Pills of OUR History (27)

"I have asked myself what we are really talking about. And I believe that the reason for our discourse is not only the attitude to be recommended to ourselves and to others regarding the Vietnam War, but rather: the use of violence. Today, many are forced by violence to remain silent. Just a few hours by jet from this place. As you know: by killing. And just a few minutes from here - well distributed between historic architectures and highways - another violence forces far too many others with the weapons of false and true needs, far too many others are forced, frightened or distracted, to talk about something else or to talk only apparently about what we are actually discussing. But we do not want to say the penultimate word, the comforting penultimate word that makes us feel honest enough. The penultimate word that is the worst enemy of the last one. [...] History and experience have taught me that today we must strive not to unite but to divide. To divide the world ever more violently, to promote the deep, the only true, the only fruitful division, which has become increasingly clear, painful, and necessary, within the unity created by the international market, within the unity determined by power and oppression. It means, first and foremost, destroying the false divisions of the past, it means identifying and interpreting the confused and corrupted unity that exists today. [...] Those who want to fight what is, the arrogance of what is, the natural sympathy that power has for power, and the opposition party for the ruling party, the natural respect that the minister feels for the foreign minister and the head of a secret service for the head of the enemy secret service, those who want to fight the tendency of that which is and want to fight it in the name of what is not yet will easily be accused: of prophecy, of abstraction, of moralism, of “petty-bourgeois adventurism.” Isn’t that how it's said? Go ahead, then, if you wish and it nourishes you. Tomorrow anything can happen. Governments and powers may tomorrow reach any compromise, today unimaginable. Resistance is not achieved solely by dying. But nothing can alter the fact that these years of absolutely enlightened massacres, of one part of ourselves against another part of ourselves, will remain. Nothing can remove the certainty that internationally acting against the order of profit and against the dissociation of men is possible and is not utopia. That the goals formulated a hundred years ago by revolutionary thought are today closer than ever due to the enormous charge of fury and madness that has accumulated in the houses, in the factories, and in the weapons of the powerful, and from those has entered us to distort – or to bring closer? – truth and life. I do not know if this is a final word. But whoever tells almost the whole truth is certainly the worst enemy of the truth. Whoever speaks only of today does not wish for tomorrow to come. Whoever utters the penultimate word is the worst enemy of the last one. I have wondered at the beginning what we were really discussing."