Debs on militarism as a mortal enemy to our class.

‘Soldiers, Slaves, and Hell’ by Eugene V. Debs from Labor Advocate (Providence). Vol. 2 No. 45. July 4, 1914.

Soldiers are recruited in all capitalist nations to keep down rebellious wage slaves.

The soldier himself is a slave hired by the ruling class to shoot other slaves when they rise in revolt against their masters.

The talk about patriotism in connection with these hired man-killers, is not only the rankest of false pretense, but an insult to the intelligence of even a slave.

The soldier under modern capitalism is not only the cheapest kind of a hireling and the cowardliest kind on a man-killer, but he is so detestably degenerate that for the miserable pittance of less than fifty cents a day he hires himself to the master class as a strike-breaker and a scab, binding himself to murder his own father and his own brother whenever and wherever they dare to strike against starvation and slavery.

It is these uniformed assassins who are now shooting unarmed workingmen and their homeless, hungry wives and children in Michigan and Colorado.

It is these strike breaking hirelings who stood guard over poor Mother Jones as if she were a wild beast, for sympathizing with the starving miners and having the courage to denounce the red-handed slave-drivers and their fawning lickspittles in public office for  having made a hell of Colorado in which tyranny and corruption hold riotous carnival and resistance to slavery is the crime of crimes.

To rob and plunder the toilers and producers the capitalists require the service of legalized murderers and that is what the soldiers are. They are hired to hold up the workers while the capitalists go through their pockets. If the victims object or try to break away, KILL THEM!

SOLDIERS AND SLAVERY AND HELL!

They are one and inseparable, now and forever.

The whole scheme of militarism is to bind the deluded workers to its false glories that they may be used to prop up a despotic government and a rotten civilization.

Militarism is the arch foe of Socialism, for the reason that Socialism is the arch foe of slavery.

Militarism is a survival of the black ages of savagery, superstition and ignorance and all the working hosts of the world should be aroused to grapple with and overthrow it.

Without the workers, who are at the same time its misguided supporters and its mutilated and bleeding victims, militarism falls to the earth and becomes a horrid nightmare of history.

PDF of full issue: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn92063933/