Showing posts with label pacifism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pacifism. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 3, 2016

War Against War!



This is the title of a photobook published by German anarchist pacifist Ernst Friedrich in 1924. During WW1 he was a teenager and joined a group of young anti-militaristic workers and was sentenced to prison after an act of sabotage in a military industry in 1917. When the war ended, he was released and continued to fight for peace and against militarism. In 1924 he had the idea of publishing a photobook  to show the atrocities and horrors of World War 1. The book includes a lot of pictures of  the consequences of the brutality and dehumanization caused by modern war. The short texts he wrote focused on explaining the lies and hypocrisy of the political and economic interests that promoted the war. His book, called in German Krieg dem Kriege! (War Against War!) was the first to include a big collection of pictures about the war and his intention was that the people discovered the real face of modern war and could have a more informed opinion about violence and militarism as "solutions" to problems between different territories. 










Here you have some of the texts he wrote on the book: 


And as we all, all human beings, equally feel joy and pain, let us fight unitedly against the common monstrous enemy, War. 

We shall unite in protesting against, in weeping over the accursed mass murders for which we all bear equal guilt. But let us also raise our eyes cheerfully to the red dawn of freedom and peace. 

This book is dedicated to all war profiteers and parasites, to all war provokers, and is consecrated also to the “kings”, generals, presidents and ministers of all lands. To the priests, however, who blessed the weapons in the name of God, this book is dedicated as a War bible! 

Show these pictures to all men who still can think!
He who then still believes in this mass butchery, let him be locked up in a madhouse, let us avoid him as we do the plague!

They lack the courage, these war-thinkers and war leaders, to go themselves into the battle, and themselves to die a sweet “heroic death”.

That is why they invented such beautiful phrases as “Fatherland” and “Field of Honour” and spoke of “defence” and uttered other lies.

The war against war signifies:
The war of the victimised against the profiteers!
The war of the deceived against the deceivers!
The war of the oppressed against the oppressors!
The war of the tortured against the torturers!
The war of the hungry against the well fed!

THE PREVENTION OF WAR
It is true that capital is the cause of every war.
But the guilt of war rests on our shoulders.
It is we proletarians that make the conduct of war possible; it is for us likewise to prevent wars!
Refuse to serve!
Bring up your children so that they may later refuse to render military and war service!
How very many lightly overlook the fact that in one’s own home in the family, war is being spontaneously prepared!
And here lies the beginning of all evils, here lies the beginning also of war!

The mother that sings soldier’s songs to the baby on her lap, prepares for war, yes, she prepares for war!
The father that makes gifts of toy soldiers to his child mobilises the child for the war idea!
The toy soldier is the Judas that you yourself bring into the home, is the betrayal of human life! Remember always this one thing: -
Ye parents that do not wish  that your sons should murder the dear sons of other parents, you should remember that the child whom you present with a helmet and sabre and gun, plays his tender soul to death out of his young body.
Those children, however, who are educated in love and solidarity, and are brought up to respect unconditionally the inviolable sanctity of human life, these children will most certainly be unfit for arms and war-service.


We, opponents of military service must finally destroy the halo and the humbug, and tear down the gaudy tinsel of the soldiery, and we must speak out what then still remains to be said:
a professional murderer paid by the state, who is trained in murder schools (called barracks) privileged by the state, in the carrying out of the most gruesome of crimes, the murder of human beings! That is what the children should be told!

I WILL NOT!
Stronger than all violence, than the sabre and the rifle, is our spirit, is our will!
Repeat these three words: “I will not!”
Give content to these words and all wars in future will be impossible.


War Against War! became a very famous book and Friedrich received a donation, which he used to buy an old building and create an Anti-War Museum in Berlin. The museum opened in 1926. 






In 1930 Friedrich was sent to jail again due to his propaganda campaigns against militarism. When he was released the folowing year, he managed to bring his archive abroad. In 1933, when the Nazis reached power in Germany, their SA troops destroyed the Anti-War Museum and he was sent to jail again.  The museum was transformed into a Nazi meeting place and later it became a torture chamber.  


At the end of 1933 he left Germany and migrated to Belgium, where he re-opened the 2nd Anti-War Museum. 

