The plain common working man and the haughty and cultivated minister—both of them—bow their heads and submit their necks to the cruel yoke, the yoke of capitalism.
Capitalism, internationally, is—for capitalists—a struggle for a strangle hold among jealously competing, unneighborly neighbors, a struggle for business.
Capitalism thus becomes a stupid snarl of “foreigners”—to each nation all other nations are “foreigners.”
And thus the world is petty, unsocial, “foreign,”—a war always possible and threatening between “foreigners,”—the unfortunate ministers, most of them, not to the contrary.
BUT, READER, THERE ARE NO “FOREIGNERS”—FOR ME AND MY INTERNATIONAL FRIEND CHRIST AND MY INTERNATIONAL COMRADES.
Then why should a group of Christless, plutocratic political crooks and flunky-champagne-guzzlers in Paris or Tokio, in Berlin or London, in Madrid or Washington—why should any such group of political bunco-steerers by a pompous declaration of assassination officially decide for you and me and our brothers of some so-called “foreign nation”—that we working class brothers are “enemies” and that we must lay down the instruments of production and take up the weapons of destruction and butcher ourselves by the tens of thousands?
Why should we permit a band of cheap “statesmen” to order us to tear one another’s throats like dogs?
The thing is ridiculous—utterly ridiculous, is it not?
And an equally important question is:—Why should we working class brothers of all the world ever permit any ecclesiastical savages to fan the flames of international hatred in our souls by means of pious prayers and sermons in favor of war?
Let us refuse to murder. The blood-spilling business is too small for brothers, too savage for socialized men, no matter what their religious faith may be.
Perhaps, brother, you and I do not agree on Christ. But we can be good friends any way, can’t we?
Now, I will tell you frankly, the Peaceful Christ seems to me to be so much grander than a war-preaching preacher, so much nobler than a flunky “fighting parson,” that he gains my sincere admiration. Such a great brave brother he was.
Christ was the most defiant preacher that ever walked the earth or flashed as a character conception in the human brain.