Page:Rosa Luxemburg - The Crisis in the German Social-Democracy (The "Junius" Pamplhet) - 1918.pdf/88

 86 revolutionary struggles, are not firmly anchored in the lives of the people by the power of revolutionary tradition. They are the gift of a Bismarckian policy granted after a period of victorious counter-revolution that lasted over twenty years. German liberties did not ripen on the field of revolution, they are the product of diplomatic gambling by Prussian military monarchy, they are the cement with which this military monarchy has united the present German empire. Danger threatens the free development of German freedom not, as the German Reichstag group believe, from Russia, but in Germany itself. It lies in the peculiar counter-revolutionary origin of the German constitution, and looms dark in the reactionary powers that have controlled the German state since the empire was founded, conducting a silent but relentless war against these pitiful "German liberties." The Junkers of east of the Elbe, the business jingoes, the arch-reactionaries of the Center, the degraded "German liberals," the personal rulership, the sway of the sword, the Zabern policy, that triumphed all over Germany before the war broke out, these are the real enemies of culture and liberty, and the war, the state of siege and the attitude of the social democracy, are strengthening the powers of darkness all over the land. The Liberal, to be sure, can explain away this graveyard quiet in Germany with a characteristically liberal explanation; to him it is only a temporary sacrifice, for the duration of the war. But to a people that is politically ripe, a sacrifice of its rights and its public life, even temporarily, is as impossible as for a human being to give up, for a time, his right to breathe. A people that gives silent consent to military government in times of war thereby admits that political independence at any time is superfluous. The passive submission of the Social Democracy to the present state of siege and its vote for war credits without attaching the slightest condition thereto, its acceptance of a civil peace, has demoralized the masses, the only existing pillar of German