As The 100th
Anniversary Of The Beginning of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars)
Approaches ... Some Remembrances
- Lenin-A German Voice on the War (1914)
The events leading up to World War I from the massive
military armament of almost all the capitalist and imperialist parties in
Europe and elsewhere in order to stake their claims to their unimpeded share of
the world’s resources to the supposedly eternal pledges by the Social-Democrats
and other militant leftist formations representing the historic interest of the
international working-class to stop those parties in their tracks at the
approach of war were decisive for 20th century history. The ability
to inflict industrial-sized slaughter and mayhem on a massive scale first
portended toward the end of the American Civil War once the Northern industrial
might tipped the scales their way almost could not be avoided in the early 20th
century once the armaments race got serious, and the technology seemed to grow
exponentially with each new turn in the war machine.
The land war, the war carried out by the “grunts,” by the “cannon
fodder” of many nations was only the tip of the iceberg and probably except for
the increased cannon-power and rapidity of the machine-guns would be carried
out by the norms of the last war. However the race for naval supremacy, or the
race to take a big kink out of British supremacy, went on unimpeded as Germany
tried to break-out into the Atlantic world and even Japan, Jesus, Japan tried
to gain a big hold in the Asia seas. The deeply disturbing submarine warfare
wreaking havoc on commerce on the seas, the use of armed aircraft and other
such technological innovations of war only added to the frenzy. We can hundred
years ahead, look back and see where talk of “stabs in the back” by the losers
and ultimately an armistice rather than decisive victory on the blood-drenched
fields of Europe would lead to more blood-letting but it was not clear, or
nobody was talking about it much, or, better, doing much about calling a halt
before they began among all those “civilized” nations who went into the abyss
in July of 1914. Sadly the list of those who would not do anything, anything
concrete, besides paper manifestos issued at international conferences, included
the great bulk of the official European labor movement which in theory was
committed to stopping the madness.
A few voices, voices like Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg
in Germany, Lenin and Trotsky in Russia, some anti-war anarchists like Monette
in France and here in America Big Bill Haywood and the stalwart Eugene V. Debs,
were raised and one hundred years later those voices have a place of honor in
this space. Those voices, many of them in exile, or in the deportations
centers, were being clamped down as well as the various imperialist governments
began closing their doors to political refugees when they were committed to
clapping down on their own anti-war citizens. As we have seen in our own times,
most recently in America in the period before the “shock and awe” of the
decimation of Iraq in 2002 and early 2003 the government, most governments, are
able to build a war frenzy out of whole cloth. At those times, and in my
lifetime the period after 9/11 when we tried in vain to stop the Afghan war in
its tracks is illustrative, to be a vocal anti-warrior is a dicey business. A
time to keep your head down a little, to speak softly and wait for the fever to
subside and to be ready to begin the anti-war fight another day. So imagine in
1914 when every nationality in Europe felt its prerogatives threatened how the
fevered masses would not listen to the calls against the slaughter. Yes, one
hundred years later is not too long to honor those ardent anti-war voices as
the mass mobilizations began in the countdown to war.
Over the next period as we lead up to the 100th
anniversary of the start of World War I and beyond I will under this headline
post various documents, manifestos and cultural expressions from that time in
order to give a sense of what the lead up to that war looked like, the struggle
against its outbreak before, the forlorn struggle during and the massive
struggles in order to create a newer world out of the shambles of the
battlefields.
