a great body of middle class, moderate, reasonable, and steady opinion which is the safeguard of the nation against all violent revolution. ”

“ In my ardour to attain the goal, I do not forget the nature of the ground where the race is to be run. The destruction of those institutions which I condemn, appears to me to be hastening on too rapidly. I abhor the very idea of a revolution. I am a determined enemy to every species of violence. ”

“ Thousands of those hell-hounds called Terrorists, whom they had shut up in prison, on their last Revolution, as the satellites of tyranny, are let loose on the people. The whole of their government, in its origination, in its continuance, in all its actions, and in all its resources, is force, and nothing but force: a forced constitution, a forced election, a forced subsistence, a forced requisition of soldiers, a forced loan of money. ”

“ My friends, of all mistakes all history proves that is the most fatal, for when you pursue that policy which seems so easy at first you find that you have at last divided a nation into two strata—the upper a thin stratum of pride and arrogance sustained by terrorism, the lower a thick stratum of class ignorance which may at any moment be inflamed by fanaticism or exploded by unrest. ”

“ I tried to imagine the results, if, instead of the national hatred with which we are inspired under the name of “patriotism”; if, in place of the glory associated with that form of murder which we call war,—if, in place of this, we were taught, on the contrary, horror and contempt for all the means—military, diplomatic, and political—which serve to divide men; if we were educated to look upon the division of men into political States, and a diversity of codes and frontiers, as an indication of barbarism ”

“ But the fact that you ruin thou sands of men in prisons, fortresses, galleys, and exile, break up millions of families and ruin millions of men, physically morally, in the army, that fact is not an imaginary but a real act of violence, which, according to your own argument, one ought to oppose by violence. And so you are yourselves these wicked men against whom, according as well as to your own argument, it is absolutely necessary to use violence," the oppressed are sure to say to their oppressors. ”

“ I see the organizing of forces, not simply law and police which are indeed paid mercenaries from the region of violence, but legislation and literature, teaching and tradition, organized religion, getting themselves and the social structure together, year after year and age after age, halting, failing, breaking up in order to try again. ”

“ The common people will welter in bloody chaos, while the parties of traditional order will fly to bloody reaction. Class wars, racial wars, wars between the nations of yesterday, wars between the nations which have just been formed, blind social convulsions, with no further aim than the gratification of the hatreds, the envies, the crazy dreams of an hour of life looking forward to no morrow.... ”

“ At the start of the 21st century, it is clear that the world is engaged in a great ideological struggle, between extremists who use terror as a weapon to create fear, and moderate people who work for peace. ”

“ They have organized hate and violence. They use force not only in secret, but in broad daylight. I have seen how they use it on the human body, its life and health, imposing monstrous and destructive tasks on human beings! ”

“ How happens it then, said PHILO, if vulgar superstition be so salutary to society, that all history abounds so much with accounts of its pernicious consequences on public affairs? Factions, civil wars, persecutions, subversions of government, oppression, slavery; these are the dismal consequences which always attend its prevalency over the minds of men. ”

“ And they maintain this monstrous claim by measures inhuman and barbarous, listening not to the voice of reason or humanity, but treating every man who goes amongst them, suspected of not favoring their cause, or of the remotest connection with others who do not favor it, with a most savage and fiendish cruelty. It is the conflict between barbarism and civilization, between liberty and the most horrible despotism that ever cursed this earth, in which we are called to take part. ”

“ While your peers in other parts of the world have received educations that prepare them for the opportunities of a global economy, you have been fed propaganda and conspiracy theories that blame others for your country's shortcomings. And everywhere you turn, you hear extremists who tell you that you can escape your misery and regain your dignity through violence and terror and martyrdom. ”

“ The institution proclaimed as the corner-stone of their government does violence not merely to the precepts of religion, but to many of the best human instincts, yet their fanaticism for it is as sincere as any tribe of the desert ever manifested for the faith of the Prophet of Allah. ”

“ And indeed how could nations be subjugated by violence who are led by their whole education, their traditions, and even their religion to see the loftiest virtue in warring with their oppressors and fighting for freedom? ”

“ Agitated multitudes in these countries seethe with discontent, are armed to the teeth, are stampeded with fear, and groan beneath the yoke of tribulations engendered by political strife, racial fanaticism, national hatreds, and religious animosities. “The winds of despair,” Bahá’u’lláh has unmistakably affirmed, “are, alas, blowing from every direction, and the strife that divides and afflicts the human race is daily increasing. ”

“ How much has reason softened religious persecution and intolerance! Every day do not we become more and more convinced of the crime and cruelty of war? How little is the exercise of arbitrary authority endured! ”

“ Shall we first educate the people and then change the forms of life, or first change the forms and then struggle, using peaceful propaganda or terrorism? So we go on disputing while they kill; they do not dispute--they know their business; they don`t care whether dozens, hundreds of men perish--and what men! ”

“ This is discovered by the weakest minds in a state of barbarism, and laws and customs are established to prevent it; but these having only a partial and local effect, the violence of nation on nation has corrupted their domestic institutions, and the collective violence of despotic government has destroyed the peaceful effect of custom in private life, and the existence of man is dragged on, through a system of civil and moral violence, to death or a new birth. ”

