White Terror! White Terror!
As Luxemburg acknowledges, the brutality of the Ebert- Scheidemann regime is a "shameless provocation," and it may hand the revolution a defeat--but, she adds, without these "defeats" from "which we have drawn historical experience, knowledge, power, idealism," where would we be today. There are lessons to be learned in defeat!
We gather as survivors and students and continue the Struggle--even while the middle class cheer on the counterrevolution's reign of "white terror"!
But when the word "defeated" becomes a visible brand we sear onto our foreheads, and when we restore ourselves to sheephood, it is because our attention has been diverted, and we have begun to anticipated "Order reigns in Berlin," "Order reigns in the U.S," and we can no longer hear ourselves chanting --Down with Ebert and Scheidemann!'" Down with capitalists thieves and liars! because we are not chanting anything anymore.
"Order reigns in Berlin,' is the triumphant announcement of the bourgeois press, of Ebert and Noske, and of the officers of the "victorious troops,' who are being cheered by the petty-bourgeois mob in the streets, waving their handkerchiefs and shouting hurrahs. The glory and the honor of the German Army has been saved in the eyes of history ("Order Reigns in Berlin," The Reader).
Okay--order reigns! Peace is on the way!
"Revolutionary struggles are the direct opposite of parliamentary struggles," Luxemburg warns. Although "revolutions have brought us nothing but defeat till now"these unavoidable defeats are only heaping guarantee upon guarantee of the coming final triumph. On one condition, she writes,
the question arises, under which circumstances each respective defeat was suffered: whether it resulted from the forward-storming energy of the masses being dashed against the barrier of the lack of maturity of historical presuppositions, or, on the other hand, whether it resulted from the revolutionary action itself being paralyzed by incompleteness, vacillation, and inner frailties.
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