Ridiculous Weep (Hristo Botev on the Paris Commune)

Weep for Paris, the capital of debauchery, of civilization, the school of espionage and slavery; weep, o philanthropists, for the palaces of the scary vampires, of the great tyrants - for the monuments of stupidity, of barbarity, built with the cutted heads of so many forerunners, of so many great thinkers and poets, with the gnawed bones of so many martyrs for essential bread, - weep! - no one can comfort the crazy, no one can tame the furious!

Curse the communards, that they have ruined your capital and died with the criminal for you words: freedom or death, bread or bullet! Spit on their corpses and on the corpses of these victims of civilization, which you hugged and hug in the face of your wives, sisters, mothers but today you call rabid whores, because they had still strength to raise gun and liberate themselves from the den of debauchery! Throw dirt and stones at the grave of Dombrowski, for not being a servant of no crowned head, but a fighter for a great idea, of higher purpose and with iron chests  stood against the traitors of France and those guilty for so many ills in humanity.

All the world cried for Paris, all the world cursed the communards. Our journalism did not fall behind, it also wept for the soulless and cursed the reasonable. Ridiculous weep! From Nimrod to Napoleon, from Cambise to Wilhelm, war presents us with the same spectacle, the same target with the same means. As if Napoleon, in the name of civilization and Wilhelm, in the name of God, have not done more evil, more barbarism in the 19th century, than say Alexander the Great with his expeditions so many centuries ago. But there is the barbarity, there are the objurgations, where the slave, the human, when neither his words nor his reason have not been heard, that he grabs onto the extreme and fights till life or death, as much as his means allow him, which are modest only because were stolen by the masters. Then they call the human a bandit, a lowlife and a barbarian! Such were also the communards.

Christianity has its martyrs, until it call them "sons of God"; the revolution also has them, in order to "turn the tramp into citizen"; socialism also has them and will forever have them, striving to turn the human into something more than son of God and citizen - not as an ideal, but as a human "from whom the destiny of his city depends, and not vice versa".

Christianity, revolution and socialism - monarchy, constitution and republic - these are facts and historic epochs, which will be refuted only by those minds who refute the progress in humanity.

The school and only the school, grandma Macedonia has said, will liberate Europe from social coup - the school and only the school, we repeat, will prepare her for this coup; but not the school of Zlatoust and Loyola, of Wilhelm and Napoleon, but the one of Fourier and Proudhon, of Cuvier and Newton - and the school of life.

The communards are martyrs, because its not the means in their struggle that matter, but the idea behind their struggle. "Freedom too will have its Jesuits", Heine has said.
 
Let our journalists hold their tears, as will their European colleagues as well - to cry for other capitals, other barbarities and sufferings, when the slave shouts at his master:who are you who cry? Are you a man, a woman, or hermaphrodite - beast or fish?... And it will be a day - the first day.