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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Alfred Neumann: Four thousand miles of fratricidal murder
Alfred Neumann: Sacred recalcitrance toward the black hatred of war
Alfred Neumann: Twilight of a conqueror
Alfred Neumann: War: Sad, hate-filled, hopeless and God-forsaken
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Alfred Neumann
From Six of Them (1945)
Translated by Anatol Murad
“‘Professor’ is derived from profiteri, and this means: to avow something, and this means: to stand for something, and that is the political postulate for the defense of a conviction and for the courage to defend it…”
“[O]mnipotence, unobstructed power, contains the seeds of its own destruction. Omnipotence deteriorates through the absence of opposition. I have always found the degenerating influence of non-resistance to be the most deleterious factor in the development of Caesars, prison warders, slaveholders, sergeants and dictators; it is their ruin. They succumb to the devastating effects of omnipotence as to a narcotic…”
“…And yet the only purpose of a criminal state is to throw out waves, higher after higher waves of all the rotten, corrupt, dangerous and wretched impulses. Thus, after a handful of years, the criminal state, already grown sclerotic and apoplectic through the lack of opposition, created the movement vital to its existence, the opposition, the ultima ratio of all dictatorships: war.
“With the war I came out from within myself and entered upon the fourth rebellious period of my life, upon my first truly systematic work for rebellion. In the winter semester 1939-40 I began to teach my secret doctrine of Criminal-State Psychology. For war is the foster father of rebellion and defeat is the mother of revolution…”
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“Humanism, the close companion and fount of strength of the inquisitive spirit – as the earth was the fount of the giant Antaeus’ strength – was declared an enemy of the State; anti-humanism in all the forms I denounced, intolerance, primitiveness, irresponsibility, want of dignity and conscience, brutality, avarice, power lust and murder lust, paganism, Satanism, megalomania, hysteria, psychopathy, sexual pathology – in short, all criminally antisocial tendencies were officially recognized by the State. The sum of all the rotten, corrupt, depraved and wretched impulses – crime – proclaimed: l’état, c’est moi.”
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The sight of swastika banners and brown shirts, which she had previously managed to avoid, and which now overwhelmed her with their massed official pomp, may have been partially responsible for the sharpening of the slight pain to increasingly violent stitches. For the blood-red flags flaming in the wind enlivened their crippled black crosses, their broken and running crosses, made them into gigantic tarantulas vampirically thirsting for blood; and the brownshirts, the leather-belted shirts of brown murder, had nothing human above them, between themselves and the chin-strapped caps, no divine stamp, no distinguishable faces, but only a leathery base, war elephantiasis of the legs in their black top boots, straining for something to trample under foot.
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