In
Honor Of The 97th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist
International-Take Four-For Rosa
Luxemburg And Karl Liebknecht
The cops, the hated Federals, and their allies the
Freikorps, were hunting down every Red, hell every leftist or trade union
militant that would not bow his head they could find in all of stinking Bavaria
after they crushed the Commune. It was awful, savage, something out of what
Otto Schmidt thought it must have been like when Thiers and his hatchet-men led
by the notorious General Gallifit who wound up in a later government right next
to the bastard socialist traitor Alexander Millerand pulled the hammer down on
the Paris Commune. He had read plenty, plenty as a schoolboy, as a proud member
of the Socialist Youth, about those heroic events back in 1871 even though most
of them were anarchists or just independent radicals living off their reputations
from the past or ones which they had picked up on the dusty barricades so he
knew that if they, they the working people did not win, then the blood would
flow in the streets. And it had come to that after some bloody street fighting.
Worse those Whites (every counter-revolutionary force in the
world since the Bolshevik Revolution and the damn civil war there was now
called White in his and every militant socialist’s book, and rightly so since
they were all kindred of the Russian Whites) they had grabbed their leader,
Eugene Levine, and who knows what had happened to him (executed as it turned
out later-an outcome he maybe portended with his desperate and fatalistic “communists
are dead men on leave” saying which while true as long as the struggle had to
continue was unnerving to hear and to think through). Hell, Otto had just
barely gotten out of Munich himself and had been hiding in a small apartment of
a sympathizer in the outer suburbs of Munich and only now had a chance to think
about the events of the past several months since the damn Kaiser had abdicated,
the war had come to a crashing halt, and working people like him, honest
socialists trying to figure out a way to change this rotten old world, had
unbowed their heads for once and taken some action.
Otto knew, although he was not theoretician, not even really
a leader, not a big leader anyway, although he was respected among the youth
for his militancy and his willingness to stick his neck out, that they, the
revolutionaries, the real revolutionaries had made mistakes, made bad mistakes
about what to do, and with whom. Sure they were young, mostly, hot-headed, mad
as hell had never before, unlike the Russians they were trying to emulate, ever
had a part in a revolution. Their leaders, their Social-Democratic leaders
mostly, had told them to organize, organize, organize and vote, vote, vote, and
when they had done enough of both then they would just ease into the socialist
republic of their dreams, his dreams. Conveniently forgetting that as Marx himself
and all the big leaders after him had said that no ruling class in history has
ever thrown in the towel as long as they had one gun left to shoot workers and
peasants with. They had to be swept out- a bitter lesson to learn just then.
Then when the chance actually came those leaders, those
august bootblack black-hearted leaders, just filled the governmental seats and
left everybody else standing high and dry. Worse those bastards had done the
bosses’ work for them; they had suppressed everything, every armed attempt to
get some worker justice. Those damn leaders were just as bad as Thiers and his
French companions in suppressing the Commune. Otto burned with an inner rage
when he thought about what they, Ebert, that fat pig, and Noske, that goddam
hangman, had done, done with glee from what he had heard, to Rosa, Rosa
Luxemburg, the rose of the revolution, and courageous Karl Liebknecht, bright
shining Karl who had in the flames of war stood up and called down every kind
of damnation on the German war aims (and the other side too but he aimed at his
own fellow Germans first). And had paid the price. Poor Levine, poor beautiful
Levine with the soul of a poet probably was slated for that same fate, a martyr’s
fate.
Yes, Otto could see where the big mistakes lie, trusting
those parlor socialists gotten fat and lazy off of hard-earned workingmen’s
dues once they took over the bourgeois government. Somebody, he forgot who it
was and some of the details but a comrade who had been to Russia or had talked
to a Russian Bolshevik while he was in Germany, one night in Munich when it
looked like they would win, had said when the revolution was at its hottest then
the struggle against the reform socialists (in Russia the Mensheviks and Social
Revolutionaries and here the Social-Democrats) has to most merciless. They had
forgotten that, forgotten that to their regret.
He had heard that same night that in Moscow earlier in the spring the
Bolsheviks and their international allies had formed a new International, a
Communist International to fight against the Social –Democrats tooth and nail
for the allegiance of the working masses. He had had not had time to
investigate that statement more since all hell had broken out a week or so
after that, to sign up or anything but he knew this, knew it deep in his young
bones, that he wished the effort well. He also wished that they, and he, could
find some way, some righteous way to avenge those deaths of Luxemburg and
Liebknecht. And now probably Levine too.
No comments:
Post a Comment