Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/166

 The same holds, mutatis mutandis, for the present militarization of the people. At present Imperialism and the bourgeoisie not only militarize the whole people, but youth also. To-morrow they may, for all we care, militarize the women. We answer: so much the better! Faster, always faster—and the faster the sooner armed revolt against Capitalism. How can Socialists become frightened or discouraged by the militarization of the youth, etc., with the example of the Paris Commune in their minds? That surely was not a theory of a dream, but reality. And it would undoubtedly breed despair if Socialists, in defiance of all economic and political reality, would doubt that the imperialistic epoch and imperialistic wars must lead with elementary force and inevitably toward a repetition of the reality of the Commune.

It was a bourgeois observer of the Commune who wrote in May, 1871, in an English newspaper: "If the French nation consisted wholly of women, what a frightful nation it would be."

The women and the youth, from thirteen years up, fought during the Commune side by side with the men: and it will not be otherwise in the coming battles to subdue the bourgeoisie. The proletarian women will not look on passively while the well-armed bourgeoisie orders the badly armed or unarmed proletariat to be shot down; they will seize arms as they did in 1871. And from the now unnerved or discouraged nations, or, more accurately, from the labor movement now disorganized by the opportunists more than by the governments, will arise, sooner or later, but beyond the shadow of a doubt, an international alliance of "frightful nations" of the revolutionary proletariat.

Militarism permeates the whole public life. Militarism becomes supreme. Imperialism means bitter struggle among the world powers to divide and re-divide the world—and this, therefore, militarizes even the small and neutral countries. What will the proletarian women do against this development? Condemn all war and all militarism, and demand disarmament? Never will the women of a revolutionary class accept such a contemptible task. On the contrary, they will urge their sons: "You will soon be grown up and they will give you a rifle. Take it, and qualify in all military knowledge—that is necessary for the workers, not in order to shoot at your comrades, as is done in this war of robbery and as you have been urged to do by the traitors of Socialism, but to fight the bourgeoisie of your own country to put an end to ex-