Polemic on General Line of International ... - From Marx to Mao

Many think that imperialist pacifism is an instrument ofpeace. That is absolutely wrong. Imperialist pacifism isan instrument for the preparation of war and for disguisingthis preparation by hypocritical talk of peace. Without thispacifism and its instrument, the League of Nations, preparationfor war in the conditions of today would be impossible.1In contrast to Lenin and Stalin, the revisionists of the SecondInternational, who were renegades from the workingclass, helped the imperialists to deceive the people and becametheir accomplices in unleashing the two World Wars.Before World War I, the revisionists represented by Bernsteinand Kautsky endeavoured by hypocritical talk aboutpeace to paralyse the revolutionary fighting will of the peopleand cover up the imperialist plans for a world war.As World War I was breaking out, the old revisionistsspeedily shed their peace masks, sided with their respectiveimperialist governments, supported the imperialist war forthe redivision of the world, voted for military appropriationsin parliament, and incited the working class of their owncountries to plunge into the war and slaughter their classbrothers in other countries under the hypocritical slogan of“defending the motherland”.When the imperialists needed an armistice in their own interests,the revisionists typified by Kautsky tried to poisonpeople’s minds and to oppose revolution by such glib talk as“nothing would make me happier than a conciliatory peacebased on the principle, ‘Live and let live’ ”. 2After World War I, the renegade Kautsky and his successorsbecame still more brazen trumpeters of the imperialists’peace frauds.1J. V. Stalin, “Results of the July Plenum of the C.C., C.P.S.U.(B.)”,Works, Eng. ed., FLPH, Moscow, 1954, Vol. XI, p. 209.2Karl Kautsky, National Problems, Russ. ed., Petrograd, 1918, p. 88.225