Page:Karl Liebknecht - Militarism (1917).djvu/124

tal Captain of Köpenick, no holy coat of Trèves has ever been worshipped so religiously as his uniform. That classical satire whose enormous effectiveness consists in its having hunted to death militarism's own pedagogic principles, ought to hunt to death militarism amidst the scornful laughter of the world if—yes, if that same bourgeois society, which in regard to militarism now finds itself for the moment in the position of the sorcerer's apprentice who evoked the spirits but could not get rid of them, did not need militarism as badly as its daily bread and the air it breathes. The same old tragical conflict. Capitalism and its powerful major-domo, militarism, do not love each other at all, but rather fear and hate each other, for which they have many a reason; they look upon each other (for the major-domo has acquired sufficient independence) only as a necessary evil, for which again they have many a reason. The lesson of Köpenick which bourgeois society can not turn to its profit will therefore only remain a convincing argument for anti-militarist propaganda, for the Social Democracy which flourishes all the more the