Belgium.” In France, everyone was writing, screaming, and singing to prove how gloriously France was behaving in defence of the heroic Belgian nation. Simultaneously in Austria and Germany it was being trumpeted that these two countries were repelling a Cossack invasion and were waging a purely defensive war.
From first to last, this was all nonsense; it was a fraud upon the workers. The fraud was necessary to enable the bourgeoisie to force their soldiers into battle. It was not the first time that the bourgeoisie had used such methods. We have previously seen that the trust magnates introduced high tariffs in order that, while plundering their fellow-countrymen, they could more readily conquer the foreign market. For them, therefore, the customs duties were a means of attack. But the bourgeoisie insisted that the duties were imposed in order to protect home industry. The same thing happened in the case of the war. The essence of the imperialist war which was to subject the world to the yoke of financial capital lay in this, that in it all were aggressors. To-day this is as clear as clear can be. The lackeys of tsardom declared that they were defending themselves. But when the November revolution opened the ministerial archives and when the secret treaties were published, documentary evidence was furnished that both the tsar and Kerensky, in concert with the British and the French, were carrying on the war for the sake of the spoils, that they wanted to seize Constantinople, to plunder Turkey and Persia, and to steal Galicia from Austria. These things are now as plain as that two and two make four.
The German imperialists were also in the end unmasked. Think of the Brest-Litovsk treaty; think of the plunderings in Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Finland. The German revolution has likewise led to many disclosures. We have learned from documentary evidence that Germany was ready to attack for the sake of loot, and that she had designed to seize vast quantities of foreign