Lawrence Ferlinghetti - Anarchist Tension #1 lyrics

And I just want to talk about some tensions, I think that us anarchists or people sympathetic to anarchism, need to try and consider. Because... I suddenly realized last night when I was laying in bed and just looking at the ceiling... I'm tending to become a book fair groupie. There's a book fair in London, I go to a book fair in London, it's an anarchist book fair, I sell anarchist books, I come to San Francisco. And I'm really talking I guess about how we as each other, as a group, as an organization, as people who share a similar... what Galleani called the ideal, the dream; How are we gonna make that real? And so there are some tensions I think we have to face. The first tension is ourselves and our history. There is a history of anarchism. But within that history there are things and people who have been forgotten. Now with the Kate Sharpley Library, we have two reasons to exist. One is, yes, flowers for the fallen. We printed a pamphlet called Anarchists Against Franco. Where there were twenty anarchists who'd been k**ed between 1942 and 1960 in guerilla warfare against Franco. And Frank Torres who wrote in Spanish says, and I couldn't agree more: It doesn't matter whether you think libertarian communism, anarchism will happen. It doesn't matter if you think it's silly. It doesn't even matter if you think you're more clever than those anarchists who went out there. What matters is how dare we forget them. How dare you and I sitting in this room not know about them. How dare we forget their bravery and their courage when they went over the mountains, against stupidly impossible odds, for that dream. So any anarchist, any person sympathetic to us, has to be aware of our history. Not the history of ideas; That's something I'll talk about in a second. But simply, the people who suffered physically and emotionally for our belief. You'll know some of them, but will also not know a lot of them and one of the things we must do, is revise history to give them that dignity. And the second thing of course is if we can we learn from history. We have to learn! Look, I've been an anarchist for thirty years! So you're not gonna learn much from me because we haven't got that far. But I do know what we've done has gone wrong. I do think I have an idea that what we've done has gone wrong. But we have to learn from our history. We can't just pretend that we exist now and that really those people were a bit strange or not like us because they spoke a different language. If we're not guided by our history we have no foundation, nothing, except living on our wits. So that I think is the first tension. How we discover and make our history come alive for all of us.