Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/127

 A logical analysis of war (one which is not distorted by Plekhanov's shameless bourgeois slant) leads to the conclusion that war is simply "the continuation of politics by other means" (of a violent nature). This is the definition given by Clausewitz, one of the leading authorities on the history of wars, writing under the inspiration of the Hegelian theories.

And this was also the opinion of Marx and Engels who regarded war as the continuation of the politics of certain interested powers and of various classes within the various nations, at a certain time.

Plekhanov's primitive chauvinism stands exactly on the same theoretical plane as Kautsky's more subtle, opportunistic and watery chauvinism, when the latter approves the attitude of the Socialists of every country going over to the camp of "their" own capitalists in the following statement:

"It is everybody's right and duty to defend his country. True intemationlisminternationalism [sic] grants that right to the Socialists of every country, and among them to those who are at war with my country." {Neue Zeit, October 2, 1914, passim.)

This incredible statement is such a base betrayal of Socialism, that the only way to answer it would be to have a medal coined with, on one side, the portraits of William II and Nicholas II and on the other side those of Plekhanov and Kautsky. True internationalism would then justify the French workers in shooting the