Re: [Marxism] Revolution and Religious Fundamentalism

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Shane Mage wrote:
> Now where have I heard that before.  Oh yes, the "Schlageter Line"--in  
> the very early 1920's there was in Germany a nationalistic,  
> professedly socialist, movement waging an unremitting combat for a key  
> point in "the global struggle against imperialism," the struggle  
> against the Versailles Treaty.  One of the martyrs in that struggle  
> was a young workingclass man named Schlageter.  Notable Communists of  
> that time (Radek, Zinoviev)  responded by calling for political  
> alliance with the movement of the martyr Schlageter--a party known as  
> the NSDAP. A concept that Stalin, Thälmann, and Dimitrov disguisedly  
> put into practice some 10 years later.


http://www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/Pages////History/Radek.html
Leo Schlageter:  The Wanderer into the Void
Karl Radek

This is a speech made by Karl Radek at a plenum of the Executive 
Committee of the Communist International in June 1923, in a translation 
first published in the September 1923 issue of Labour Monthly. The 
"Schlageter speech", as it became known, was published by the German 
Communist Party and widely circulated.

In the aftermath of the French occupation of the Ruhr, right wing 
nationalists in Germany had made some headway among the middle classes 
and to an extent the working class. Leo Schlageter, who had been shot by 
French troops while engaging in sabotage, became a national hero for his 
part in the resistance to foreign occupation. In his speech, which was 
directed at those influenced by German nationalism, Radek sought to 
address the reasons that had drawn a man like Schlageter to the 
nationalist right, arguing that the real defenders of the interests of 
the German people were the Communists.

I CAN NEITHER supplement nor complete the comprehensive and deeply 
impressive report of our venerable leader, Comrade Zetkin, on 
International Fascism, that hammer meant to crush the head of the 
proletariat, but which will fall upon the petty bourgeois class, who are 
wielding it in the interests of large capital. I could not even follow 
it clearly, because there hovered before my eyes the corpse of the 
German Fascist, our class enemy, who was sentenced to death and shot by 
the hirelings of French imperialism, that powerful organisation of 
another section of our class enemy. Throughout the speech of Comrade 
Zetkin on the contradictions within Fascism, the name of Schlageter and 
his tragic fate was in my head. We ought to remember him here when we 
are defining our attitude towards Fascism. The story of this martyr of 
German nationalism should not be forgotten nor passed over with a mere 
phrase. It has much to tell us, and much to tell the German people.

We are not sentimental romanticists who forget friendship when its 
object is dead, nor are we diplomats who say: by the graveside say 
nothing but good, or remain silent. Schlageter, a courageous soldier of 
the counter-revolution, deserves to be sincerely honoured by us, the 
soldiers of the revolution. Freksa, who shared his views, published in 
1920 a novel in which he described the life of an officer who fell in 
the fight against Spartacus. Freska named his novel The Wanderer into 
the Void.

If those German Fascisti, who honestly thought to serve the German 
people, failed to understand the significance of Schlageter’s fate, 
Schlageter died in vain, and on his tombstone should read: “The Wanderer 
into the Void”.

Germany lay crushed. Only fools believed that the victorious capitalist 
Entente would treat the German people differently from the way the 
victorious German capitalists treated the Russian and Romanian people. 
Only fools or cowards, who feared to face the truth, could believe in 
the promises of Wilson, in the declarations that the Kaiser and not the 
German people would have to pay the price of defeat. In the East a 
people was at war. Starving, freezing, it fought against the Entente on 
fourteen fronts. That was Soviet Russia. One of these fronts consisted 
of German officers and German soldiers. Schlageter fought in Medem’s 
Volunteer Corps, which stormed Riga. We do not know whether the young 
officer understood the significance of his acts. But the then German 
Commissar, the Social Democrat Winnig, and General Von der Golz, the 
Commander of the Baltic troops, knew what they were doing. They sought 
to gain the friendship of the Entente by performing the work of 
hirelings against the Russian people. In order that the German 
bourgeoisie should not pay the victors the indemnities of war, they 
hired young German blood, which had been spared the bullets of the Great 
War, to fight against the Russian people. We do not know what Schlageter 
thought at this period. His leader, Medem, later admitted that he 
marched through the Baltic into the void. Did all the German 
nationalists understand that?

