"Consider well this fact: As long as the German people does not arise and use force directed by its own will, the assassination of the people will continue"
About this Quote
“Assassination of the people” is a deliberately jolting phrase: Liebknecht isn’t describing a single crime but a slow, organized killing carried out in daylight by institutions. Writing as a revolutionary socialist amid World War I and the collapse of the German Empire, he’s pointing to mass death and deprivation as policy outcomes - trench warfare, hunger, repression - not tragic accidents. The moral charge is the point: if the state is murdering its own, then passive endurance stops being a virtue and starts looking like complicity.
The line’s political craft is in its conditional trap. “As long as” makes suffering sound procedural, almost bureaucratic: the violence will continue not because the rulers are omnipotent, but because the ruled haven’t yet become actors. Liebknecht recasts “the German people” from a national-romantic slogan into an unrealized subject, one that must “arise” to earn the name. That’s a provocation aimed at a public trained to identify with the nation while being used up for it.
The insistence on “force directed by its own will” is the subtextual critique of both obedience and outsourced salvation. He’s not asking for sympathy, petitions, or reforms granted from above; he’s demanding self-authored power. In 1918-19, with councils forming and counterrevolution hardening, the sentence reads like an urgent warning: history will not rescue you. If you don’t seize agency, someone else will keep writing the script - with your bodies as punctuation.
The line’s political craft is in its conditional trap. “As long as” makes suffering sound procedural, almost bureaucratic: the violence will continue not because the rulers are omnipotent, but because the ruled haven’t yet become actors. Liebknecht recasts “the German people” from a national-romantic slogan into an unrealized subject, one that must “arise” to earn the name. That’s a provocation aimed at a public trained to identify with the nation while being used up for it.
The insistence on “force directed by its own will” is the subtextual critique of both obedience and outsourced salvation. He’s not asking for sympathy, petitions, or reforms granted from above; he’s demanding self-authored power. In 1918-19, with councils forming and counterrevolution hardening, the sentence reads like an urgent warning: history will not rescue you. If you don’t seize agency, someone else will keep writing the script - with your bodies as punctuation.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
|---|
More Quotes by Karl
Add to List
