Politics & Power Quote by Karl Liebknecht

A fuse disguised as a syllogism: if the world is imperialist, then “self-defense” is propaganda, not policy. Karl Liebknecht isn’t offering a pacifist platitude here; he’s trying to blow up the moral alibi that made World War I sellable to ordinary people. In 1914, every major power claimed it was reluctantly protecting its borders, its honor, its civilians. Liebknecht, a German socialist and one of the few Reichstag deputies to vote against war credits, heard the same script in different accents and called it what it was: a shared imperial system where rival empires clash over markets, colonies, and prestige, then conscript workers to die for it.

The line works because it yanks “national self-defense” out of the comforting realm of civic virtue and drops it into a structural critique. “Milieu” matters: he’s not condemning a single government’s bad intentions, but a whole environment that distorts motives and language. In an imperial order, states are not neutral victims; they are actors already engaged in expansion, coercion, and economic competition. So even a war framed as defensive is, in practice, a bid to preserve an empire’s position - to defend not a people, but an arrangement of power.

The subtext is also disciplinary, aimed at his own country’s social democrats: stop treating war as an exception that might be justified; treat it as the system’s default tool. It’s a demand for class solidarity over national loyalty, delivered with the cold clarity of someone who knew dissent could cost him his freedom - and, eventually, his life.