War & Peace Quote by Karl Liebknecht

A rallying cry disguised as a calendar reminder, Liebknecht turns May Day from a sanctioned “festival” into a moral trapdoor: if you celebrate while the trenches fill, you’re collaborating. The line is built to shame inertia and fuse identity into obligation. “Workers, comrades” establishes the traditional socialist audience, but the pointed pivot to “women of the people” widens the coalition and sharpens the stakes. He’s not flattering women as symbols; he’s recruiting them as a political force uniquely positioned to disrupt wartime consent through households, workplaces, and public grief.

The phrase “the second during the war” does heavy contextual work. By 1916, the novelty of mobilization propaganda has curdled into routine. Liebknecht is indicting that normalization: the fact that May Day is still happening, again, proves how quickly mass death can be folded into civic life. His insistence that it must not “pass without protest” frames silence as an action, not an absence.

“Imperialist Slaughter” is deliberately blunt, stripping the war of patriotic language and reassigning blame upward. It’s not tragedy; it’s policy. In Germany, that was incendiary. Liebknecht was one of the few Social Democrats to break party discipline and oppose war credits, and May Day was both a symbolic battleground and a surveillance magnet. The intent is less to persuade the state than to puncture the spell holding the public together: to make dissent feel like the only respectable way to mark the day.