All the persecutions of Christians and Jews, the inquisitions and burnings of heretics, witch-trials, the religious sorrows of all times—all were outflows of the love for humanity. Their aim was to safeguard mankind from the robbery of its happiness by heresy!
The love of humanity begat our Neros, our Torquemadas, our Ivans the Terrible, and Schdanows!
Why did these men torture other men?... In order themselves to realize in imagination the others’ torments, to sympathize with them, to feel with them. In order in their own spirit to endure these martyrdoms; that is to say, to torture themselves with the representation of the pain of another.... “Thus in its motives sadism is nothing else than masochism.”
The love of humanity erected the cross of Christ, lighted the faggots with which Huss and Bruno wore burned, tortured Thomas Münzer, stabbed Marat, decapitated Hebert, and built the gallows of Arad, St. Petersburg, Chicago, etc.!
The love of humanity built the Bastille, the Tower of London, the Spielberg, Blackwell’s Island, and the Schlüsselburg, built the torture-chambers of the Inquisition, constructed the medieval penal system, and those of Montjuich, Alcalla del Valle, Borissoglebsk, and many others.
Remarkable! That precisely your “love of humanity” was the most cruel tormentor, the most inexorable executioner, the most bloodthirsty butcher of men, and the greatest of all criminals.
Do you not see in all this the wise rule of the masochistic principle? That it was only persecution which diffused these ideas? All the progress which man makes in civilization must be paid for by means of enormous sacrifice. The superhuman sorrows of millions of slaves created the civilization of antiquity—the Phœnician, the Babylonian, the Persian, the Assyrian, the Greek, and the Roman! (With regard to this often disputed fact, see Mommsen: “In comparison with the sufferings of the slaves of antiquity, all the sufferings of modern negro slaves are simply a drop in the ocean!”)
Indian civilization is the product of the most horrible suppression and plunder of the lower castes by the higher. The soil of the Southern States of America was cultivated through being manured with the sweat, blood, and bones of negro slaves.
The soil of Europe, again, was made fertile by the sufferings of slaves and serfs, and so on!
Amid the most horrible birth-pangs, amid the slave rebellions, peasant wars, and revolutions, in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, mankind was enabled to throw off the shell of the feudal system. Therewith capitalism was born. This newest form of civilization, once more, is based upon horrible plundering, oppression, and misery of millions and millions of proletarians.