"It may be impossible to have a revolution without crimes but that does not make revolution a crime"
About this Quote
Bergamin slips a legal razor into a moral argument: revolutions may commit crimes, yet revolution itself is not identical with criminality. The line is built like a courtroom distinction, separating an act from the messy inventory of acts committed in its name. Its sting is aimed at the standard counterrevolutionary move: treat disorder as proof of illegitimacy, then declare the demand for change guilty on arrival. Bergamin refuses that syllogism. He concedes the blood and the broken glass, then denies the state its favorite shortcut: if violence happens, the cause must be violence.
The subtext is political triage. In moments of upheaval, institutions that already hold coercive power suddenly pose as guardians of “law,” as if their own origins and maintenance weren’t saturated in sanctioned force. Bergamin’s phrasing exposes how “crime” functions as a label that protects existing hierarchies. Calling revolution a crime is less a description than a strategy: it relocates debate from justice to policing, from grievances to punishment.
Context sharpens the stakes. Bergamin, a Spanish writer marked by the turbulence of the early 20th century and the Spanish Civil War’s moral wreckage, is not romanticizing revolutionary purity. He’s arguing for a more honest accounting: if transformation is necessary, it won’t arrive with clean hands, but necessity isn’t absolved or condemned by cleanliness. The quote works because it rejects both propaganda poles - the state’s pious legality and the revolution’s self-mythologizing - and insists on the uncomfortable middle where politics actually lives.
The subtext is political triage. In moments of upheaval, institutions that already hold coercive power suddenly pose as guardians of “law,” as if their own origins and maintenance weren’t saturated in sanctioned force. Bergamin’s phrasing exposes how “crime” functions as a label that protects existing hierarchies. Calling revolution a crime is less a description than a strategy: it relocates debate from justice to policing, from grievances to punishment.
Context sharpens the stakes. Bergamin, a Spanish writer marked by the turbulence of the early 20th century and the Spanish Civil War’s moral wreckage, is not romanticizing revolutionary purity. He’s arguing for a more honest accounting: if transformation is necessary, it won’t arrive with clean hands, but necessity isn’t absolved or condemned by cleanliness. The quote works because it rejects both propaganda poles - the state’s pious legality and the revolution’s self-mythologizing - and insists on the uncomfortable middle where politics actually lives.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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