********
Teddy Martin had come from a long line of workers, some of
his forbears had been among the first domestic weavers in Spitalfield, had been
the first machine-tenders in Manchester and had been workers like him and his
father in the London shipbuilding trade. He knew deep in his blood there was an
“us” and “them” in the world without his party, the Labor Party, having to tell
him word one on the subject. He had even read Karl Marx in his early teens when
he was trying to figure out why his family was stuck in the faraway outer tenements
with their squalor and their human closeness (he never could get over being in
close quarters ever since then). So yes he was ready to listen to what some
left members of the party had to say if the war clouds on the horizon turned
any darker. But, and hear him true, his was like his forbears and his father
before him as loyal a man as to be found in the country. Loyal to his king
(queen too if it came to that) and his country. So he would have to think,
think carefully, about what to do if those nasty Huns and their craven allies
making loud noises of late threatened his way of life. Most of his mates to the
extent that they had any opinion were beginning to be swept up in the idea that
a little war might not be such a bad thing to settle some long smoldering
disputes. Still he, Teddy Martin, was not a man to be rushed and so he would
think, think hard, about what to do if there was a mass mobilization.
No question, thought Teddy Martin, his majesty’s government
had gotten itself into a hard situation ever since that mangy Archduke somebody
had got himself shot by a guy, a damn anarchist working with who knows who,
maybe freemasons, over in Sarajevo, over in someplace he was not quite sure he
knew where it was if somebody had asked him to point it out in a map. That
seemingly silly little act (except of course to the Archduke and his wife also
killed) apparently has exposed Britain, damn the whole British Empire that they
claim the sun never sets on, to some pretty serious entanglements because if
France were to go to war with Austria or someplace like that then the king is
duty bound to come to France’s rescue. And Teddy Martin as thinking man, as a
working man, as a member in good standing of the Labor Party ever since its
inception was still not sure what he would do. Not sure that he would follow
the war cries being shouted out by the likes of Arthur Henderson from his own
party. All he knew was that the usual talk of football or the prizefights that
filled the air at his pub, The Cock and Bull, was being supplanted by war talk,
by talk of taking a nip out of the Germans and those who spoke in that way were
gaining a hearing. All Teddy knew was that it was getting harder and harder for
him to openly express thoughts that he needed to think about the issues more.
That was not a good sign, not a good omen.
Yes, once the Germans were on the march toward Belgium and
then threatened Paris in a race to the sea if not stopped then the guys at the
Cock and Bull became more pensive, started to see that they would have to do
right by the king. One night, one July night before the blood started flowing
on the continent, one of the boys, Brewster, Teddy thought had led a toast to
the king and all including Teddy rather sheepishly. But now, now with the blood
up, no with the Empire at stake, new with even the wogs in India clamoring to
serve their king and emperor Teddy Martin could see where each must do his
duty. And so Teddy found himself less and less at the pub with the boys and
more and more at home with his wife and two young boys waiting for that minute when he would find himself
heading to the recruiting station to give his all for his country. Although he
lifted no glass to that fact.
********
The German Social-Democratic Party had given Fritz Klein
everything. Had taken him from a small furniture-making factory(less than one
hundred employees constituting in those days small) where he led the fight for
unionization (against all odds for that woefully unorganized industry and against
the then still standing laws against unionization pressed by the state as well
as well as the outlaw status of the S-D Party in those pre-legal days) and
brought him along into the burgeoning party bureaucracy (boasting of this
number of party publications, that number of members, and the pinnacle the
votes attained for the growing number of party parliamentarians in the
Reichstag). Made him a local then regional shop steward agent. Later found him
a spot in the party publications department and from there to alternate member
of the party’s national committee. As he grew older, got married, had two
lovely children the party had severely sapped the youthful idealism out of him.
Still he was stirred whenever Karl Liebknecht, old Wilhelm’s son, the father whom
he knew from the old days, delivered one of his intellectual and rational
attacks against the war aims of the Kaiser and his cabal. Still too though he
worried, worried to perdition, that the British and, especially the French were
deliberately stepping on German toes. Although tired, endlessly tired, he hoped
that he would be able to stick to the Second International’s pledge made at
Basle in 1912 to do everything to stop war in case it came, as was now likely.
He just didn’t know how he would react, didn’t know at all.
