I covered the recent horrors of the Zionist burning civilians alive in the grounds of Al Aqsa Martyr’s Hospital in Deir Al Balah, the military situation in Syria, the ramping up of war rhetoric against Iran and finally I talked about Eugene Debs, a 1918 US presidential candidate who was imprisoned for ten years under the espionage act for his speech entitled - The Subject Class Always Fights the Battles.
This speech by perennial socialist presidential candidate Eugene V.Debs resulted in a ten-year prison sentence under the Espionage Act of 1917. The Supreme Court upheld the sentence in Debs v. U.S. (1919). Debs received a million votes in the 1920 presidential election even though he was still in prison. A campaign button featured Debs's face along with the words, FOR PRESIDENT: CONVICT NO. 9653. President Woodrow Wilson denied all appeals for Debs's release. It was his successor, , Warren Harding—who, unlike Wilson himself, is despised by historians—who finally released Debs, in 1921. "I want him to eat his Christmas dinner with his wife, " Harding said.
Let the capitalists do their own fighting and furnish their own corpses, and there will never be another war on the face of this earth.
Here is the excerpt that I presented:
Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. In the Middle Ages when the feudal lords who inhabited the castles whose towers may still be seen along the Rhine concluded to enlarge their domains, to increase their power, their prestige and their wealth they declared war upon one another. But they themselves did not go to war any more than the modern feudal lords, the barons of Wall Street go to war. The feudal barons of the Middle Ages, the economic predecessors of the capitalists of our day, declared all wars. And their miserable serfs fought all the battles. The poor, ignorant serfs had been taught to revere their masters; to believe that when their masters declared war upon one another, it was their patriotic duty to fall upon one another and to cut one another’s throats for the profit and glory of the lords and barons who held them in contempt. And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose—especially their lives.
They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people.
And here let me emphasize the fact—and it cannot be repeated too often—that the working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace.
Yours not to reason why;
Yours but to do and die.
That is their motto and we object on the part of the awakening workers of this nation.
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