War—What for?

Chapter Twelve: Suggestions—and What to Read 338

Illustrations:

Industrial Despotism, Craftily Called Freedom Frontispiece

Leading Citizens—“We Want Wars” 31

Leading Citizens—“We Declare Wars” 33

Citizens Who Are Led—“We Fight the Wars” 35

Hired Hands Facing p. 46

Worn-Out Boxing Gloves of the Ruling Class 51

The History of Ignorance and Meekness 53

The War Is the Class War 169

The Beneficiaries of Hell, Flirting with Heaven Facing p. 206

The Noble Rôle of Cossacks and Militiamen Facing p. 207

Preparing Boy-Scout Hired Hands Facing p. 220

Four Victims of Cheap Patriotism 241

In My Name! After Nineteen Hundred Years! 245

PREFACE.

Justice soothes.

Justice heals the wounds and sores in the social body.

Justice strikes down all robbery—illegal and legal.

Justice calms.

Injustice stings.

Injustice burns, irritates—kills sociability and creates conflict.

Injustice prevents brotherhood.

Injustice is unsocial—anti-social—and is thus a social sore.

Injustice, organized injustice, is the soul of all class-labor forms of society.

The purpose of all class-labor forms of society is ROBBERY.

The robbed resist—sometimes.

The robbers are ready for resistance—always.

In all class-labor forms of society the ruling class always have:

FIRST, AN =ARMED= GUARD—READY:

ready to serve as tusk and fist of the robber ruling class,

ready to suppress protesting chattel-slaves,

ready to suppress protesting serfs,

ready to suppress protesting wage-earners,

ready to defend the class-labor system,

ready to extend the class-labor system,

ready to defy and defeat and hold down and kick the robbed working class.

SECOND, AN =UNARMED= GUARD—composed of prideless purchasable human things, social chameleons, moral eunuchs, political flunkies—intellectual prostitutes—READY:

ready to make laws in the interest of the ruling class,

ready to interpret laws in the interest of the ruling class,

ready to execute laws in the interest of the ruling class,

ready to cunningly cajole and beguile the toil-cursed working class,

ready to cunningly teach meekness, humility and contentment—to the working class,

ready to cunningly teach servility and obedience—to the working class,

ready with grand words to cunningly dupe and chloroform—the working class,

ready to bellow about “Law and Order” when the unemployed call loudly for work or bread and when hungry strikers open their lips in self-defense,

ready “for Jesus’ sake” (and a salary) to glorify war and scream to the “God of Battles” (also the “God of Peace”) for victory; ready to baptize wholesale murder and flatter the blood-stained conquerors; ready to whine and mumble over the shell-torn corpses of the victims and hypocritically sniffle and mouth consolatory congratulations to the war-cursed widows and orphans—ready thus to mock their own ruined victims—for a price; ready to preach—to the workers—that they must fight like hell to “get a home in heaven.”

Many of my brothers—my betrayed younger brothers—are soldiers: they have been seduced to serve as Armed Guard. They have been deceived. And they are abused. Many of them are even driven insane. Insanity ranks third in the long list of disablements for which our betrayed brothers are dismissed from the service. (Report of the Department of War, 1908, p. 21.) A whole carload of insane soldiers were shipped through Pittsburgh—home from the Philippines—December 11, 1909.

These men are indeed betrayed and abused—and ashamed. They even destroy themselves to hide their shame and escape abuse. TWENTY-SIX TIMES AS MANY enlisted men committed suicide in 1908 as in 1907; AND THIRTY-NINE TIMES AS MANY of them committed suicide in 1909 as in 1907.

More and more the boys in the Army are disgusted with the whole vile business, but as the boys become increasingly sick of the service and would like to run away, the War Department more and more prepares to hold them like rats in a trap—just as the Secretary of War boasted in his Report for 1908 (p. 19) that he now finally had “an elaborate system ... almost perfected well calculated to secure swift and certain apprehension and punishment of deserters, and will ... have a marked effect in reducing the crime to a minimum.” Thus the boys are trapped and stung,—and some of them kill themselves.

