Page:Karl Liebknecht - Militarism (1917).djvu/146

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114
MILITARISM

home in the class-struggle, a function which is even developing a pronounced feeling in favor of the abolition of the existing militias.

Comparing the entire budget of the German Empire for 1906–07, which amounted to 2,397,324,000 marks, with that portion of it devoted to the army and navy, we notice that all the other items play only the part of small satellites to that mighty sum, that the entire fiscal system, the entire financial system group themselves round the military budget—"as the host of the stars are mustered round the sun," as the poet says.

Hence militarism dangerously impedes, and often makes impossible even such progress in civilization as in itself would advance the interest of the existing social order. Education, art and science, public sanitation, the communication system: all are treated in a niggardly fashion since there is nothing left for works of civilization after gluttonous Moloch has been fed. The ministerial declaration that the obligations of civilization[1]


  1. "Kulturaufgaben"—a very difficult word to translate correctly. The lately much derided German word Kultur does