Page:Rosa Luxemburg - The Crisis in the German Social-Democracy (The "Junius" Pamplhet) - 1918.pdf/48

 46 the Turkish nation make its regeneration a hopeless undertaking. The Armenian, Curdian, Syrian, Arabian, Greek, and (up to the most recent times) the Albanian and Macedonian questions, the manifold economic and social problems that exist in the different parts of the realm, are a serious menace. The growth of a strong, a hopeful, capitalism in the neighboring Balkan states and the long years of destructive activity of international capital and international diplomacy stamp every attempt to hold together this rotting pile of timber as nothing but a reactionary undertaking. This has long been apparent, particularly to the German Social-Democracy. As early as 1896, at the time of the Cretan uprising, the German Party press was filled with long discussions on the Oriental problem, that led to a revision of the attitude taken by Marx at the time of the Crimean war and to the definite repudiation of the "integrity of Turkey" as a heritage of European reaction. Nowhere was the Young Turkish regime, its inner sterility and its counter-revolutionary character, so quickly and so thoroughly recognized as in the German Social-Democratic press." It was a real Prussian idea, this building of strategic railroads for rapid mobilization, this sending of capable military instructors to prop up the crumbling edifice of the Turkish State.

In 1912 the Young Turkish was forced to abdicate to the counter-revolution. Characteristically, the first act of "Turkish regeneration" in this war was a coup d'état, the annihilation of the constitution. In this respect too there was a formal return to the rule of Abdul Hamid.

The first Balkan war brought bankruptcy to Turkish militarism, in spite of German training. And the present war, into which Turkey was precipitated as Germany's "charge," will lead, with inevitable fatality, to the further or to the final liquidation of the Turkish Empire.

The position of German militarism—and its essence, the interests of the Deutsche Bank—has brought the German Empire in