War, the Only Hygiene of the World
Reading edition
F. T. Marinetti
(Translated from the French by Anne Simon)
I want to explain to you the difference between Futurism and Anarchism.
Anarchism, denying the infinite principle of human evolution, suspends its impulse at the ideal threshold of universal peace, and before the stupid paradise of interlocked embraces in the open fields and midst the waving of palms.
We, the Futurists, on the contrary, affirm as one of our absolute principles the continuous growth and the unlimited physiological and intellectual progress of Man.
We aim beyond the hypothesis of the amicable fusion of the different races, and we admit the only possible hygiene of the World: War.
The distant goal of the anarchistic conception (a kind of sweet tenderness, sister to baseness) appears to us as an impure gangrene preluding the agony of the races.
The anarchists are satisfied in attacking the political, judicial, and economical branches of the social tree. We strive to do much more than that. We want to uproot and burn its very deepest roots; those that are planted in the brain of man, and are called:
Mania for order.
The desire for the least effort.
The fanatical adoration of the family.
The undue stress laid on sleep, and the repast at a fixed hour.
Cowardly acquiescence or quietism.
Love for the antique and the old.
The unwise preservation of everything that is wicked and sick.
The horror of the new.
Contempt for youth.
Contempt for rebellious minorities.
The veneration for time, for accumulated years, for the dead, and for the dying.
The instinctive need of laws, chains, and impediments.
Horror of violence.
Horror of the unknown and the new.
Fear of a total liberty.
Have you never seen an assemblage of young revolutionaries or anarchists?... Eh bien: there is no more discouraging spectacle.
You would observe that the urgent, immediate mania, in these red souls, is to deprive themselves quickly of their vehement independence, to give the government of their party to the oldest of their number; that is to say, to the greatest opportunist, to the most prudent, in a word, to the one who having already acquired a little force, and a little authority, will be fatally interested in conserving the present state of things, in calming violence, in opposing all desire for adventure, for risk, and heroism.
This new president, while guiding them in the general discussion with apparent equity, shall lead them like sheep to the fold of his personal interest.
Do you still believe seriously in the usefulness or desirability of conventions of revolutionary spirits?
Content yourself then, with choosing a director, or, better still, a leader of discussion. Choose for that post the youngest amongst you, the least known, the least important; only his role must never supersede the simple distribution of the word, with an absolute equality of time that he shall control, the watch in his hand.
But that which digs the deepest ditch between the futuristic and anarchistic conception, is the great problem of love, with its great tyranny of sentiment and lust, from which we want to extricate humanity.
Genius-worship is the infallible sign of an uncreative age.—Clive Bell.
The least that the state can do is to protect people who have something to say that may cause a riot. What will not cause a riot is probably not worth saying.—Clive Bell.