Page:Karl Liebknecht - Militarism (1917).djvu/67

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CAPITALISTIC MILITARISM
35

fires of narrow-minded jingoism; that the fear of war in 1887, unscrupulously engineered by Bismarck, did excellent service to the most dangerous forces of reaction; that according to a nice little plan, lately revealed,[1] and hatched by a number of highly placed personages, the Reichstag suffrage was to be filched from the German people in the excitement of jingoism, "after the return of a victorious army." They know that the advantages of the economic development which those policies attempt to exploit, especially all the advantages of our colonial policies, flow into the ample pockets of the exploiting class, of capitalism, the arch-enemy of the proletariat. They know that the wars the ruling classes engage in for their own purposes demand of the working-class the most terrible sacrifice of blood and treasure,[2] for which they are recompensed, after the work has been done, by miserable pensions, beggarly grants to war invalids, street organs and kicks.


  1. See Hamburger Nachrichten, November 3, 1906.
  2. The number of the victims of the wars between 1799 and 1904 (excluding the Russo-Japanese War) is estimated at about 15,000,000 men killed.