Kultur in Cartoons: With accompanying notes by well-known English writersRaemaekers, Louis
History
Kultur in Cartoons: With accompanying notes by well-known English writers
Raemaekers, Louis
World War, 1914-1918 -- Caricatures and cartoons
Only from a vanquished Germany may the remaining vital conditions of
peace follow. With her defeat she must be called upon to scrap the fatal
poisons that led to her insanity, and take her daily food no more from
the hands of war lords, hireling professors, and publicists. She must be
cleansed, freed of her seven devils, and taught that the only sovereign
power human progress can henceforth recognize is the sovereignty of a
people’s will. For the fighting kingdoms know now at this bitter cost
one eternal truth: that not nations, but their rulers will wars and make
them.
If ideals of internationalism falter before this condition, and M.
Hervé’s peace will increase the enthusiasm of nationality, his
far-reaching view sees greater hopes beyond. For his third stipulation
allows no subject peoples. He would have Europe found a practical and
living system of justice upon these ruins--a system sprung of honor and
honesty, and based on international physical strength.
From such a system federation must sooner or later spring, and the peace
ideals of nationalist and internationalist alike grow from dreams into
realities.
The victory that can win such terms will in truth be “a victory of
industry, commerce, the arts, and humanity.”
EDEN PHILLPOTTS.
[Illustration]
_A German “Victory”_
Although this manifestation of the German spirit is new, and belongs to
this war only, yet the spirit itself is as old as Prussian power. That
spirit was evident in 1813, in the Napoleonic wars; it was evident in
the campaign of Sadowa, and again in the Franco-German war of 1870, when
the murder of women and children was proved to be the Prussian form of
retaliation for perfectly legitimate acts of war. This cartoon, which
first appeared after one of the earlier Zeppelin raids on England, gives
another result of the Prussian belief in terrorism as an aid to war; the
result is new, but the policy behind it is old.
Because that policy is old, and is a deep-rooted principle of
Prussianism, any talk of “peace terms” is futile, and the “honorable
peace” of which German deputies talk in their gatherings is an
impossibility. There can be no terms for the nation that does these
things, no bargaining with it, and the world that has wakened to the
real nature of the thing which has attacked civilization will take care
that the thing itself has no power to impose “terms” in the day when
peace returns.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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