Page:Karl Liebknecht - Militarism (1917).djvu/195

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SOME CARDINAL SINS
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part in its tenacious and dashing manner in the intricate political guerilla warfare of every day; it has infinitely higher aspirations. It knows itself to be the most important and strongest pillar of throne and altar in all the great and greatest, severe and severest conflicts of capitalist reaction against the revolution, and it has thrown its weight into the scales in all the previous great revolutionary movements. Brief references will suffice. We have already referred to the frightful laurels earned by capitalist militarism in its battles with the Parisian proletariat in the month of July, 1830, in June, 1848, and in the month of May, 1871. We have also mentioned the provocation to riot, staged by "Napoleon the Little," on December 2, 1852. The butchering of Chartists at Newport and Birmingham in 1839, when 10 people were killed and 50 wounded, deserves our special interest because it happened in England—"Et tu, Brute!" For two years Russia has been under military law of varying degrees of severity and given up, for the protection of the Czar's barbaric rule of the knout and the cruel suppression of