Page:Karl Liebknecht - Militarism (1917).djvu/66

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34
MILITARISM

all the duties of civilized man towards the less developed peoples are flung aside; and yet nothing is really attained except an insane imperiling of the whole existence of our civilization in consequence of the warlike world complications that are conjured up. The working-class, too. welcome the immense economic developments of our days. But they also know that this economic development could be carried on peacefully without the mailed fist, without militarism and navalism, without the trident being in our hand and without the barbarities of our colonial system, if only sensibly managed communities were to carry it on according to international understandings and in conformity with the duties and interests of civilization. They knew that our world policy largely explains itself as an attempt to fight down and confuse forcibly and clumsily the social and political home problems confronting the ruling classes, in short, as an attempt at a policy of deceptions and misleadings such as Napoleon III. was a master of. They know that the enemies of the working-class love to make their pots boil over the