Dr. Liebknecht's Indictment of Germany
A copy has been received of an open letter by Dr. Karl Liebknecht, the German Socialist, which proved an important factor in his imprisonment—which still continues. It bears date May 3, 1916, and was addressed to the Berlin District Court-Martial. The German authorities suppressed it, and made it a criminal offense for any one to be found in possession of it.
After stating his view of the war as a struggle of the masses against the classes throughout the world, Dr. Liebknecht wrote:
"The German Government is in its very social and political being an instrument for the exploitation and suppression of the laboring masses. It serves at home and abroad the interests of Junkerdom, capitalism, and militarism. It is the reckless representative of world political expansion, the strongest driver of competition in armaments, and therewith one of the weightiest exponents in the creation of the causes for the present war. It plotted this war in conjunction with the Austrian Government, and so burdened itself with the chief responsibility for its outbreak. It arranged this war while misleading the masses of the people and even the Reichstag.
"Compare, for instance, the keeping silent about the ultimatum to Belgium, the making up of the German White Book, the alteration of the Czar's telegram of July 29, 1914, &c. It seeks to maintain the war feeling in the nation by the most blameworthy means. It carries on the war by methods which, even regarded from the hitherto customary level, are monstrous. Such, for instance, are the invasion of Belgium and Luxemburg, poison gases, the Zeppelins, which are designed to destroy everything living, combatant or noncombatant, in a wide circle below them; the submarine trade war; the torpedoing of the Lusitania; the system of hostages and contributions, especially in the beginning, in Belgium; the systematic trapping of Ukrainian, Polish, Irish, Mohammedan, and other war prisoners in German prison camps for purposes of a traitorous war service and traitorous espionage in the interests of the Central Powers; the treaty of Under Secretary Zimmermann with Sir Roger Casement of December, 1914, as to the formation, equipment, and training of British soldiers from among the prisoners to form an Irish brigade in the German prison camps; the attempts to use civilian subjects of hostile States who were in Germany, by threatening them with forced internment, for war services of a treacherous character against their country; the dictum necessity knows no law, &c.
"The German Government has tremendously increased the want of political rights and the exploitation of the masses of the people by the conditions it imposed under a state of siege. It refuses all serious political and social reforms, while by phrases about the supposed equality of all parties, about the supposed reform of political and social treatment, about the supposed 'neuorientierung,' &c., it tries to maintain its hold on the masses of the people for the purposes of its imperialistic war policy. Because of its regard for the agragrians and the capitalists it has entirely failed in the economic provisioning of the population during the war, and it has prepared the road for making usury out of the people and their very needs. Today still it holds fast to its war objects of conquest, and therewith forms the chief hindrance to immediate peace negotiations on the ground of no annexations and no force of any kind. By the maintenance of the illegal state of siege, censorship, and so on, it smothers public knowledge of uncomfortable facts and criticism of its methods.
"The present war is not a war for the defense of the national inviolability or for the liberty of small nations. From the standpoint of the proletariat it signifies only the most extreme concentration and increase of the political suppression, their economic draining, and militaristic slaughter of the life of the working classes for capitalistic and absolutist advantage. To this there is only one answer of the laboring classes of all countries, namely, a sharpened international class fight against the capitalistic Governments and dominating classes of all countries, for the removal of every form of suppression and exploitation, and for ending the war by a peace in the Socialistic sense. As a Socialist I am on principle an opponent of this war, as of the existing military system. The fight against militarism is a life question for the working classes. The war demands that the anti-militarism struggle shall be carried on with redoubled energy."