The working class men inside and outside the Army are confused.

They do not understand.

But they will understand.

AND WHEN THEY DO UNDERSTAND, their class loyalty and class pride will astonish the world. They will stand erect in their vast class strength and defend—THEMSELVES. They will cease to coax and tease; they will make demands—unitedly. They will desert the armory; they will spike every cannon on earth; they will scorn the commander; they will never club or bayonet another striker; and in the legislatures of the world they will shear the fatted parasites from the political and industrial body of society.

But these things they will not do and can not do till they are roused—roused because they understand.

Therefore, I “rise to a point of order”: The most important thing on the program in the politics of the world today is to rouse the working class to realize itself, to be conscious of itself, to see itself and also see distinctly the age-long conspiracy of the ruling class; the first thing is to rouse the working class to unite socially and unite industrially and unite politically and seize all the powers of government in all the world—for self-defense; the supreme business of the hour is to rouse the working class for the crowning victory in the evolution of mankind—for the industrial freedom of the working class, for the peace and the calm born of justice, for the beauty and the glory of the brotherhood of man.

This book is written to help instruct and rouse the working class; and if in some small measure this unpretentious book carries light to the brains of my younger brothers on the big steel battleships, in the barren gloomy barracks, and to my abused and cheated brothers (and sisters) in the mills and mines and on the farms—and thus helps stir my class to a consciousness of their class and thus helps advance the demand for justice and the demand for a reconstructed, socialized society, my reward will seem abundant.

GEORGE R. KIRKPATRICK.

July 4, 1910.

PREFACE TO THE FIFTH EDITION:

A few amusingly oracular and pitifully (not to say pardonably) impotent voices have been raised—necessarily not very high, of course—against the style of this book. Deferring, for the present, any discussion of certain evident pedagogical exigencies, my reply is: In the ninth month from the date of first issue, the book is in its Fifth Edition, Thirtieth Thousand.

G. R. K.

May 24, 1911.

* * * * *

The pictures in this book add much to its interest and usefulness. Those on pages 31 and 33 were made by Mr. Ryan Walker, of New York; all the others were made by Mr. John Sloan, also of New York. The author is genuinely grateful for their kind cooperation.

Ready.

The Roman slave-owners of two thousand years ago with their armed slave-drivers; also the slave-owners of sixty years ago with their hireling slave-drivers, armed with blacksnake whips and pistols, on horseback in the cotton fields of the South—the ancient and the modern chattel slave-owners thus were ready—ready to murder the slave working class.

The lords of serfdom with armed hirelings housed near their castles were also ready—ready to murder the serf working class.

Recently, in 1907, when the number of the unemployed wage-earners in the United States numbered over three millions, it was promptly planned by the War Department serving the Caesars of industry that one machine-gun company with six rapid-fire guns of the Maxim or some similar type should be added to each of the thirty regiments of infantry and fifteen regiments of cavalry now constituting the Army—a total of two hundred and seventy of the most terrible murdering machines ever invented. With these guns, each firing eight hundred shots per minute, eight million six hundred and forty thousand cold steel nuggets of “law-and-order” and “unparalleled prosperity” could be handed out to the unemployed in just forty minutes,—to lovingly show the working class how, under the wage-system-the present class-labor system,—“the interests of the capitalist class and the interests of the working class are practically the same.”

Thus the capitalists of our day are also ready—ready to have wage-paid soldiers, militiamen and policemen murder the wage-earning working class.

“Although the conventions of popular government are preserved, capital is at least as absolute as under the Caesars. The aristocracy which wields this autocratic power is beyond attack, for it is defended by a wage-earning police, by the side of which the [Roman] legions were a toy—a police so formidable that, for the first time in history, revolt is hopeless and is not attempted. The only question which preoccupies the ruling class is whether it is cheaper to coerce or bribe.”—Brooks Adams: The Law of Civilization and Decay, p. 292.

An Insult from the Commander=in=Chief:

“The fact can not be disregarded nor explained away that for some reason or other the life of the soldier as at present constituted is not one to attract the best and most desirable class of enlisted men....

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