Read Online The Antichrist by Joseph Roth, Richard Panchyk - Free Book Online Page B

‘We want to be people in all the countries of the world,’ they said that they wanted to be masters in their own countries. And I thereby recognized that the Antichrist was in control among them also.
    I said this to one of them, a man with kind eyes and an agreeable voice. He came from India. He replied: ‘Since you came to us with violence and trickery and brought us your alcohol and syphilis, but we didn’t come to you with trickery and violence, to defend ourselves we must speak with the words that you have taught us and fight with the weapons that you use.’
    To which I answered that he had spoken much foolishness in two phrases but that that he had revealed his great folly mainly through the use of a couple of little words – namely ‘your’ and ‘you’. Since I had unfortunately not seen his country I couldn’t object to his regarding mine as he regarded his own. I also looked upon his country as I looked upon mine. If, perhaps, I were to bring some disease or other evil into his country I could no doubt assume that there were other diseases and evils that were common and native to that place. For we are all a mixture of virtue and sin. And it was precisely because all men were comprised in the same way of virtue and sin, strength and weakness, goodness and malice, disease and health, that I couldn’t comprehend why every country should be jealous of exactly those frailties, evils and diseases that it imagined were special and peculiar to itself. As far as I was concerned, at that moment, as we conversed one man to another, was he, I asked him, speaking with me or with my skin colour? For he used the plural pronoun when speaking to me, although I was only one person.
    At this, he replied that he had become used to it because it was the people of my colour who had begun by addressing people of his colour in this way, saying ‘you’ and ‘your’ to them.
    â€˜Let us assume,’ I said to him, ‘that there was a certain town, and in this town lived a great many murderers. Would you therefore address each citizen of the town as “you murderers” or say “among you murderers”? And,’ said I further, ‘I have read that in your country live many wise men. Am I to address everyone in your country as “you wise men”?’
    â€˜I have seldom met anyone of your type,’ he said, thinking to compliment me.
    With this I recognized him and told him that he seemed to be the twin brother of my employer – the wise Master of a Thousand Tongues. And then I said bluntly: ‘The Antichrist walks in your country also. And that is worse than syphilis.’
    He seemed not to understand. He said nothing. As, however, he was concerned to reconcile me he searched, very much as the Antichrist would, not for a subject that we might both like but for one that he thought I would hate. And he said: ‘The worst are the half-breeds.’
    â€˜No,’ I said, ‘the worst are those who would think and say such a thing. For we are all people, and when people come together with each other it is natural and the will of God that everything should happen between them that can occur between human beings. They can speak to one another, they can hate one another, they can love one another and they can sleep with one another. Love between a red man and a yellow woman is natural. For if nature didn’t wish this love to exist it would prevent them from bearing fruit. Since children spring from such a love these children are neither better nor worse than any others. When, however, two women or two men of the same colour love each other, this process goes against nature, even though people must obey the particular ways of their own bodies. There certainly exist within creation many phenomena that are subject not to the general laws of creation butto others of a special and remarkable kind. We have no right to condemn them. Neither