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theory of frightfulness which a German officer formulated when he said that he would kill ten thousand children in the enemy country if it would save a single soldier.
Militarism is the real evil which people have in mind, when they talk of the evils of war. Militarism is the mathematics of aggressiveness, the fighting spirit turned into a bureaucratic system—all state activities guided by military considerations, the officer becoming the standard of the citizen and of the world in general. Prussian militarism is universally recognised as the pattern and source of this social evil; the Prussian militarists themselves point out correctly that all life in Germany is militarized. Modern German theologians have made a corporal of Jesus and a drill-master of God.
This militarism is not necessary, as the war itself demonstrates. Not only France, but even England, stand successfully against Prussian militarism, although England was not at all militaristic; the armies of the Allies fight no less bravely than the Germans; and if we consider that Germany alone was prepared for the war, that German soldiers are military specialists, the achievements of the Allied armies are relatively higher than the German successes. Most assuredly this war has already sounded the deathknell for Prussian militarism—for militarism does not decide the value of men and nations.
A militia will be a sufficient system of defence for democracy, as is admitted even by anti-militarist socialists (Engels).
24. Who is Responsible for the War?
54a. From the democratic viewpoint the question who caused the war, who attacked and who only defended himself, the question, who is guilty, is of extreme importance. Democracy rests on morality, and for that very reason the question of guilt is so important.
We do not agree with those who dissociate politics, and consequently war, from morals, who exalt political acts, especially of the masses, as something great, something above the small, private happenings in ordinary life, which are subject to the usual moral standards. My experience teaches me, that men who do not obey the rules of morality in politics do not follow them in private life and vice versâ.
For that reason also we cannot adopt the attitude of those Marxists who even in this war appeal to historical (economic) materialism; “Comrades” Renner and others insist that war must be judged from the economic and not from the moral standpoint. Let us grant that: but then the economic standpoint is not valid for the Germans only, but also for the Czechs and other oppressed nations. Herr Renner, of course, thinks only of the Germans and their superior rights, and therefore through his materialism he has become a full-blooded Pangermanist; he thinks that “war selection,” the force creating the firmest organisation, will become the judge, the administrator and the law-giver of nations, Moltke completely absorbed Marx, naturally; materialism, whether we call it historical or any other kind, necessarily reaches the conclusion that might is right. Herr Renner even now claims to adhere to the Internacionale, but it is the Internacionale of the German Marxists, as Liebknecht’s minority clearly proves, having contracted its scope to meet the exigencies of German militarism and Pangermanism. Herr Renner defends Mittel-europa, and for that very reason he wants to reform Austria-Hungary: he wants to throw a bone to the dissatisfied nations so that they would so much the more effectively serve Berlin as its Eastern vanguard.
Russian Socialists speak often à la Dostojevsky of the guilt of all that fight. I might admit that all are guilty; but that does not dispose of the moral duty to investigate, who is the more guilty and who the less. It surely deserves some thought, why all the states before the war looked with connivance on Prussianism and its great strength—without that tacitus consensus the Pangerman march to the East would have been impossible.
