Eugene Debs On War

We are going into a critical election year. The working class of Chicago just flexed their muscles with a massive strike against their neoliberal Democratic mayor. And in Washington the impeachment hearings continue, prompting an aggressive backlash by the Republicans.

As civil war hashtags are trending on social media and Trump is backed into a corner, desperate to find a distraction, let’s remember the wise words of legendary American socialist Eugene Victor Debs at his Canton, Ohio speech against World War One. His birthday was November 5th. War, he said, is a racket, unless it’s the class war:

“That is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose — especially their lives.

“They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people.

“And here let me emphasize the fact — and it cannot be repeated too often — that the working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace.

Yours not to reason why;
Yours but to do and die.

That is their motto and we object on the part of the awakening workers of this nation.

“If war is right let it be declared by the people. You who have your lives to lose, you certainly above all others have the right to decide the momentous issue of war or peace.”