Page:Karl Liebknecht - Militarism (1917).djvu/198

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166
MILITARISM

but also directed, on March 28, 1901, that famous appeal to his Alexandrian regiment. The military preparations and the exploits of General Wrangel by which, in 1848 and 1849, the German revolutionary movement, three-quarters betrayed and entirely left in the lurch by the bourgeoisie, was overwhelmed and basely robbed of its birth-right, were meant for the proletariat as such, as being then the only sound pillar of the "constitution." We further remind the reader of the Boyen-Lötzen chain affair of September, 1870, and the ravings of Bismarck and Puttkamer in which those gentlemen of the nineteenth century, at the time of the shameful anti-socialist law, anticipated and longed for an opportunity when the working people, driven to revolution, could be sabred, shot and shelled to pieces in the dashing, correct, sportsmanlike military fashion.[1] The military consig-


  1. Ludwigshafen in the Palatinate was literally occupied by troops on the Sunday preceding the Reichstag elections of 1887, and only the self-possession of the Social Democrats prevented the rifles from going off. Of interest in this connection is an utterance by the German Emperor which is entered under December 12, 1889, in Hohenlohe's reminiscences: "then (when the Socal Democrats had the majority in the Berlin city council) they would plunder the bourgeoisie; it was all