Violence vs. Nonviolence Theme Analysis

“[…] I stoked the greed, I helped it along, and the injustices and abuses multiplied. I fomented crimes and acts of cruelty so that the people would get used to the idea of death. I contributed to their anxiety so that, when they ran screaming from it, they would look for any solution at all. I shackled business to such an extent that with the country reduced to poverty and misery in the end the people would have nothing to fear. I put measures in place to deplete the treasury, and if that weren’t enough to create a popular uprising, I hit them where it would hurt the most: I made it so that the vulture itself would insult the body that gave it life and would corrupt it.”

And they’re not happy with just being unjust, no, or upsetting your country’s traditions […] you have served Spain and the king, but when in their name you ask for justice, they offer no protection. They throw you off your own land without a trial and without even a good reason. They rip you from the arms of your wives and the embrace of your children. Some of you have suffered even more than Cabesang Tales and yet none of you had justice […] without pity or humanity they persecuted you even beyond the grave, as they did to Mariano Herbosa. Cry or laugh on the lonely islands where you wander, unsure of the future. Spain, generous Spain, watches over you and, sooner or later, you will get justice!

“O,” it said, shaking disconsolately, “I loved a young woman, the daughter of a priest, pure as light, as a just-opened lotus flower. The young priest of Abydos coveted her as well and plotted a mutiny using my name and several papyruses I had dedicated to my beloved. The mutiny unfolded just as a furious Cambyses returned from the disasters of his unfortunate campaign. I was branded a rebel and imprisoned. When I was able to escape, during the pursuit I died in Lake Moeris. From eternity I watched as imposture triumphed, I saw as the priest of Abydos pursued the poor virgin day and night, even after she had taken refuge in a temple of Isis on the Island of Philoe. I saw him pursue her and hunt her down even into the caverns, drive her mad from terror and suffering, like a giant bat and a white dove.”

Simoun suddenly stopped speaking, as if he had been cut off. Somewhere inside him a voice asked if he, Simoun, were not indeed part of the trash of that damned city, perhaps even its most destructive ferment. And as the dead rise at the sound of the eternal trumpet, a thousand bloody ghosts, desperate shadows of murdered men, dishonored women, fathers torn from their families, vices engendered and fostered, virtues rejected now rose up in the echoes of that mysterious question. For the first time in his career as a criminal, since Havana, when through vice and bribery he had decided to create a means to carry out his plans, a man without faith, without patriotism, without conscience, for the first time in that era of his life something inside of him came out and protested his actions.

“Every man!” Simoun repeated in a sinister tone of voice. “Every man, indios, mestizos, Chinamen, Spaniards, everyone you encounter without valor or energy…it’s essential to renew the race! Cowardly fathers only beget slavish sons and it’s not worth it to destroy only to rebuild with rotten materials. What? You’re trembling? You’re shaking, you’re afraid to sow death? What is death? What is a holocaust of twenty thousand wretches? Twenty thousand fewer wretches and millions of wretchednesses starved at birth!”

“What will the world say when they see such carnage?”

“The world will applaud, like it always does, saying that the strongest, and the most violent, are in the right,” Simoun answered with a cruel smile. “Europe applauded when the Western nations sacrificed millions of Indians in the Americas, and surely there are not to be found much more moral or peaceful nations. […] Europe applauded when a powerful Portugal despoiled the Moluccan Islands, it applauds as England destroys the primitive peoples in the Pacific to implant its emigrants there. Europe will applaud the way it applauds the end of a play, the end of a tragedy. The masses will hardly take notice, in the end, and will see only the effect. Commit a crime well and you will be admired and you’ll end up with more supporters than you would have had you committed a virtuous act, carried out with timidity and modesty.”

While these scenes unrolled in the street, in the dining room the greater gods handed around a piece of parchment on which the fateful words were written in red ink:

Mane Thecel Phares

Juan Crisóstomo Ibarra

“The glory of saving a country doesn’t mean having to use the measures that contributed to its ruin! You have believed that what crime iniquity have stained and deformed, another crime and another iniquity can purify and redeem! That’s wrong! Hatred creates nothing but monsters. Only love can bring about wondrous things. Only virtue is redemptive! No, if someday our country can be free, it will not be by vice and crime, not by corruption of our children, by cheating some, and buying others. No, redemption supposes virtue, sacrifice, and sacrifice, love!”

“May nature keep you in its deep abyss, with the coral and pearls of its eternal seas,” the cleric then said, solemnly holding out his hand. “When men need you for a holy, sublime reason, God will pull you from the bosom of your waves. And meanwhile, where you are now you will do no harm, you won’t twist what is right, nor be the cause of any avarice!”