594 THE CLASS STRUGGLE IN THE TORRENT OF THE REVOLUTION 595 Let us believe in ourselves, let us be stubborn and unyielding in our battles. Everything is in our power, and in all creation there is no law but our reason and our will.
You who feel in the storm of events; you whose hearts are torn by evil doubts, whose minds are oppressed by black sorrow my greetings.
My greetings to you, too, who are innocently languishing in prison.
Not We Have Desecrated the World!
Three years of cruel senseless butchery; three years the blood of the best peoples of the world has been spilled, the best brain of the cultured races of Europe has been destroyed.
France, the leader of mankind, is bleeding to death, Italy. the most beautiful gift the Gods have given to this mournful earth, is facing annihilation; England who with calm pride shows to the world the wonders of labor, is putting forth its last desperate effort, the busy folk of Germania are being throttled in the iron clutches of war.
Belgium, Rumania, Servia and Poland are ruined, dreamy, spineless Russia, the land that has never lived, that has never had a chance to show the world its hidden strength, is economically and spiritually rent asunder.
For nineteen centuries Europe has preached humanity, in the churches it is now destroying with bombs, in books that its soldiers are using for fire wood. And in the twentieth century humanism is forgotten and scorned. What the unselfish work of science created, has been confiscated by shameless murderers and utilized for the destruction of mankind.
What are all the Thirty Years Wars and the Hundred Years Wars of the past compared with these fantastic three years of butchery? Where can we find a justification for this unexampled crime against the culture of our planet?
There can be no justification for this horrible self destruction. Whatever hypocrites may say of the great aims of the war, their lies cannot cover up the shameful truth: that this war was born of greed, the only goddess that is recognized and worshipped by these murderers who trade in the lives of humanity.
In every nation these scoundrels are branding those who believe in the ultimate victory of the ideal of world brotherhood as insane, as dangerous and heartless, as phantasts who know no love of fatherland.
They have forgotten that Christ, John of Damascus, Francis of Assisi, Leo Tolstoi, and all the other demigods and supermen that are the pride and worship of mankind were also such phantasts. They who are ready to destroy millions of lives for a few kilometers of foreign soil, have neither God nor Devil. To them the lives of their fellowmen are worth less than a stone, their love of fatherland is nothing more than an acquired mental habit. They demand to live as they have been accustomed to live, though the whole world be torn into fragments.
For three years they have been living up to their necks in the blood of millions of men that is being shed because they will it.
But when once the strength of the masses is spent, when once there flares up within them the determination to live, a purer, a more human life, and puts an end to this bloody delirium. then they who have destroyed will cry out: We are not to blame! Not we have devastated the world, not we have destroyed and plundered Europe.
But when that time comes, we hope that the voice of the people will be the voice of God, sounding more loudly than the most blatant lie. Let all those who believe in victory over shamelessness and madness unite their forces.
For after all, in the end reason must always conquer.
New Conditions New People What will the New Year bring. All that we are able to command from it.
To become capable men and women we must believe that