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N.B. valuable admissions |
Volksstimme (Chemnitz) No. 156 (Supplement I), July 8, 1916. Article: “Betrayal of the Party Is Betrayal of the Nation.” |
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“For several months now, numerous anonymous leaflets have been making charges against the elected and well- tried leaders of the Party and trade unions in all manner of tones, including the use of the word ‘dog’. The charge laid against them is that in the great crisis of world his- tory, the visible climax of which, for the Party’s policy, was August 4, 1914, they sold and betrayed the proletariat. At first, this was dismissed with laughter. But the more the terrible gravity of the war made itself felt in terms of casualties and the increasing scarcity of food, and the less prospect there was of peace, owing to the enemy’s persistent efforts to realise his plans of annihilation, more and more people were prepared to believe this insulting charge.” |
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| “more and more” |
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The use of the word “dog”—an obvious allusion to a leaflet which said that the social-imperialists ought to be treated with a “dog-whip”! |
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“To what end people like Scheidemann, David and Landsberg are supposed to have betrayed the proletariat, for what reward, has not been vouchsafed to us”.... Not for posts in the Party: “refusal to vote for war credits involves no danger to life”.... And wherein lies the betrayal is still less clear, for it is claimed that it follows from their convictions, their appraisal of the facts.... “In that case, the charge of betrayal has no meaning whatever.”
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“But for the Party it is extremely danger- ous. One can doubt and dispute as to what the Party membership thinks. But there can be no doubt that today, too, at least three-quarters of those whom in the tran- quil time of peace the proletariat chose as leaders because of their services, still consider that voting for the war credits was correct and necessary. Hence, over 90 of the 110 Social-Democrat Reichstag depu- ties are supposed to have committed a betrayal on August 4, and over three- quarters of the leaders and Party function- aries are committing it even today. If this were true, the most sensible thing would be to let the Party commit suicide and to encoffin and inter it as quickly as possible. For if, after fifty years of organisational work, the proletariat has as its leaders men, practically all of whom are traitors, that would be overwhelming, irrefutable proof that the proletariat is politically quite incapable and will always be fooled. What other conclusion could there be? One could sack all the old leaders and elect entirely new ones, but there would be no guarantee that in the next big crisis the new leaders would not once again commit treachery”.... For many extreme radicals were for August 4 (Pfannkuch, Ebert, etc.).... “Consequently, what guar- antee could we give the workers that if these men are traitors, every one of their successors, too, would not finally end up as a traitor?” |
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| N.B. | ||||
| cf. Martov!! |
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| sic!! | ||||
Now the anonymous leaflets have gone to the length of calling for a strike in the munitions industry. That=high treason.
“It goes without saying that this idea of a mass strike will not have the slightest practical effect among the fanatically nationalist French or the haughty British”....
| cf. Martov in Investia, etc. |
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The persons responsible are clearly not Social-Democrats, but either madmen or Anglo-Russian stooges .... This behaviour is so “devoid of honour and patriotism” that we can never have anything in common with such people, and so forth. |
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