From the 15th to the 22nd of December, 1884, eight workingmen, who had been captured in the war of the poor against the rich, were sitting in the dock, not to have justice passed upon them, but to await the sentence of might which the judges, acting as mouth-pieces for the ruling powers, had in preparation for them. The most prominent figure among these victims of a barbaric order of society was August Reinsdorf. To this man my little book is to be a tribute of esteem.
I am well aware of the difficulty of my otherwise quite modest undertaking, to write a biography of the father of the Anarchistic movement within the territory of the German language, yet I hope to do the brothers near and far a service, for the time being at least, by sketching for them a likeness of a true hero of the Social Revolution....
Indeed Reinsdorf was not an agitator of the common sort. Speeches delivered occasionally or written articles were to him only means to a higher purpose—incentives to action.
Since he had recognized his ideal in Anarchism; ... since the necessity of the “tactics of terror” had dawned upon him in contradistinction to the tactics of petitioning, voting, “parliamenting,” bargaining, and of the peaceable and legitimate hide-and-seek practice—all his thinking and planning was directed to but one thing, he knew of but one endeavor, he gave his entire being to but one motive power of the Social Revolution—that was the propaganda of action.
JOHANN MOST.
In this regard he may be put beside the most noble conspirators of ancient and modern times....
To be a revolutionist indeed, one must possess the faculty of thinking with the most acute clearness. But religious “fog” is the opposite of clearness of intellect. Yea, where religious nonsense has once taken a deep root, there every mental development is actually excluded, and a kind of idiocy formally takes its place....
Quite different does the matter stand in the case of a “proletarian.” If he once recognize the old Lord God with his thunderbolt as an invented scarecrow which a shrewd gang of rascals have placed before paradise,—that man should not eat of the tree of knowledge, but that he should rather wait in patience for the roasted birds which, after his death, come flying into his mouth from a heavenly kitchen,—if the poor devil has learned to see that his namesake, too, wherewith they had tried to scare him previously, is also an invention of malicious swindlers,—then he soon applies the rule of the critic to the “high” and “highest” idols of earth. He loses respect for the so-called “Governments” and more and more learns to see in them a horde of brutal tormentors. These custodians of existing treasures attract his eye also to the possessors of the riches of the earth, and soon the question dawns upon him, Who has created all these things? The answer comes of itself. He and his like have done that. To them, therefore, belongs the whole world. They only need to take.
Thus the man, having cut loose from God, becomes the revolutionist par excellence.