Fritz was furious, furious at two things. First that those
damn whatever they were anarchists, nationalists, or whatever had assassinated
the Archduke Ferdinand. Had threatened the peace of Europe, his peace, with
their screwy theory of picking off various state officials thinking that would,
unlike victory in the mass class struggles, change the world. Christ, they
could have at least read Marx or somebody. Make no mistake Fritz had no truck
with monarchy, certainly not the moribund Austro-Hungarian monarchy, despised
the Kaiser himself right here in the German homeland (although on the quiet
since the Kaiser was not above using his courts for the simple pleasure of
skewering a man for lese majeste and had
done so to political opponents and the idle wild-talkers alike). Still his
blood boiled that some desperados would pick at a fellow Germanic target. Fritz
was not at all sure that maybe the French, or the English, the bloody English
were behind the activities. Hugo Heine thought so, his immediate regional director,
so there could be some truth to the assertion.
Secondly, that same Hugo Heine had begun, at the behest of
the national committee of the party, to clamp down on those who were trying to
make the party live up to its promises and try to make a stand against any
German, any Kaiser moves toward war over the incident at Sarajevo. The way
Heine put it was that if war was to come and he hoped that it would not the
Social-Democracy must not be thrown into the underground again like in the old
days under Bismarck. Hugo had spent two years in the Kaiser’s jail back then
for simply trying to organize his shop and get them to vote for the party then
outlawed. The radical stuffing had come out of Hugo though and all he wanted
was not to go back to jail now for any reason. Fritz cursed those damn
anarchists again, cursed them more bitterly since they were surely going to
disturb his peace.
Fritz Klein was beside himself when he heard the news, the
Social-Democratic parliamentary caucus on August 4th had overwhelming
to support the Kaiser’s war budget (and because overwhelming each member was
duty-bound to vote en bloc the way the majority vote went and did so despite
the pleas of Karl Liebknecht), to give him the guns, ammunition and whatever he
needed to pursue the war aims that were just beginning to unfold. Fritz had not
expected the party to be able to stop the war preparations, or once the war
clouds got too ominous, to stop the mobilizations, but he did expect that the
parliamentary delegation (which was under its own discipline and not the
party’s) would not cravenly grant the Kaiser’s every war supply. All those
brave peacetime proclamations about the brotherhood of man and international
working-class solidarity were now so much paper in the wind. He sat for a
moment in disgust and disbelief that now Europe would be in flames for who knew
how long before he knew he would have to explain to the party stalwarts the
whys and wherefores of the budgetary decision. And have to explain why he and
his comrades would soon be loading rifles instead of bags of flour somewhere
near the Atlantic Ocean. For a flash he hoped for a short war but in his gut he
knew the fates were fickle and that the blood of the European working-class
youth would be spilled without question and without end.
********
Jacques Rous (and yes he traced his family roots back to the
revolution, back to the “red” priest who he was named after who had led some of
the plebeian struggles back then that were defeated by those damn moderate cutthroats
Robespierre and Saint Just) had long been a leader the anarchist delegation in
his Parisian district, had been in a few fights in his time with the damn city
bourgeoisie, and had a long, very long memory of what the Germans had, and had not
done, in Paris in ’71,in the time of the bloodedly suppressed Commune. Also Jacques
had long memories of his long past forbears who had come from Alsace-Lorraine
now in German hands. And it galled him, galled him that there were war clouds
gathering daily over his head, over his district and over his beloved
Paris.
But that was not what
was troubling Jacques Rous in the spring of 1914. He knew, knew deep in his
bones like a lot of his fellow anarchists, like a lot of the guys in the small
pottery factory he had worked in for the past several years after being laid
off from the big textile factory across the river that if war came they would
know what to do. Quatrain from the CGT (the large trade union organization to
which he and others in the factory belonged to) had clued them in, had told
them enough to know some surprises were headed the government’s way if they
decided to use the youth of the neighborhoods as cannon fodder. What bothered
Jacques was not his conduct but that of his son, Jacques too named in honor of
that same ancient red priest who was the lifeblood of the family. Young Jacques
something of a dandy like many youth in those days, something of a lady’s man
(he had reportedly a married mistress and somebody else on the side), had told
one and all (although not his father directly) who would listen one night that
he planned to enlist in the Grenadiers just as soon as it looked like trouble
was coming. Old Jacques wondered if other fathers were standing in fear of such
rash actions by their sons just then.
