By: Arnulfo Benavente Diaz
Manuel González Prada is the rebellious, anarchist, positivist and sarcastic thinker who writes with a firm pen and drawn sword. In his works: “Anarchy”, “New Free Pages”, “Hours of Fight” and “Free Pages”, he points out: “Let’s break the infamous and tacit pact of speaking in a low voice, let’s leave the crossroads for the royal road and ambiguity for the right word. When attacking the error and rushing against his henchmen, let us not lash with a sword in the scabbard: let us throw deep thrusts with a clean blade, free, sparkling in the Sun ”.
Write and leave without floor not only Catholicism, but all followers of Christianity in the world: “What precepts of these divine calls remained without being formulated implicitly or explicitly by the philosophers of Hindustan, China, Judea, Greece and Rome?” .
In the Propaganda and Attack section of “Free Pages”, he mentions: “Enough of celestial compensations and illusory hopes; in superhuman justice, enough of narcotics and derivatives that discourage action, relax energy and make man an eternal victim of man”.
We note that González Prada, prose similar to the book by Marx and Engels, “The Holy Family”: “Religion is the opium of the people. The overcoming of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness”.
The intellectual González Prada maintains about lawyers and magistrates: “Creole justice has free hands to catch whatever comes and eyes open to see which side the suns shine on.”
Regarding the media or journalism, he states: “Let’s eliminate the newspapers and in the freest nations the most iniquitous and most abominable tyrants will emerge.” Likewise, he points out: “Journalism goes where business calls them”.
On alienation, it denotes: “And how will we think well if we still breathe in the atmosphere of the Middle Ages?”.
Regarding corruption, he expressed the following: “Today Peru is a sick organism, where the finger is applied, pus sprouts.”
For the aforementioned thinker, the congress is: “Tarquino’s maximum sewer, the great collector where the sewers of the Republic come to meet.”
His point of definition of women: “Path of all iniquities, gate of hell…” (sic).
Regarding the police, he indicates: “We do not understand how, having so many ways to earn an honest living, a man can join the police.”
On the country’s military barracks: “The barracks has not been and will not be a school of civilization, it is a piece of primitive jungle embedded in the heart of modern cities.”
The purpose and message of the author is: “I do not come to guide, but to be dragged along the right path. Happy those who come tomorrow because they will live, not in the divine Jerusalem, but in the secular city…”.
We think that the controversial González Prada recognizes materiality and is agnostic. He is eclectic, he has a pantheistic variant of the philosopher Spinoza and the immanentist ideas of the Frenchman Ernest Renán.