Politics & Power Quote by Karl Liebknecht

“External peace” sounds like a lullaby, but Liebknecht loads it with a tripwire: peace is not a treaty between governments, it’s a weapon to be seized from them. Writing as a socialist politician in an era when Europe’s elites were rehearsing for total war, he reframes “peace among peoples” as something fundamentally antagonistic to the state’s usual business. The subtext is blunt: nationalism is the ruling class’s favorite anesthetic, and militarism is its most reliable enforcement mechanism. If workers can be persuaded that their true community is international, the old spell - sacrifice for flag, throne, and profit - weakens.

The phrase “class struggle” at the front is doing rhetorical discipline. It denies the comforting fantasy that peace can be achieved by goodwill alone. Liebknecht is insisting on a causal chain: dismantle the class order that benefits from war and you get “external peace”; leave that order intact and “peace” becomes a diplomatic costume for future slaughter.

“Sacred slogan” is the clever twist. Social democracy is cast as a secular faith, with its own creed meant to compete with the quasi-religion of nationhood. He borrows the moral seriousness usually reserved for patriotism and redirects it toward “international solidarity,” trying to make cosmopolitanism feel not airy, but obligatory.

The final promise - “liberates nations” - is the crucial reconciliation. Internationalism is often caricatured as erasing local self-determination; Liebknecht claims the opposite: nations are only truly free when they’re no longer mobilized as instruments of capital and empire. In that insistence sits the urgency of 1914’s shadow and the gamble that workers might refuse to kill each other on command.