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Actually, I don't have pretensions of speaking for anyone but myself. As artesian has eloquently demonstrated, the conditions in the US were dramatically different from those in industrialized Germany-in and outside of Prussia. Moreover, and this is where the moral reference, sanctimonious or not, comes in: no persons in Germany suffered the levels of oppression of African slaves in the US, certainly not as a function of not being part of a unified Germany under Prussia. In other words, the level of their national oppression and the compellingness of the national question on a human level was of an entirely different order. Again, the war was not against the other German states but against France which was used as a foil-the bogeyman or lightning rod-to motivate everyone to mobilize under one flag, something that surely would have happened anyway peacefully in short order as no one was in any position to credibly oppose it, particularly when coming from the most industrialized and militarily powerful country in Europe. I don't know what the "proletarian" and "bourgois" lines on what now is an obscure issue were. As my quote of Bakunin, in his day and the generation after his passing, as central a working class leader as Marx was, indicates, together with Marx's own views is that no clear consensus around support of Germany at all existed in what ended up being upstaged by the Paris Commune at which time much of former radical opinion in support of Prussia swung radically and swiflty the other way; Garibaldi being the most famous example. As to the bourgois line: if there is one it is a function of 20th Century historiography that emanated in the midst of the anti-German hysteria during World War I that glorified Britain and France, particularly the latter and demonized everything to do with "The Hun"; I don't know that the US capitalists had any particular view of it at the time in 1870 beyond who they could make money from. Finally it was exactly during this 1914-18 period that socialists, Wobblies and other anti-war activists were tagged by the bourgois media as being "pro-German" etc., a view that you still see in history books. Debs, in the 1918 speech that sent him to prison, went out of his way to debunk this, talking about how socialists opposed the militarism of all imperialist powers, how the German anti-war socialists opposed the Kaiser and how the socialist Mass legislator walked out when the Kaiser was brought in to address them in Boston circa 1902. German anti-war socialists really set the example in fact for their courageous stand against the militarism of their "own" country. We all know the story of Karl Leibknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Obviously the idea that the "Allies" of Tsarist Russia, imperial Britain and the France of the Dreyfus case represented some fundamental bulwark of liberty against the tyrannical menace of the "Central Powers" of Germany (a constitutional monarchy like Britain), Austria and the Ottomans was a thoroughgoing fraud that merited, along with its apostles like Wilson, ridicule and contempt. As Walter Millis in his 1935 work "Road to War, America 1914-17" lays out, this propaganda hack job was made easier by the British Navy's cutting of the transatlantic cables from Berlin and Vienna in 1914 creating a monopoly on war information on behalf of London and Paris. > What I say is that your vision of German history is the vision of the > USAmerican bourgeoisie, not that of the international proletariat. And I > say that you dress it up as "Leftist" because you speak in the name of > that proletariat. > > _ > Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu > Set your options at: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/tomcod3%40gmail.com > ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
