Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
November 1917, Antonio Gramsci, imprisoned by the fascists from 1926 to his death, 1937
Indifference is the dead weight of history. It is a lead ball to the innovator, it is
the inert matter which drowns the most sparkling enthusiasms, it is the swamp which surrounds
the old city and defends it better than the most solid walls, better than the bodies of
its soldiers, because it swallows the assailants in its slimy mires, it decimates them, disheartens
them and, at times, makes them desist from their heroic undertaking.
Indifference is actually the mainspring of history. But in a negative sense. It is fatality.
It is what you can't fight against. What comes to pass, the evil that afflicts everyone,
is due not so much to the initiative of the active few, as to the absenteeism of the many.
What comes to pass does so not so much because a few people want it to happen, as because
the mass of citizens abdicate their responsibility and let things be. They allow the knots to
form that in time only a sword will be able to cut through; they let promulgate the laws
that only a revolt will be able to abrogate; they let men rise to power whom in time only
a revolution will overthrow.
Bishop Aillet: The resistance, moral, cultural, and political even! The peaceful resistance,
but the resistance still! Bravo!
Thank you, Your Eminence.
We don't let them enslave us with this false power of violence, political, physical, anthropological,
historical violence, a violence against History, a violence against Mankind.