The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1925-01-10
Honor the Spartacists

The Communists of America are honoring on
this Sunday the memory of Karl Liebknecht and
of his comrade in life and death, Rosa Luxembourg
both lion-hearted leaders of the Spartacus Bund
which carried on the spearheads of its few but
valiant lances the star of proletarian revolution
thru the midnight of confusion and betrayal, into
which the German working class was plunged by
tratorous social-democrats at the end of the world
war
These traitors, who have fathomed the neither
most depths of political and ethical decadence and
counterrevolution, on January 15 1919, jointly
with monarchist officers who acted under their
orders, murdered in the most cowardly and CHASTITY
brutal fashion Liebknecht and Luxembourg, while
they were formally under arrest helpless, unarmed
and cut off from their comrades.
Karl Liebknecht! How your name rang the
whole world around in those days after August 4,
1914 Son of fighting sire, old Wilhelm Lieb
knecht, comrade and friend of Marx, even your
training of years, to abide by the unit rule in the
parliamentary bloc, and the fact that you stood
alone against the whole fraction of ITO deputies
of the socialdemocratic party in the reichstag of
the kaiser, could not keep you after the surprise
of the first vote on war credits, from crying out
above the tempest: "The workers have no Father
land, and no enemy but capitalismv
In the reichstag Karl Liebknecht launched
daring crusade against the imperialist war. His
speeches, protected by parliamentary immunity
rang out around the world, and in the armies of
France-Germany's Legendary foe-the conscripts
murmured his name in veneratiOn of that power
which they instinctively knew the only power
to save their class from world slaughter-the
power of the social revolution. And under many
spiked German helmet Liebknecht was a name
loved but forbidden.
When expelled for violating the decision of the
traitorous social-democratic party to support the
war; he answered. "Mightier ties of discipline bind
me-those of international solidarity"
When the kaiser conscripted him and sent him to
serve on the eastern front he addressed tremen-
dous crowd in Berlin on May Day, 1916, and open
ly called for armed revolt sentence of four years
followed his immediate arrest. (How light the
kaiser was beside the savage sentence given Ruthen-
berg by American democracy
But the wave Of revolution which he had un-
chained, released Liebknecht in October, 1918, and
he at once took the fighting position of the Com
munist guided minority who, recalling the memory
of the great gladiator that led the mutiny against
Rome, termed themselves Spartacists and began
an armed struggle against the class collaboration
lists of the socialdemocracy who turned the infant
Soviets into the paralyzing substitute Betriebs-
Ydete.
Liebknecht-and Luxemburg-was again ar
rested and lodged in military prison in the west
end of Berlin. On January 10, 1919, they were or
dered transferred by motor car under guard, to
the Moabit prison, but the road they were
brutally murdered by their guards in a lonely
spot in the Tiergarten. The socialists have seen
that the assassins escaped with light term in jail
Liebknecht is dead, but in the coming German revo
luton the workers will fight for power with his
name upon their lips