El Filibusterismo

“[…] I stoked the greed, I helped it along, and the injustices and abuses multiplied. I fomented crimes and acts of cruelty so that the people would get used to the idea of death. I contributed to their anxiety so that, when they ran screaming from it, they would look for any solution at all. I shackled business to such an extent that with the country reduced to poverty and misery in the end the people would have nothing to fear. I put measures in place to deplete the treasury, and if that weren’t enough to create a popular uprising, I hit them where it would hurt the most: I made it so that the vulture itself would insult the body that gave it life and would corrupt it.”

“What will you accomplish with Spanish, especially with the few who will actually speak it? Kill off your originality? Subordinate your thoughts to the minds of others and instead of being free, you will really make yourselves into slaves. Nine out of ten of you who think of yourselves as members of the educated upper middle class are renegades to your own country! Those among you would speak that language neglect their own to such an extent that they neither speak it or understand it, and how many of you actually pretend not to understand a single world!”

In the garden, he came upon his coach, which was waiting for him.

“One day when you declare your independence,” he said to the lackey who had opened the coach door, taking heart, “remember that there were some in Spain who didn’t lack the courage to suffer for you and fight for your rights.”

“Where to, señor?” the lackey inquired. He hadn’t understood a word, and just wanted to know the destination.

“Every man!” Simoun repeated in a sinister tone of voice. “Every man, indios, mestizos, Chinamen, Spaniards, everyone you encounter without valor or energy…it’s essential to renew the race! Cowardly fathers only beget slavish sons and it’s not worth it to destroy only to rebuild with rotten materials. What? You’re trembling? You’re shaking, you’re afraid to sow death? What is death? What is a holocaust of twenty thousand wretches? Twenty thousand fewer wretches and millions of wretchednesses starved at birth!”

“What will the world say when they see such carnage?”

“The world will applaud, like it always does, saying that the strongest, and the most violent, are in the right,” Simoun answered with a cruel smile. “Europe applauded when the Western nations sacrificed millions of Indians in the Americas, and surely there are not to be found much more moral or peaceful nations. […] Europe applauded when a powerful Portugal despoiled the Moluccan Islands, it applauds as England destroys the primitive peoples in the Pacific to implant its emigrants there. Europe will applaud the way it applauds the end of a play, the end of a tragedy. The masses will hardly take notice, in the end, and will see only the effect. Commit a crime well and you will be admired and you’ll end up with more supporters than you would have had you committed a virtuous act, carried out with timidity and modesty.”