At the funeral of Schlageter in Munich, General Ludendorff spoke, the 
same Ludendorff who even today is offering himself to England and to 
France as the leader of a crusade against Russia. Schlageter was mourned 
by the Stinnes press. Herr Stinnes was the colleague in the Alpina 
Montana of Schneider-Creusot the armourer, the assassin of Schlageter. 
Against whom did the German people wish to fight: against the Entente 
capitalists or against the Russian people? With whom did they wish to 
ally themselves: with the Russian workers and peasants in order to throw 
off the yoke of Entente capital for the enslavement of the German and 
Russian peoples?

Schlageter is dead. He cannot supply the answer. His comrades in arms 
swore at his graveside to carry on his fight. They must supply the 
answer: against whom and on whose side?

Schlageter went from the Baltic to the Ruhr, not in the year 1923 but in 
the year 1920. Do you know what that meant? He took part in the attack 
of German capital upon the Ruhr workers; he fought in the ranks of the 
troops whose task it was to bring the miners of the Ruhr under the heel 
of the iron and coal kings. The troops of Waters, in whose ranks he 
fought, fired the same leaden bullets with which General Degoutte 
quelled the Ruhr workers. We have no reason to believe that it was from 
selfish motives that Schlageter helped to subdue the starving miners.

The way in which he risked his life speaks on his behalf, and proves 
that he was convinced he was serving the German people. But Schlageter 
thought he was best serving the people by helping to restore the mastery 
of the class which had hitherto led the German people, and had brought 
such terrible misfortune upon them. Schlageter regarded the working 
class as the mob that must be governed. And in this he shared the view 
of Count Reventlow, who calmly declared that no war against the Entente 
was possible until the internal enemy had been overcome. The internal 
enemy for Schlageter was the revolutionary working class.

Schlageter could see with his own eyes the results of this policy when 
he returned to the Ruhr in 1923 during the occupation. He could see that 
even if the workers were united against French imperialism, no single 
people could fight alone. He could see the profound mistrust of the 
workers towards the German government and the German bourgeoisie. He 
could see how greatly the cleavage in the nation hampered its defensive 
power. He could see more. Those who share his views complained of the 
passivity of the German people. How can a defeated working class be 
active? How can a working class be active which has been disarmed, and 
from whom it is demanded that they shall allow themselves to be 
exploited by profiteers and speculators? Or could the activity of the 
German working masses be replaced by the activity of the German bourgeoisie?

Schlageter read in the newspapers how the very people who pretended to 
be the patrons of the German nationalist movement sent securities abroad 
so that they might be enriched and the country impoverished. Schlageter 
certainly could have no hope in these parasites. He was spared reading 
in the press how the representative of the German bourgeoisie, Dr 
Lutterbuck, turned to his executioners with the request that they should 
permit the iron and steel kings to shoot down sons of Germany, the men 
who were carrying out the resistance in the Ruhr, with machine guns.

Now that the German resistance, through the rascally trick of Dr 
Lutterbuck, and still more through the economic policy of the possessing 
classes, has turned into a farce, we ask the honest, patriotic masses 
who are anxious to fight against the French imperialist invasion: how 
will you fight, on whose support will you rely? The struggle against 
Entente imperialism is a war, even though the guns are silent. There can 
be no war at the front when there is unrest in the rear. A minority can 
be kept under in the rear, but not a majority. The majority of the 
German people are the working men, who must fight against the poverty 
and want which the German bourgeoisie is bringing upon them. If the 
patriotic circles of Germany do not make up their own minds to make the 
cause of the majority of the nation their own, and so create a front 
against both the Entente and German capital, then the path of Schlageter 
was the path into the void, and Germany, in the face of foreign 
invasion, and the perpetual menace of the victors, will be transformed 
into a field of bloody internal conflict, and it will be easy for the 
enemy to defeat her and destroy her.

