Page:Karl Liebknecht - Militarism (1917).djvu/88

 56 as the Russian toughs, the black bands. In the bourgeois capitalist state the conscript army, in its function as a weapon against the proletariat, is a crude and, at the same time, terrible and fantastic contradiction in itself; under the Czar's despotic régime the conscript army is a weapon which must turn itself more and more with crushing power against the despotism of Czarism itself, from which at the same time the conclusion must be drawn that the experience derived from the anti-militarist developments in Russian can be utilized only with great care in regard to the bourgeois capitalist states. In the bourgeois capitalist states, the attempts of the ruling classes to buy the people to fight against itself, and that even largely with money taken from the people for the purpose mentioned, are condemned to ultimate failure. In regard to Russia, we are witnessing already how desperate and wretched attempts of Czarism to bribe the revolution, as it were, are resulting in an early and pitiable fiasco amidst the miseries of the financial situation, in spite of all the endeavors of the unscrupulous international stock-exchange finan-