War & Peace Quote by Karl Liebknecht

“Long live” is a coronation, but not for a king. Liebknecht anoints a cause and, in doing so, tries to manufacture momentum: a chant built to be repeated in streets, not shelved in pamphlets. The sentence races forward on stacked nouns - war, exploitation, slavery - a triptych of modern suffering that turns capitalism and militarism into a single machine. Calling it an “infernal chasm” isn’t just moral outrage; it’s tactical theology. If the world above is civilized, then the world below is hell, and neutrality becomes complicity.

The most revealing word is “liberation.” It implies the workers are already captive, and it also carries a promise: freedom is not reform granted from above but rescue seized from below. “Of all countries” is the dagger aimed at nationalist sentiment, especially potent coming from a German socialist who broke with wartime consensus. In Liebknecht’s era - the First World War, the collapse of empires, the radicalization of labor movements - internationalism wasn’t abstract idealism; it was an attempt to short-circuit the state’s favorite magic trick: convincing workers to die for borders drawn by elites.

There’s subtexted urgency here, too. The line reads like a slogan because it’s meant for precarious moments when argument is a luxury and alignment is everything. It compresses a worldview into a single breath: if war and exploitation share roots, then opposing one without the other is a sentimental error. For Liebknecht, the point isn’t peace alone; it’s a different order of life.