When, after Jena, Gneisenau and Scharnhorst asked themselves how the 
German people were to be raised from their defeat, they replied: only by 
making the peasants free from their former submission and slavery. Only 
the free German peasantry can lay the foundations for the emancipation 
of Germany. What the German peasantry meant for the fate of the German 
nation at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the German working 
class means at the beginning of the twentieth century. Only with it can 
Germany be freed from the fetters of slavery – not against it.

Schlageter’s comrades talked of war at his graveside. They swore to 
continue the fight. It had to be conducted against an enemy that was 
armed to the teeth, while Germany was unarmed and beaten. If the talk of 
war is not to remain an empty phrase, if it is not to consist of bombing 
columns that blow up bridges, but not the enemy; that derail trains, but 
cannot check the armoured trains of Entente capital, then a number of 
conditions must be fulfilled.

The German people must break with those who have not only led it into 
defeat, but who are perpetuating the defeat and the defencelessness of 
the German people by regarding the majority of the German people as the 
enemy. This demands a break with the peoples and parties whose faces act 
upon other peoples like a Medusa head, mobilising them against the 
German people. Only when the German cause becomes the cause of the 
German people, only when the German cause becomes the fight for the 
rights of the German people, will the German people win active friends. 
The powerful nation cannot endure without friends, all the more so a 
nation which is defeated and surrounded by enemies.

If Germany wants to be in the position to fight, it must create a united 
front of workers, and the brain workers must unite with the hand workers 
and form a solid phalanx. The condition of the brain workers cries out 
for this union. Only old prejudices stand in the way. United into a 
victorious working people, Germany will be able to draw upon great 
resources of resisting power which will be able to remove all obstacles. 
If the cause of the people is made the cause of the nation, then the 
cause of the nation will become the cause of the people. United into a 
fighting nation of workers, it will gain the assistance of other peoples 
who are also fighting for their existence. Whoever is not prepared to 
fight in this way is capable of deeds of desperation but not of a 
serious struggle.

That is what the German Communist Party and the Communist International 
have to say at Schlageter’s graveside. It has nothing to conceal, for 
only the complete truth can penetrate into the suffering, internally 
disintegrated masses of Germany. The German Communist Party must declare 
openly to the nationalist petty bourgeois masses: whoever is working in 
the service of the profiteers, the speculators, and the iron and coal 
magnates to enslave the German people and to drive them into desperate 
adventures will meet the resistance of the German Communist workers, who 
will oppose violence by violence. Whoever, from lack of comprehension, 
allies himself with the hirelings of capital we shall fight with every 
means in our power.

But we believe that the great majority of the nationalist-minded masses 
belong not to the camp of the capitalists but to the camp of the 
workers. We want to find, and we shall find, the path to these masses. 
We shall do all in our power to make men like Schlageter, who are 
prepared to go to their deaths for a common cause, not wanderers into 
the void, but wanderers into a better future for the whole of mankind; 
that they should not spill their hot, unselfish blood for the profit of 
the coal and iron barons, but in the cause of the great toiling German 
people, which is a member of the family of peoples fighting for their 
emancipation.

This truth the Communist Party will declare to the great masses of the 
German people, for it is not a party fighting for a crust of bread on 
behalf of the industrial workers, but a party of the struggling 
proletariat fighting for its emancipation, an emancipation that is 
identical with the emancipation of the whole people, of all who toil and 
suffer in Germany. Schlageter himself cannot now hear this declaration, 
but we are convinced that there are hundreds of Schlageters who will 
hear it and understand it.

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