Clara Zetkin was a German Marxist theorist, activist, and organizer of the first International Women's Day in 1911
The possessing classes and their servants soon forget their little domestic quarrel, whether militarism was to have the supreme command only to the benefit of the bourgeois order, or even over the bourgeois order itself. Democracy and militarism embraced each other and united for the common struggle against the Left, against Bolshevism, that means against the workers who long for liberty. Democracy gave to these poor devils futile and hollow negotiations and conceptions, whilst militarism lured into them the bullets and balls of its machine guns and minenwerfers. The revolutionary part of the workers had enough clearness of aim as to the way of historical revolution, to understand well the necessity and the object of the struggle, but they had not yet grown enough in number and unity to be able to win victory. Thanks to militarism, democracy remained triumphant over revolution. In those places where the workers had had been able to vanquish militarism by seizing arms, there rages now the white terror. After Thuringia, Leipzig„ Halle, etc the Rhine provinces and Westphalia are the victims of Noske’s guards. The “modest police action” to restore “order and peace,” to which the Government of Ebert and Muller were bound by oath, has proved to be the most ferocious, unscrupulous dictatorship of sabres, guns, shells, and martial law. The thousands of wounded, torn, slaughtered bodies of workers tell another tale; the heroic courage and self-denying devotion with which the exploited have fought, because they ventured to dream of freedom and the highest human development for their class.
Excerpt from The Call, April 29, 1920
