La Révolution Surréaliste 1925
Source: La Révolution Surréaliste, year 1, no. 3, April 15, 1925;
Translated: for marxists.org by Mitchell Abidor;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2012.
The Jews have always provided us the spectacle of auto-flagellation. It is they who tell the most wicked tales about Israel. They are the ones who ridicule themselves, accuse themselves, condemn themselves. Little old Drumont was nothing next to them
Perhaps then I can, with a little more freedom, express my admiration for the sacred character of their mission and, in a writing that is not at all anti-Semitic, denounce all the horror I feel for their nascent nationalism; all the hope I place in them to put in check their desertion of the intelligence.
If America had been discovered (in the sense that Columbus’s descendants mean it) by the West, i.e., on the Pacific coast by Oriental navigators instead of by Westerners on the Atlantic coast) we would probably not have to point out the peril threatening the intelligence from the fact that Asia, citadel of all hopes, is under attack from the East and the West. The American continent would have been an advanced fort, impassible for the narrow-minded men of the Old World (as they say, speaking of the wasp nest, the wart of Asia: Europe).
At the current time indifference is no longer allowed in the question of choosing sides in the grand quarrel between spirit and matter. From the foothills of Tibet to the lush valleys with colorful rivers, to the plains of elephants, to the alligator-filled marshes; from the Himalayas to Coromandel; from Amon Daria to Sakhalin, profound souls sense the approach, as an ocean does the storm, of the Occidental epidemic. Let there be no mistake: Japan is becoming contaminated, is Europeanizing itself. Russia, balanced between its two antagonistic fragments, has failed to affirm its will spiritually. Everywhere else the danger is held in check, but for how long? The battle for Africa is being ardently fought without any clash of arms. May no defection occur among the defenders of the knot of the universe for which they must take sides in the name of infinity and eternity!
Among the races of the East the Jewish race seems to have received a special mission. Delegated among its enemies, are they not, consciously or not, the servants of the primitive spirit? Strange race. It is one of these individuals that Christianity adores, crucified by his compatriots.
On this poetic terrain the mystics speculate on the strange circumstances of the Passion, however, it is true that without any lyricism, however legitimate, the Jews have introduced themselves into the West in Jesus’ wake. Once again the Red Sea has parted for a magnificent conquest, but do the persecutors have any idea of their predestined drowning? On the ocean Moses’ crib encounters a powerful liner and the air is filled with supernatural tempests about to break out.
What is the role of these scouts of the Tamerlane of the future? What wind drives forward these new Spartans following behind a crucified Leonidas passing over to the attack?
Though they apparently submit to the influence of the countries where they live, in fact the atmosphere is transformed wherever the Jews pass. They aren’t seen at the head of revolts, proclaiming the truths necessary for the birth of revolutions, but among the crowd look at the hooked noses, the wavy hair, the velvet gazes. Issued from ghettoes and peaceful shops, those who are thought to be avid in the pursuit of money alone reveal themselves to be the anonymous pillars of the insurrection. They opened the gates of the Freemasonries of the eighteenth century to uneasy sprits; they came out when the first baker was hung on the place de Grève, stimulating popular ardor and leaving their assayer’s scales on their counters shining with usury. Saint-Merry saw them behind the famous barricade; the white plains of Siberia, the isbas of Russia sheltered them and their bombs; the last century saw destiny take one of them in hand and reminded the French that they must recognize themselves and line up behind the two enemy banners of territory and liberty.
Others, charged with less obvious tasks, leave to their brothers the thankless task of agent provocateur of the sprit. And it is bankers and it is ministers again exaggerating the infamy of the enemy class that receive them. The gold that is in their hands seems gifted with reptilian life; the stock exchanges tremble on their neo-classical foundations; the price of Rio Tinto and oil wells become sure instruments of demoralization.
Wandering lanterns insensible to the blows of chance; birds of passage of humid ports; usurers in the black dressing gown of Fez and Nizhni-Novgorod; Monsieur Baron de Rothschild; Monsieur (some say Captain) Dreyfus; vodka and smoked fish merchant of the rue des Rosiers: by different methods, and perhaps even unbeknownst to you, you pursue the same goal, you participate in the same cause.
Lost children! Accursed children! The Arab spits when you pass and you are the rampart of Mecca; the Buddhist scorns you and you defend the Ganges; Lhasa is forbidden you and you are among the Lama’s servants: white ideas in a white sky.
These political hatreds are nothing but fables that are useful in accomplishing the task that is assigned to you. Whether it detests or defends you, the West is prey to the elevated thoughts that follow in your wake. You are an element of disorder for the enemy of the East. The passions which several millennia of Mediterranean civilization have risen up against are more profoundly reborn and capable of urging humans to extreme acts. You are the most scorned and sacrificed of the soldiers of Asia; isolated bataillonaires at the mercy of pogroms and cowardly vengeances, and yet you have never weakened, your activity has never slowed down.
And yet we now see, born of the League of Nations, a sentimental movement that is pushing for the reconstruction of Zion and the founding of a Jewish State as ridiculous and artificial as Poland. Then all these impure beings, all these mixed brains that weaken Europe for the good of Asia will return to the sacred land, bearing with them the worst maladies of the spirit, the skepticism contracted during that 2000 year expedition into enemy territory. They'll carry the troubles they bear wherever they go to the narrow Jordan Valley, to the tragic banks of the Dead Sea. That strength will turn back against what it has a mission to defend by becoming the advanced outpost of the nations of the West and will be more dangerous than the English and French colonies. The Rothschilds, by supplying funds for the Zionist expedition, are going against the genius of the race.
I know that those who desert and depart to find the Wailing Wall are rare, and imbecilic littérateurs thought they found in these few old men the spirit of Israel returning to its cradle. The failure of such an endeavor is fortunately not in doubt. The Monaco-Monte Carlo of the Levant has not yet opened its casino and if the reactionaries have not yet pushed against the wheel of the ancient biblical cart nothing in their attitude indicates displeasure or worry. On the contrary, one must see in this quasi-silence a mark of joy. These good politicians are rubbing their hands. Their territory will perhaps be evacuated.
But a current has been created. It must not take on any importance. The Israelites must remain in exile as long as the Western cause has not been lost, as long as the Latin, Greek, Anglo-Saxon and German spirit, which is the worst threat to the intelligence, has not been crushed.
From Paris to Rome, from London to New York, from Oxford to Hamburg the malady becomes daily more aggressive. The old sadist of Geneva makes a claim to sequester the soul. The last freedoms are threatened. The right to opium, the right to alcohol, the right to love, the right to abortion, the right of the individual to dispose of himself: this is what the sinister bonzes of the League of Nations are in the process of ruining. [1]
And it’s at the very moment when the world needs thirty sacred deniers, saved for you, that you want to flee! The very idea of a possible retreat should sicken you against the weak and cowardly among you. The day approaches, your day. This time it’s a question of life or death for everything that is worth living and defending.
Judas’s thirty deniers weren’t given in vain. You saved them in order to redeem the rare individuals who are worth being saved. Don’t waste them on clearing sentimental fields.
It’s a treasure that all the gold in the world cannot serve to redeem for you.
1. There should also be pointed out that femme de letters who should be avoided who, delegated to that assembly has as her mission the combating of obscene literature (!).