The Indifferent
A Call to the Living: Against the Cowardice of Neutrality
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The Indifferent
By Antonio Gramsci
“I hate the indifferent. I believe that life means taking sides. One who is really alive, can be nothing if not citizen and partisan. Indifference is lethargy; it is parasitism; it is cowardice; it is not life. Therefore, I hate the indifferent.
Indifference is the dead weight of history. Indifference plays an important role in history. It plays a passive role, but it does play a role. It is fatality; it is something that cannot be counted on; it is something that disrupts programmes, overturns the best made plans; it is that awful something that chokes intelligence. What happens, the evil that touches everyone, happens because the majority relinquish their will to it, allowing the enactment of laws that only a revolution can revoke, letting men rise to power who, later, only a mutiny can remove. Between absenteeism and indifference, few hands, supervised by no-one, spin the web of common life, and the masses shut their eyes, because they do not care; and thus we believe it is fatality that ravages everyone and everything, and we believe that history is nothing but an enormous natural phenomenon, an eruption, an earthquake of which we are all victims, those who wanted it and those who did not, those who knew about it and those who did not, those who were active in it and those who were indifferent. Some whimper piteously, others curse obscenely, but few or none ask themselves: if I, too, had done my part, if I had struggled to exert my will, would what has happened have happened?
This is why I hate the indifferent: their whimpering, innocents always, bothers me. I hold each and everyone one of them accountable for how they carried out the task that life put before them and puts before them every day, for what they did and, especially, for what they did not do. And I believe I can afford to be unrelenting, unwilling to show pity and to share my tears with them.
I am ‘partigiano’, alive, and already I hear, in the consciences of those on my same side, the throbbing bustle of the city of the future that we are building. And in it, the social chain does not weigh on the shoulders of only a few, nothing is haphazard, fatality, but the intelligent work of its citizens. There is no-one watching from the sidelines while others are sacrificed, bled dry. I am alive, partisan. And, therefore, I hate those who do not take sides; I hate the indifferent.”
February 11, 1917
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Source:
Indifferenti/The indifferent by Antonio Gramsci – parallel texts: words reflected
https://paralleltexts.blog/2015/11/01/indifferentithe-indifferent-by-antonio-gramsci/#content-wrapper