Anna Strunsky

Anna Strunsky in 1914

Anna Strunsky Walling (March 21, 1877 – February 25, 1964) was known as an early 20th-century Jewish-American author and advocate of socialism based in San Francisco, California, and New York City. She was primarily a novelist, but also wrote about social problems and the labor movement.

Quotes

• A scientist, humanitarian and of royal birth, Kropotkin is a genius of the age; not only does his colossal intellect cause him to stand in bold relief, but his personality is one of indescribable and unduplicated power.
  • "Earnest Address by Anna Strunsky", San Francisco Call, 11 October 1904, quoted in Ruth Kinna, Kropotkin: Reviewing the Classical Anarchist Tradition (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), p. 15.

"The Revolutionist and War" (June 1915)

• cowardice is itself a military conception. He does not want to understand military morality. He knows only the courage of principle.

• For home and country —but all homes are his home, all countries are his too. He has no separate home and country,

• It is a universal suicide they are committing. In place of the fraternity which yesterday existed, there is distilled to-day the poisonous fumes of nationalistic patriotism which threatens to cover the earth with darkness for another fifty years.

• The French Revolution brought into the world the conception of society, of the Third Estate. Before that we had institutions, religion, caste, government, but the people did not exist. The Revolution extended the idea of the people as far as the Rhine.

• You cannot conquer an awakened people. You cannot Prussianize Belgium and France. You cannot eradicate the teachings of Marx and Engels from the minds of hundreds of thousands of German Socialists. Surely they would find some way of uniting in spirit and in deed with the comrades of other nations in case of such an invasion on the part of a government which they had always understood and denounced. Disarmament is not non-resistance. It is a resistance which must carry everything before it. It is raising the battle-field to a higher plane upon which the nobler and better must conquer, where today almost as surely they must fail. It is to practice a resistance unknown in history. It is a modernism which partakes of the future society which it goes to build up.

• We progress, we develop ourselves ; then comes a call to arms, and all is swallowed up. The last vestiges of civilization are gone. We ourselves become war-mad. A reversal of everything takes place. Instead of preparing for life in its multitudinous and beautiful forms we prepare for death —night covers everything. We sink further into the slime of the abyss. We lose our humanity

• Patriots all, who have forgotten or deserted the higher patriotism with which they had lived and from which their art drew its strength.

• On the revolutionary battle-field there are no soldiers, called to the front with as little power to resist as the machine guns that they drag with them. There are comrades—men and women, infatuated with freedom, who have risen to establish a home of equal hospitality to all, and to cause the dream of fellowship to come to pass upon this earth.

External links

• Jewish Women's Archive page