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 laborers in the free and democratic republic of America, these and a thousand other facts reveal the truth which the bourgeoisie has sought in vain to conceal, namely, that in the most democratic countries the Terror and the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie are really in control and come out openly into the light of day whenever it seems to exploiters that the power of capital is tottering.

The imperialistic war, 1914–1918, has once and for all time proven even to the most backward workers, that the true nature, of bourgeois democracy even in the most free republics is dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. For the sake of enriching German and English groups of millionaires, millions of human beings were murdered, and in the most free republics the military dictatorship of the bourgeoisie was established. This military dictatorship continues in the Entente nations even. after the defeat of Germany. The war, more than anything else, has served to open the eyes of the workers, to tear the false veil from bourgeois democracy, and to reveal to the people the whole abyss of war-time speculation and profiteering. In the name of freedom and equality the bourgeoisie has conducted this war; in the name of freedom and equality the purveyors of war-munitions have become incredibly rich. All the efforts of the Yellow International at Berne to conceal from the masses the now completely unmasked exploiting character of bourgeois freedom, of bourgeois equality, and of bourgeois democracy, are doomed to futility.

In the most highly developed capitalist country on the European continent, in Germany, the first months of complete republican freedom, brought by the overturn of imperialistic Germany, have shown German workers and the whole world the real class-content of the bourgeois-democratic republic. The murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg is an event of world-historical significance not only because the best leaders of the true proletariat Communist International came to tragic deaths, but also because the class-character of the first State in Europe—without exaggeration, the first State in the world—has defnitely revealed itself. If those under arrest, i. e., individually taken under the protection of the power of the State, can safely be murdered by officers and capitalists under a social-patriotic regime, it follows that the democratic republic in which such things can transpire