Page:Rosa Luxemburg - The Crisis in the German Social-Democracy (The "Junius" Pamplhet) - 1918.pdf/67

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THE CRISIS
65

ment of Germany in this war" are at stake, inspite of he reiterations of the social-democratic press, but the immediate profits of the "Deutsche Bank" in Asiatic Turkey and the future profits of the "Mannesmann" and "Krupp" interests in Morocco, the existence and the reactionary character of Austria, "this heap of organized decay, that calls itself the Habsburg monarchy," as the "Vorwaerts" wrote on the 25th of July, 1914; Hungarian pigs and prunes, paragraph 14, the "Kultur" of Friedmann-Prohaska, the existence of Turkish rule in Asia Minor and of counter-revolution on the Balkan.

Our party press was filled with moral indignation over the fact that Germany's foes should drive black men and barbarians, Negroes, Sikhs and Maoris into the war. Yet these peoples play a role in this war that is approximately identical with that played by the socialist proletariat in the European states. If the Maoris of New Zealand were eager to risk their skulls for the English king, they showed only as much understanding of their own interests as the German Social-Democratic group that traded the existence, the freedom and the civilization of the German people for the existence of the Habsburg monarchy, for Turkey and for the vaults of the "Deutsche Bank."

One difference there is between the two. A generation ago, Maori negroes were still cannibals and not students of Marxian philosophy.