Old Jacques could see the writing on the wall, remembered
what it was like when the German
threatened to come back in ’70 and then came the last time. Came and left the
Parisian poor to eat rats or worse when they besieged the city, old Thiers fled
to Versailles, and Paris starved half-aided by those Germans and he expected
the same if not worse this time because that country was now unified, was now
filled with strange powerful Krupp cannon and in a mood to use it now that one
of the members of their alliance had had one of its own killed in Sarajevo and
all Europe was waiting for the other shoe to drop. He believed that the
anarchists of Paris to a man would resist the call to arms issued by the
government. Quatrain, the great leader ever since Commune days, almost
guaranteed a general strike if they tried to mobilize the Parisian youth for
the slaughter. Yeah Quatrain would stand tall. Jacques though had personal
worries somebody had seen his son, also Jacques, heading with some of his “gilded”
friends toward the 12th Grenadier recruiting office in the Hotel de
Ville ready to fight for bloody bourgeois France, for the memory of Napoleon,
for the glory of battle. And he old Jacques knowing from some skimpily- held
barricades back in ’71 just how “glorious” war was fretted in the night against
his blood.
Damn, the Germans were on the march again, yesterday it was
Belgium and old Jacques knew in his heart where the bloody Kaiser was heading
next. Hell knew it since those bloody May weeks in ’71 when the Germans acted
as “honor guard” for the damn Thiers reaction once they broke out of Versailles
so he was prepared to defeat his section to the death if it came to that, came
to shedding an old man’s blood. What
worried Jacques, had worried him all spring was young Jacques cavalier attitude
toward the impeding slaughter, his disregard for any of the principles that the
old man had tried to instill in him from his youth. Had in May joined the 47th
Grenadiers who were now stationed in a forward position in the border area
between France and Belgium. Sure young Jacques looked the gallant like all the
Rouses but that last look, that unknowing look that old Jacques detected in his
young son before he saw him off told plenty about the fears to come. The fear
that no matter how far apart they had drifted, father and son, they were
kindred, they were French at this dismal hour.
*******
George Jenkins dreamed the dream of many young men out in
the heartland, out in the wheat fields of Kansas a dream that America, his
America would keep the hell out of what looked like war clouds coming from
Europe in the spring of 1914 (although dreams and dreamers were located not
just on the farms since George was not a Kansas farm boy but a rising young
clerk in Doc Dell’s Drugstore located in the college town of Lawrence). George
was keenly interested in such matters and would, while on break or when things
were slow, glance through the day later copy of the New York Times or Washington
Post that Doc provided for his more worldly customers via the passing
trains. What really kept George informed though was William White’s home-grown Emporia Gazette which kept a close eye
on the situation in Europe for the folks.
And with all of that information here is what George
Jenkins, American citizen, concluded: America had its own problems best tended
to by keeping out of foreign entanglements except when America’s direct
interests were threatened. So George naturally cast skeptical eyes on
Washington, on President Wilson, despite his protestations that European
affairs were not our business. George had small town ideas about people minding
their own business. See too also George had voted for Eugene V. Debs himself,
the Socialist party candidate for President, and while he was somewhat
skeptical about some of the Socialist Party leaders back East he truly believed
that Brother Debs would help keep us out of war.
