We refuse to “Hurrah” over victories that break the heart and blind the world with tears.
We refuse the cheap rôle of Armed Guard—as the salaried assassins in the service of the plunder-bloated coward ruling class.
If the masters want blood let them cut their own throats.
CHAPTER ELEVEN.
A Short Lesson in the History of the Working Class.
(A very careful distinction should always be made between those who abuse and those who nobly use great offices and powers.)
“We have repeatedly pointed out that every social institution weaves a protecting integument of glossy idealization about itself like a colony of caterpillars in an apple-tree. For instance, wherever militarism rules, war is idealized by monuments and paintings, poetry and song. The stench of the hospitals and the maggots of the battlefield are passed in silence, and the imagination of the people is filled with waving plumes and the shout of charging columns.”—Professor Walter Rauschenbusch, Rochester Theological Seminary.[[332]]
Knowledge of the history of the working class, which includes the history of war, will cement the workers inseparably together—socially, industrially and politically, and will thus many times multiply their power for self-defense.
When the working class understand the history of the working class, a bronze monument erected in honor of a great general will look to the workers like a vote of thanks to the Superintendent of Hell, and an ornamental cannon in a public park will look like a viper on a banquet table spread for a feast of brothers.
In the public schools of the world the history of the working class is almost wholly neglected. No text-book gives the facts, and no teacher is permitted to tell the truth—clearly—about the martyrdom of labor since the dawn of class-form, “civilized” society. The union labor men and women of the world could with great advantage to the working class devote a few thousand dollars for the expense of a five-hundred-page book summarizing: The History of Labor—The Tragedy of Toil.
(At this point please reread first two pages of the preface of the present volume.)