WHAT WE SAID (11)

Peace, so they said, had arrived,  but for the Socialist Party our class war continued unabated. What we advocate is a war on war to be waged on the battlefield of ideas—for the hearts and minds of the world's people. And once we unite there will be no force that will stop us taking the Earth into our common possession for it is only socialism which will allow humanity to co-exist in peace. Stop and think the next time you hear the government present their case for war, the next time you read a tabloid headline supporting the government line and praising “our boys”. Think of the peace which could come about and think of the screams which accompany the slaughter but which the media edits out of its reports, and for your own sake, think hard! What you must never forget – because then you have been finally brainwashed – is that there is nobody out there you need to kill and there are no enemies out there with a grievance against you. War is not about our interests, but those of the bosses who rob us so that they can be rich and powerful. Ponder that as the Masters of War ask for your support.

Peace (!)

Peace, we are told, has now been made. On 28th June, 1919, the representatives of the Allied powers and Germany signed a "Peace treaty", officially terminating the "Great War", which it had claimed would "end all war" and "make the world safe for democracy".

To achieve the great result millions of the working class lie in war graves, millions are maimed, crippled, or disfigured for life, millions more, with constitutions shattered, are wondering what the future holds for them.

But the "Great War" has ended. And almost immediately, in every country throughout the capitalist world, strikes and struggles between masters and workers blaze up. In the countries of the conquerors and the conquered alike, in neutral States and border zones, over-riding all the artificial divisions of territory and race, the antagonism between the working class and the master class gains greater prominence, with fiercer fights, than ever before. These fights, necessary for immediate purposes as many of them are, provide no solution for the fundamental problem facing the working class.

The "League of Nations", claimed by its supporters to be the greatest safeguard of future peace that has resulted from the war, is cynically exposed by the military treaties between England, France, and America, to be a combination of the stronger Powers to enforce methods and conditions suitable to their own interests upon the weaker nations...

...During the "Great War" the capitalist class on both sides broke down many of the old national and racial barriers that still existed between various sections of slaves under their control. Black chattel slaves fought alongside yellow contract workers. Irish Home Rulers stood by jingo Englishmen, French Syndicalists by Japanese Imperialists.
Clearer than ever before stands out the great fact that there is no hope for real peace in the world until these various sections of workers recognise the common fundamental character of their slavery and set to work to remove it, thus ending the enslavement of the human race by the establishment of Socialism.

AUGUST 1919