During World War 2 Friedrich joined the French Resistance against the Nazis. When the war ended, he used the compensation received from the German government to buy a piece of land in Paris, where he created the Île de la Paix, an international center to promote peace and understanding, with the objective of hosting groups of French and German students. After Friedrich's death this center was sold and destroyed. 

In 1982 a new Anti-War Museum was opened in Berlin to remember Friedrich's work. 



Here you have some more links, if you want to learn more about Ernst Friedrich and his work for peace: 




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Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Eugene Debs



Eugene Debs was an important organizer of the workers in the USA in the last decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century. He also ran for president in several elections, but he didn´t get many votes. This is part of his interesting story: 

He started working when he was 14 years old in a railway company. He worked as a locomotive fireman and joined the Broterhood of Locomotive Firemen, a mutual benefit society for the railway workers. He also went to a night school to learn more and became an important figure in the Broterhood. But he thought that broterhoods were only focused on their members and he decided to create a union in 1893: the American Railway Union, which was one of the first industrial unions created in the USA. 

In 1894 the workers of the Pullman Company (the one that made the train cars) decided to go on strike, because the company had reduced their salaries by 28%. Debs considered that the union was not strong enough to go on strike yet, but the strike extended and he finally decided to join the strikers. The USA government got a warrant from the Court to oblige the workers to come back to work, because thay had obstructed the distribution of U.S. mail, and sent the army to end with the strike. Debs was arrested and sent to prison for six months. 

The time he spent in prison was crucial for him. He received thousands of letters and he read books about socialism and became aware of the injustice of the capitalist system. When he went out from prison, more than 100,000 people received him in Chicago. 

After his experience in jail, Debs went on with the organization of workers and contributed to the foundation of the Social Democratic Party in the USA and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), an international union. Although he was a prominent and influencial figure, he rejected to be considered as a leader. He though that workers had to decide by themselves and not to follow others´ ideas. He said: "You must use your heads as well as your hands and get yourself out of your present condition". 

Debs ran for the presidence of the USA in 1904, 1908, 1912 and 1920, but he didn´t get much support of the workers. His best result was in 1912, when he got 6% of the votes (901,551 votes).



In June 1918 he made a speech in Canton, Ohio, against military conscription for World War 1. As many Socialists, he considered that war to be in the interest of capitalists. Here you have part of his speech, read by the actor Marc Ruffalo:
No wonder Sam Johnson declared that “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” He must have had this Wall Street gentry in mind, or at least their prototypes, for in every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the people.

Every solitary one of these aristocratic conspirators and would-be murderers claims to be an arch-patriot; every one of them insists that the war is being waged to make the world safe for democracy. What humbug! What rot! What false pretense! These autocrats, these tyrants, these red-handed robbers and murderers, the “patriots,” while the men who have the courage to stand face to face with them, speak the truth, and fight for their exploited victims—they are the disloyalists and traitors. If this be true, I want to take my place side by side with the traitors in this fight.

Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. In the Middle Ages when the feudal lords who inhabited the castles whose towers may still be seen along the Rhine concluded to enlarge their domains, to increase their power, their prestige and their wealth they declared war upon one another. But they themselves did not go to war any more than the modern feudal lords, the barons of Wall Street go to war. The feudal barons of the Middle Ages, the economic predecessors of the capitalists of our day, declared all wars. And their miserable serfs fought all the battles. The poor, ignorant serfs had been taught to revere their masters; to believe that when their masters declared war upon one another, it was their patriotic duty to fall upon one another and to cut one another’s throats for the profit and glory of the lords and barons who held them in contempt. And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose—especially their lives.

They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people.

And here let me emphasize the fact—and it cannot be repeated too often—that the working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace.

Yours not to reason why;
Yours but to do and die.

That is their motto and we object on the part of the awakening workers of this nation. 

If war is right, let it be declared by the people. You who have your lives to lose, you certainly above all others have the right to decide the momentous issue of war or peace.

This speech was considered to be anti-patriotic and Debs was prosecuted by treason and sentenced to 10 years and disenfranchised (deprived of the right to vote) for life. President Wilson refused to pardon him. In 1921 President Harding commuted his sentence, because Debs was ill, and he was released on the 25th December 1921. A crowd of 50,000 people received him at home. 


Eugene Debs died in 1926. His life was an example of fight for the ideas he believed in and consistency with the defense of his principles. 



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