Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/219



There have never been so many pacifists as at this moment, when people are slaying each other on all the g^eat highways of our planet. Each epoch has not only its own technology and political forms, but also its own style of hypocrisy. Time was when the nations destroyed each other for the glory of Christ's teachings and the love of one's neighbor. Now Christ is invoked only by backward governments. The advanced nations cut each other's throats under the banners of pacifism … a league of nations and a durable peace. Kerensky and Tseretelli shout for an offensive, in the name of an "early conclusion of peace."

There is no Juvenal for this epoch, to depict it with biting satire. Yet we are forced to admit that even the most powerful satire would appear weak and insignificant in the presence of blatant baseness and cringing stupidity, two of the elements which have been released by the present war.

Pacifism springs from the same historical roots as democracy. The bourgeoisie made a gigantic effort to rationalize human relations, that is, to supplant a blind and stupid tradition by a system of critical reason. The guild restrictions on industry, class privileges, monarchic autocracy—these were the traditional heritage of the middle ages. Bourgeois democracy demanded legal equality, free competition and parliamentary methods in the conduct of public affairs. Naturally, its rationalistic criteria were applied also in the field of international relations. Here it hit upon war, which appeared to it as a method of solving questions that was a complete denial of all "reason." So bourgeois democracy began to point out to the nations — with the tongues of poesy, moral philosophy and certified accounting—that they would profit more by the establishment of a condition of eternal peace. Such were the lexical roots of bourgeois pacifism.

From the time of its birth pacifism was afflicted, however, with