Page:Karl Liebknecht - Militarism (1917).djvu/87

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CAPITALISTIC MILITARISM
55

paratus, by the unfavorable arrangement of political districts, the insufficiently developed means of communication, and other things. By a cunningly devised system of elite forces, like the constabulary and, above all, the Cossacks, who have been positively changed into a special social class by means of good pay and other material rewards, large political privileges and the establishment of semi-socialist Cossack communities, and are thus artificially bound to the despotic régime, Czarism attempts to secure a sufficiently strong band of faithful retainers to fight down the unrest which has penetrated deeply into the ranks of the army. In addition to these "watch-dogs of Czarism" there are the Circassians[1] and other barbarian populations living in the empire of the knout who, for instance, were let loose upon the land like a pack of wolves during the counter-revolution in the Baltic Province, and all the other armed beneficiaries of Czarism whose name is legion, the police and their accomplices, as well


  1. Even Sheriff von Sievers-Roemershof writes of the "blood-thirsty Circassians" in the Dünazeitung of December 4, (17.) 1906.