Jesus, those damn Europeans have begun to make a mess for
themselves now that some archduke, Jesus, an archduke in this day and age (and
George Jenkins thanked some forgotten forebear for getting his clan out of
Europe whenever he did so and avoided that nonsense about going to the aid of
somebody over a damn archduke). Make no mistake George Jenkins had no sympathy
for anarchists and was half-glad a couple of years ago when the Socialist Party
booted the IWW, the damn Wobbies, out if that is what they did and the beggars
didn’t just walk out. Although he had an admiration for Big Bill Hayward and
his trade union fights that is all it was-admiration and policy could not be
made on that basis. So no he had no truck with anarchists but to go to war over
an archduke-damn. Still George was no Pollyanna and kept abreast of what was
going on and it bothered him more than somewhat that guys like Senator Lodge
from Massachusetts and others from the Northeast were beating the war drums to
get the United States mired in a damn European war. No way, no way good solid
Midwesterners would fall for that line. And so George watched and waited.
Watched too to see what old Debs had to say about matters. George figured that
if the war drums got loud enough then Brother Debs would organize and speak up
to keep things right. That was his way.
George, despite his membership in the American Socialist
Party and devotion to its presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs in 1912 when he
travelled all over Kansas on weekends trying to drum up votes among the small
hard-pressed farmers and small town people whom he was kindred with, had
somewhat neglected what was happening among his fellow European socialists in the
big-tent Second International. All he knew was that at least since the turn of the
century when so many countries were getting industrialized and were to prove
they counted making war cloud noises that the International was committed to
stopping the madness of war anyway they could. He could not say though he was shocked,
naïve shocked anyway, when all of Europe mobilized for war and the German Social-Democrats
had led the way and voted the Kaiser’s war budget without a murmur (as far as he
knew). Hadn’t this country gone crazy with war hysteria when the Maine went down and Teddy and the boys
gave old hombre Spain a bloody nose in return. And received heros’ welcomes and
glad tidings when they returned. Thankfully the war clouds in America were not
fierce yet, but he knew once they came, as he feared they would those small
farmers and small town people would not receive him with open arms like in
1912.
********
Ivan Smirnov was no kid, had been around the block a few
times in this war business. Had been in the Russian fleet that got its ass
kicked by the Japanese in 1904 (he never called them “Nips” like lots of his
crewmates did not after that beating they took that did not have to happen if
the damn Czar’s naval officers had been anything but lackeys and anything but
overconfident that they could beat the Johnny-come-lately Japanese in the naval
war game). More importantly he had been in the Baltic fleet when the revolution
of 1905 came thundering over their heads and each man, each sailor, each
officer had to choice sides. He had gone with rebels and while he did not face
the fate of his comrades on the Potemkin
his naval career was over.
Just as well Ivan had thought many times since he was then able
to come ashore and get work on the docks through some connections, and think.
And what he was thinking in the spring of 1914 with some ominous war clouds in
the air that that unfinished task from 1905 was going to come to a head. Ivan
knew enough about the state of the navy, and more importantly, the army to know
that without some quick decisive military action the monarchy was finished and
good riddance. The hard part, the extremely hard part, was to get those future
peasant conscripts who would provide cannon fodder for the Czar’s ill-thought
out land adventures to listen up for a minute rather than go unknowingly
head-long into the Czar’s arm (the father’s arms for many of them). So there
was plenty of work to do. Ivan just that moment was glad that he was not a
kid.
As the war clouds thickened after the killing of the
archduke in bloody damn Sarajevo in early summer 1914 Ivan Smirnov knew in his
bones that the peasant soldier cannon fodder as always would come flocking to
the Czar like lemmings to the sea the minute war was declared. Any way the deal
was cut the likely line-up of the Czar with the “democracies” of the West,
Britain and France and less likely the United States would immediately give the
Czar cover against the villainies of the Huns, of the Germans who just the
other day were propping up the Czar’s treasury. It could not end well. All Ivan
hoped for was that his party, the real Social-Democrats, locally known as the
Mensheviks from the great split in 1903 with the Bolsheviks and who had definitely
separated from that organization for good in 1912, would not get war fever just
because the damn Czar was lined up with the very democracies that the party
wished to emulate in Russia.
