SOCIALIST TERMS OF PEACE 21 20 THE CLASS STRUGGLE war cannot be avoided. And Germany is not the only one that is preparing for it. The preparedness epidemic rages all over the world. The Socialists of most countries are affected by it. Conscription is made permanent in the United States, Great Britain, and the self governing dominions of the British Empire. The world lives in constant fear of the next war, which overshadows all its interests and dominates all its activities.
And the greater the fear, the more feverish the preparations, the surer, the sooner does the holocaust break loose.
We seem to be moving in a vicious circle, with no escape from the nightmare of the armed peace which preceded this war followed by the frightfulness of the present war, both raised to the highest degree to which fear, hatred, and human ingenuity, can raise them. Is there no solution to the problem; no escape from the terrible dilemma?
merely an armistice between the present and the next war.
Militaristic Germany and for reasons shown further below most Germany is militaristic openly speaks even now of the next war in which she will obtain all her objects. And this talk is not to be ignored: for there is good sense in it at least from the militaristic point of view. Given the militaristic logic and the militaristic psychology, the reasoning is, indeed, unanswerable; Germany has proven her superiority in arms to the whole world. She has braved the whole world and has come out victorious. For years the entire world has been arrayed against her, and for all these years she has managed to keep the scourge of war from her own landso while her armies carried death and destruction into those of her enemies, overrunning whole kingdoms, devastating whole provinces, and generally inflicting upon her enemies such punishment as they shall not forget to the end of time. During these years her armies have won victories without number, while her enemies paid her the tribute of shouting victory whenever they managed, by frightful sacrifices of men and treasure, to stay the forward march of one of her armies or win back some infinitesimal part of the ground which she had won from them.
And, last but not least, Germany has proven to the world that she can protect her friends and allies from harm, while those who have pinned their faith upon her adversaries are now bewailing their folly. The smaller nations have learned the value of her friendship, and the terrible consequences of her enmity.
And some of the big ones, too. The next war will, therefore, not see the whole world arrayed against her. And any combination less than the whole world she can easily beat. The next war must therefore bring ultimate victory, and establish her unquestioned predominance in the world. Preparations for the next war must therefore be begun at once. This will bring the day of ultimate victory so much nearer. It may also perhaps make the next war necessary; for if the world realizes the futility of resistance it may acknowledge our supremacy and bend to our will without a fight.
But the world does not give up without a fight. The next Not if we accept the view of the hide bound conservatives that wars are due to human nature the innate character of the human animal, who will fight just because of his animal spirits.
Nor if we accept the view of the pseudo Marxists who insist that there is bound to be war at least as long as capitalism prevails in the world, because trade competition must result in war. Nor yet if we accept that curious compound of pseudo science and downright nationalistic bigotry presented to the readers of The Class STRUGGLE in its last issue by Robert Rives LaMonte, and its variants, according to which the human animal as such has divested itself of its fighting instinct and is in fact as meek as a lamb outside of Germany, and particularly in Great Britain and these blessed United States of America; but that the German race or nation is inherently warlike, and that this warlike character of the Germans has brought about the present war and will bring some more unless forcibly prevented by the meeker and more peaceful nations.
If one of these views is accepted we seem to be in for it for an unlimited stretch of militarism unlimited both in time and magnitude and for quite a series of wars. Human nature is, as is well known, eternal and unchangeable at least 19