The first tension is ourselves and our history. There is a history of anarchism. But within that history of anarchism, there are things and people who have been forgotten. Now, with the Kate Sharpley Library, we have two reasons to exist. One is, yes, flowers for the fallen. We printed a pamphlet called Anarchists against Franco1 where there were twenty anarchists who’d been killed between 1942 and 1960 in guerrilla warfare against Franco. And Frank Torres who wrote it in Spanish says – and I couldn’t agree more – it doesn’t matter whether you think libertarian communism, anarchism will happen, it doesn’t matter whether you think it’s silly, it doesn’t even matter if you think you’re cleverer than those anarchists who went out there.
What matters is how dare we forget them? How dare you and I sitting in this room not know about them? How dare we forget their bravery and their courage when they went over the mountains against stupidly impossible odds for that dream?
So, any anarchist, any person sympathetic to us has to be aware of our history, not the history of ideas, that’s something I’ll talk about in a second, but simply the people who have suffered physically and emotionally for our belief. You’ll know some of them, nah? But we’ll also not know a lot of them and one of the things we must do is to revise history, to give them that dignity of that memory.
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