Thus wrote the _Vorwärts_ after Germany had already declared war on Russia.
These words characterize the honest manly stand of the proletariat against a belligerent jingoism. The _Vorwärts_ clearly understood and cleverly stigmatized the base hypocrisy of the knout-loving ruling class of Germany, which suddenly became conscious of its mission to free Russia from Czarism. The _Vorwärts_ warned the German working class of the political extortion that the bourgeois press would practise on their revolutionary conscience. "Do not believe these friends of the knout," the _Vorwärts_ said to the German proletariat. "They are hungry for your souls, and hide their imperialistic designs behind liberal-sounding phrases. They are deceiving you--you, the cannon-fodder with souls that they need. If they succeed in winning you over, they will only be helping Czarism by dealing the Russian Revolution a fearful moral blow. And if, in spite of this, the Russian Revolution should raise its head, these very people will help Czarism to crush it."
That is the sense of what the _Vorwärts_ preached to the working class up to the 4th of August.
And exactly three weeks later the same _Vorwärts_ wrote:
"Liberation from Muscovitism (?), freedom and independence for Poland and Finland, free development for the great Russian people themselves, dissolution of the unnatural alliance between two cultural nations and Czaristic barbarism--these were the aims that inspired the German people and made them ready for any sacrifice,"
and inspired also the German Social Democracy and its chief organ.
What happened in those three weeks to cause the _Vorwärts_ to repudiate its original standpoint?
What happened? Nothing of importance. The German armies strangled neutral Belgium, burned down a number of Belgian towns, destroyed Louvain, the inhabitants of which had been so criminally audacious as to fire at the armed invaders when they themselves wore no helmets and waving feathers.³ In those three weeks the German armies carried death and destruction into French territory, and the troops of their ally, Austria-Hungary, pounded the love of the Hapsburg Monarchy into the Serbs on the Save and the Drina. These are the facts that apparently convinced the _Vorwärts_ that the Hohenzollerns were waging the war of liberation of the nations.