14) PEOPLE'S VOICE 2014 ANTI-WAR CALENDAR

 

            With the centenary of the First World War (1914-1918) approaching, a propaganda bombardment of epic proportions will be launched by the Harper government. Claiming that "Canada was born at Vimy Ridge," the Tories and the pro-war media will spend millions to whip up support for expanding the Canadian military forces and backing the U.S. in new imperialist interventions across the planet.

 

            In reality, this brutal conflict slaughtered an estimated six million soldiers and four million civilians, as part of an imperialist struggle over resources and territories. Another six million people died prematurely as a result of hunger and disease. The so-called "war to end all wars" set the stage for an even deadlier global war just two decades later.

 

            Now on sale, the People's Voice 2014 Calendar is dedicated to the opponents of the "Great War", and to all struggles of the international working class for peace, equality and socialism. The calendar presents the voices of those on both sides of the front lines, who often risked jail or death for speaking against the war.

 

            One of the sharpest critics was revolutionary U.S. journalist John Reed, who wrote the following in April 1917, just as his country was entering the war:

 

            "Whose war is this? Not mine. I know that hundreds of thousands of American workingmen employed by our great financial `patriots' are not paid a living wage. I have seen poor men sent to jail for long terms without trial, and even without any charge. Peaceful strikers, and their wives and children, have been shot to death, burned to death, by private detectives and militiamen. The rich have steadily become richer, and the cost of living higher, and the workers proportionally poorer. These toilers don't want war ‑ not even civil war. But the speculators, the employers, the plutocracy ‑ they want it, just as they did in Germany and in England; and with lies and sophistries they will whip up our blood until we are savage ‑ and then we'll fight and die for them."

 

            A quarter-century before hostilities began, Frederick Engels accurately predicted: "The only war left for Prussia‑Germany to wage will be a world war, a world war, moreover of an extent the violence hitherto unimagined. Eight to ten million soldiers will be at each other's throats and in the process they will strip Europe barer than a swarm of locusts. The depredations of the Thirty Years' War compressed into three to four years and extended over the entire continent; famine, disease, the universal lapse into barbarism."

 

            One of the few politicians to act on the anti-war resolutions of the Socialist International was Karl Liebknecht, the only Reichstag member to vote against Germany's entry into the war: "This war was not started for the benefit of the German or of any other people. It is an Imperialist war, a war for capitalist domination of the world markets and for the political domination of the important countries in the interest of industrial and financial capitalism. Arising out of the armament race, it is a preventative war provoked by the German and Austrian war parties in the obscurity of semi‑absolutism and of secret diplomacy."

 

            Liebknecht was supported by his colleague Rosa Luxemburg: "This world war is a regression into barbarism.... The world war today is demonstrably not only murder on a grand scale; it is also suicide of the working classes of Europe. The soldiers of socialism, the proletarians of England, France, Germany, Russia, and Belgium have for months been killing one another at the behest of capital. They are driving the cold steel of murder into each other's hearts. Locked in the embrace of death, they tumble into a common grave." 

 

            British philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote these words after the outbreak of hostilities: "Against the vast majority of my countrymen... in the name of humanity and civilisation, I protest against our share in the destruction of Germany. A month ago Europe was a peaceful comity of nations: if an Englishman killed a German, he was hanged. Now, if an Englishman kills a German, or if a German kills an Englishman, he is a patriot who has deserved well of his country."

 

            The troops on both sides found nothing heroic about battle. Canadian Private R.A. Coldwell wrote this about the battle of Passchendaele: "There was not a sign of life of any sort. Not a tree, save for a few dead stumps which looked strange in the moonlight. Not a bird, not even a rat or a blade of grass. Nature was as dead as those Canadians whose bodies remained where they had fallen the previous autumn. Death was written large everywhere."

 

            German soldier Hans Otto Schetter gave a similar picture: "The whole earth is ploughed by the exploding shells and the holes are filled with water, and if you do not get killed by the shells you may drown in the craters. Broken wagons and dead horses are moved to the sides of the road, also many dead soldiers lie here. Wounded soldiers who died in the ambulance have been unloaded and their eyes stare at you. Sometimes an arm or leg is missing. Everybody is rushing, running, trying to escape almost certain death in this hail of enemy shells. Today I have seen the real face of war."

 

            Behind the propaganda about "the Kaiser's soldiers bayonetting Belgian babies" (a forerunner of the lies to justify the wars against Iraq), the truth is that the war was about profits. During the 1920s and '30s, retired U.S. Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler toured the continent, presenting his famous speech, "War is a racket." As Butler said, "It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.... It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."

 

            Clara Zetkin, who helped organize the 1915 International Women's Peace Conference, wrote:  "Who profits from this war? Only a tiny minority in each nation: The manufacturers of rifles and cannons, of armor‑plate and torpedo boats, the shipyard owners and the suppliers of the armed forces' needs. In the interests of their profits, they have fanned the hatred among the people, this contributing to the outbreak of the war. The workers have nothing to gain from this war, but they stand to lose everything that is dear to them."

 

            The most penetrating analysis of the war was written by Russian Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin: "This is a war firstly, to fortify the enslavement of the colonies  by means of a `fairer' distribution and subsequent more concerted exploitation of them; secondly, to fortify the oppression of other nations within the `great' powers; and thirdly, to fortify and prolong wage slavery, for the proletariat is split up and suppressed, while the capitalists gain, making fortunes out of the war, aggravating national prejudices and intensifying reaction, which has raised its head in all countries. even in the freest and most republican."

 

            The war did spur revolutionary sentiments in many countries. Canadian Communist leader Tim Buck later wrote: "The world imperialist war of 1914‑1918 signalized the beginning of the breakdown of capitalism and the transition to socialist society. The epoch of the transition to socialism was ushered in with a crash by the great Russian Revolution. The cheers of the workers storming the Winter Palace in far‑away Petrograd were echoed in the hearts of hundreds of thousands of Canadian workers."

 

            U.S. socialist leader Eugene V. Debs was jailed for his anti-war organizing. As he said, "They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people."

 

            Helen Keller, the famous blind socialist activist, urged Americans to "Strike against all ordinances and laws and institutions that continue the slaughter of peace and the butcheries of war. Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought. Strike against manufacturing shrapnel and gas bombs and all other tools of murder. Strike against preparedness that means death and misery. Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction. Be heroes in an army of construction."

 

            Over the decades, even some capitalist politicians have understood the cost of militarism. In a 1953 speech, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower said, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron."

 

            To order a copy of the People's Voice 2014 Anti-First World War Calendar, send $15 (includes postage and handling) to People's Voice, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1. Contact us at 604-255-2041 or pvoice@telus.net for information on lower-cost bulk orders. The Calendar is also on sale at PV Bureaus in Toronto, Montreal, and Winnipeg.

 

(The above article is from the November 1-15, 2013, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)