“ A more decisive argument is afforded by a consideration of the universal connexion of ferocity of manners, and a contempt of social ties, with the contempt of human life. Governments which derive their institutions from the existence of circumstances of barbarism and violence, with some rare exceptions perhaps, are bloody in proportion as they are despotic, and form the manners of their subjects to a sympathy with their own spirit. ”

“ Some natures in such a plight, and those by no means the least social or the least sensitive, will become violent, and will even feel that their violence is social and not anti-social, that in striking when and how they can, they are striking, not for themselves, but for human nature, outraged and despoiled in their persons and in those of their fellow sufferers. ”

“ Religion spreads abroad its thousands of arms, each one asserting its sole right to be, but the fact remains: war is spreading, crime increasing, immorality assuming giant proportions, misery, disease, and wrongdoing growing mightier day by day, while the forces that could and would stay these horrors, still wear the badge of slavery. ”

“ Not only the government, but the majority of liberal free-thinkers, as though by preconcerted agreement, carefully avoid alluding to what has been said, written, or done in this matter of denouncing the inconsistency of violence, as embodied in its most shocking, crude, and striking form, in the person of a soldier,—this readiness to commit murder,—not only with the precepts of Christianity, but with the [30] dictates of mere humanity, which the world professes to obey. ”

“ Anarchists, terrorists, Bolshevists, Reds of all shades and degrees, are now believed to represent in modern times what perhaps once was a tribe of Assassins—a sect whose religion was founded upon a common predilection for crimes of violence. ”

“ From war results that other great evil, seen in the administration of the internal concerns of each country; the government being of necessity entrusted, [Pg 85] for the defence of the people, with the power of the sword, the people are governed by the sword of power. Hostile prejudices, the strife of interests ill understood, false judgments, and the jargon of languages mutually unintelligible, fears, suspicions, and precautions perpetuate the evil of disunion when the work of havoc and desolation is suspended. ”

“ By the time a revolutionary or reforming group was large enough to use violence successfully, and to weather the storm of the counter-revolution or reaction, it would already have won to its side so large a portion of the community that it could probably succeed without the use of violence. ”

“ You are terrifying yourselves with ghosts and apparitions, whilst your house is the haunt of robbers. It is thus with all those who, attending only to the shell and husk of history, think they are waging war with intolerance, pride, and cruelty, whilst, under color of abhorring the ill principles of antiquated parties, they are authorizing and feeding the same odious vices in different factions, and perhaps in worse. ”

“ Then, but not till then, will crime hide her head, and the race no longer be to the swift or the battle to the strong: a calm and steady breeze will temper the course of the swift to wrath, or the powerfully scientific lever of knowledge uproot violence out of the councils of the nation ”

“ Over the United States stretched an unseen network of secret intrigue woven tirelessly night and day by the busy enemies of civilisation—Reds, parlour-socialists, enemy-aliens, terrorists, Bolsheviki, pseudo-intellectuals, I. W. W.’s, social faddists, and amateur meddlers of every nuance—all the various varieties of the vicious, witless, and mentally unhinged—brought together through the “cohesive power of plunder” and the degeneration of cranial tissue. ”

“ Believe me, citizen dictators, if this is all your science, make haste to reconcile yourselves with the Jews; renounce those demonstrations of terrorism that make capital run after the revolution like dogs after policemen. ”

“ However, if we learn little from those actually engaged in the conflict, there are those outside who have labored earnestly to understand and explain the causes of terrorism. Ethics, religion, psychology, criminal pathology, sociology, economics, jurisprudence—all contribute to the explanation. And, while it is not possible to go into the entire matter as exhaustively as one could wish, there are several points which seem to make clear the cause of this almost individual struggle between the anarchists above and the anarchists below. ”

“ How much of that complex of motives can be used to bind men together into a civilised state? One can no doubt play upon their fears, represent the dangers of conquest and cruelty by hostile peoples so vividly [Pg 343] as to make them fight and compel others to fight for them in great wars, rally them to the flag in a state of panic, fill them with that frantic distrust and hate of strangers which is the basis of vulgar “Patriotism.” With a little coercion one may even get them to pay national taxes under the influence of these same mass-fears. ”

“ The people who become violently immoderate in speech and sentiment when their selfish interests are attacked are the people who lecture us to be moderate in our expressions. I ask you to say if I am not right in calling these agitators as extremists. I said elsewhere there are no moderates or extremists among us, but the real extremists are those people who by their actions and by their words have betrayed the Government of this country and also the people of this country. ”

“ Even today the groups we call nations or states have a double stardard: they forbid violence within and allow or even command it on occasion without—the very acts which are offenses, crimes in the one case, meeting with general approval or applause in the other. ”

“ National animosities, sectarian passions, popular ignorance, despotic governments, the division of one nationality into numerous independent states, and the established policies of conquest, balance of power, sectarian intolerance, and trade-restriction bred frequent wars, and destroyed confidence in the duration of any peace. ”

“ The perplexing languages, religions, customs and ideologies between the people of your nations, are incentives to enmity, turmoil, revolutions, and wars. Even now black clouds of dissensions and differences in your ideologies are looming on your horizon, seriously dividing the nations of your globe into two different camps and menacing your world peace. ”

“ The conflict within threatens to engulf the society in self-war, group against group. The vital traditions may be lost—not merely altered or reformed, but completely destroyed in this period of chaos and anarchy. ”