He knew too that the talk among the leadership of the
Bolsheviks (almost all of them in exile and thus far from knowing what was
happening down in the base of society at home) about opposing the Czar to the
bitter end, about fighting in the streets again some said to keep the young
workers and the peasants drifting into the urban areas from the dead-ass farms
from becoming cannon-fodder for a lost cause was crazy, was irresponsible.
Fortunately some of the local Bolshevik committee men in Russia and among their
Duma delegation had cooler heads. Yea this was not time to be a kid, with kid’s
tunnel vision, with great events working in the world.
********V. I. Lenin
A German Voice on the War
Published: Sotsial-Demokrat No. 34, December 5, 1914. Published according to the text in Sotsial-Demokrat.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [197[4]], Moscow, Volume 21, pages 92-93.
Translated:
Transcription\Markup: D. Walters and R. Cymbala
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive 2002 (2005). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
Other Formats: Text • README
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [197[4]], Moscow, Volume 21, pages 92-93.
Translated:
Transcription\Markup: D. Walters and R. Cymbala
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive 2002 (2005). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
Other Formats: Text • README
“In a single night the aspect of the world has changed... . Everyone puts the blame on his neighbour, everyone claims to be on the defensive, to act only in a state of urgent defence. Everyone, don’t you see, is defending only his most sacred values, the hearth, the fatherland... . National vainglory and national aggressiveness triumph... . Even the great international working class obeys national orders, workers are killing one another on the battlefields... . Our civilisation has proved bankrupt... . Writers of European fame are not ashamed to come forth as ragingly blind chauvinists... . We had too much faith in the possibility of imperialist madness being curbed by the fear of economic ruin... . We are going through an undisguised imperialist struggle for mastery of the world. There is no trace anywhere of a struggle for great ideas, except perhaps the overthrow of the Russian Minotaur ... the tsar and his grand dukes who have delivered to the hangmen the noblest men of their country... . But do we not see how noble France, the bearer of ideals of liberty, has become the ally of the hangman tsar? How honest Germany ... is breaking its word and is strangling unhappy neutral Belgium? ... How will it all end? If poverty becomes too great, if despair gains the upper hand, if brother recognises his brother in the uniform of an enemy, then perhaps something very unexpected may still come, arms may perhaps be turned against those who are urging people into the war and nations that have been made to hate one another may perhaps forget that hatred, and suddenly unite. We do not want to be prophets, but should the European war bring us one step closer to a European social republic, then this war, after all, will not have been as senseless as it seems at present.”
Whose voice is this? Perhaps one coming from a German Social-Democrat? Far from it! Headed by Kautsky, the German Social Democrats have become “wretched counter-revolutionary windbags”,[2] as Marx called those Social-Democrats who, after the publication of the Anti-Socialist Law, behaved “in accord with the circumstances”, in the manner of Haase, Kautsky, Südekum and Co. today.
No, our quotation is from a magazine of petty-bourgeois Christian democrats published by a group of kind-hearted little churchmen in Zurich (Neue Wege, Blätter für religiöse Arbeit,[1] September, 1914). That is the limit of humiliation we have come to: God-fearing philistines go as far as to say that it would not be bad to turn weapons against those who “are urging people into the war”, while “authoritative” Social-Democrats like Kautsky “scientifically” defend the most despicable chauvinism, or, like Plekhanov, declare the propaganda of civil war against the bourgeoisie a harmful “utopia”!
Indeed, if such “Social-Democrats” wish to be in the majority and to form the official “International”(= an alliance for international justification of national chauvinism), then is it not better to give up the name of “Social-Democrats”, which has been besmirched and degraded by them, and return to the old Marxist name of Communists? Kautsky once threatened to do that when the opportunist Bernsteinians[3] seemed to be close to conquering the German party officially. What was an idle threat from his lips will perhaps become action to others.
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