Page:Karl Liebknecht - Militarism (1917).djvu/100

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
68
MILITARISM

tematically. The daily military school lesson begins in which it is sought to drum into the soldier a childish, distorted view of the world, properly trimmed up for the purposes of militarism. This instruction, too, which is mostly given by entirely incapable and uneducated people, has no effect whatever on the more intelligent industrial proletarians, who are quite often much more intelligent than their instructors. It is an experiment on an unsuitable material, an arrow rebounding on him that shot it. That has only lately been proved, in a controversy with General Liebert about the anti-socialist instruction of soldiers, by The Post and Max Lorenz, with the acumen generated by the capitalist competition for profits.

To produce the necessary pliability and tractableness of will pipe-clay service, the discipline of the barracks, the canonization of the officer's[1] and


  1. These are indeed strange saints! The reader may remember the Bilse case of the month of November, 1903, the many "small garrisons" after the Forbach model, the gambling and champagne decrees, the officers' dueling practices (that fine fleur of the officers' honor), the stabbings of Brüsewitz and the shooting propensities of Hüssener, the Ruhstrat affair and that of the "harmless," the novels of Bilse and Beyerlein depicting the life of the officers with photographic truth,