y untainted evidence. And if a crime has been committed, but no guilt can be established, then someone must pay. There is a potential criminal for every crime. The preservation of society demands no less. The police are forced by their situation to do wrong that right may come.
Nevertheless, to frame a complicated case demands careful thought and meticulous planning. This is not something that can be done every day - It must be kept for important occasions, as was the trial of the IWW Twelve. Here personal distaste and political environment combined to encourage the police to act. The hope of personal gain was probably not a major motive; rather this was seen as a job that, in the situation, had to be done.
Between the police force and those who supervised and directed their work in the Government and those who judged it from the bench, there was a complex relation. It was the job of the police to do what they had to do and then conceal it; it was the job of their political and judicial superiors to pretend that this was not done. But this was an unacknowledged agreement. Law enforcement is based on violence; it almost necessarily involves malpractice; and many of those who take part in it are touched by corruption. Yet none of this can be admitted by Government or Bench, because to do so would be to undermine an institution on which the power of judges and politicians depends.
Between the police and the Wobblies, there was that strange love-hate relationship of which Dostoyevsky wrote. They were in such close contact, they knew one another so well, each side was preoccupied with the other's plans and motives and actions: this very intimacy made hate impossible. Yet they started from opposite premises, they served different gods. And so there was a nexus between them which could not be dissolved, for there is nothing more central to thought and emotion than one's closest enemies. Each man destroys those whom he loves - and loves those whom he must destroy.
What of the Wobblies? Like the police, they were their own law-makers, but from more clearly defined premises. For the revolutionary, society is something that is external to him, operating against him in an oppressive and exploitative way. The law has no sanctity in its own right; it is not divinely ordained, and anything that is made by man may be unmade. Yet most revolutionaries live within the law - perhaps because they fear the personal consequences; perhaps because they accept that even an unjust society is better that no society at all, and that change must come by persuasion rather than personal defiance.
But some do not, and among these were the Wobblies. They made contempt for the law a way of life; for them, this kind of direct action was the essence of revolutionary behaviour. Yet it was still a long step from striking, or speaking from a street corner soapbox or selling newspapers in defiance of the law, to the physical destruction of property or life.
What makes a man a nihilist? - For there was a handful of nihilists in Australia. Anger, impatience, lack of faith - whatever it is, it bites deep into men's souls, and leads them to destroy the symbols of injustice they see around them, believing that by destroying the symbols they are destroying injustice itself.
Yet they were not ordinary criminals. They destroyed not for themselves but for all men, not for greed or spite but for a dream. That is why men came to their defence - even men who knew that they were wrong - for beneath their error and their destruction were human hearts. The tragedy of the Australian nihilists was that what they finally destroyed was themselves and the cause they sought to advance.
The Wobblies harboured this element of nihilism because they were a loosely disciplined organisation with an undeveloped ideology, because they repudiated the law in theory and could not see why it should be respected in practice, because the syndicalist Utopia they preached had much in common with anarchism, and because the "propaganda of the deed" has always been one part of anarchism.
The Wobblies had been born of violence - the naked, brutal violence of the war of the American classes. They had lived under the torment of injustice and bitter hate. And a few of them had come to live by violence and hate. But their movement was much more than this, and although it was as abhorrent to respectable trade union leaders and Labor politicians as to employers and conservatives, it was enormously attractive to many. Its members had a courage, a dedication, and a humour that were rare in the labour movement. Its promise of a future in which working men ended their exploitation and alienation by taking to themselves the industries they worked, and deciding among themselves the distribution of their product, gave hope to many minds and hearts. So that when entrenched conserv...
