That is to say: Tho’ the capitalists should refuse to employ 5,000,000
men and virtually spit in their faces and order these willing-to-work
men out of the factories and mines to shiver and starve in rags, and
thus infinitely humiliate millions of working class wives and daughters
with the terrors of poverty—no matter, the rifle-practiced graduates of
high schools, colleges and universities will be “ready for use,” ready
to crush the unemployed if they loudly protest, ready to help the master
class thrust all the injustices of a _class_-labor system into the lives
of the working class, ready to thrust bayonets into the out-of-work
wage-slaves who cry aloud for work, for bread, for justice in the
industrial civil war of capitalism.
Bright and early every school day, in New York City, about 600,000
children are _compelled_ to salute the flag and recite some mocking lies
about the “glorious freedom they have” and the “bounteous blessings they
enjoy”—under the “friendly folds of the Stars and Stripes”—tho’ a whole
half million of the children _have no homes of their own and in a
hundred ways are stung with the lash of poverty_.
(=17=) Many additional instructors in military tactics have in recent
years been appointed to service in high schools, colleges and
universities. United States Army officers are now in ninety-three
universities, colleges and schools, drilling 22,910 students in
“military departments.”
Improved rifles, riot cartridges, and killing equipment are being
distributed among the State militia forces; local armories are being
improved and made attractive,—all made “ready for use” when needed to
pacify the out-of-work wage-earners. Recently in one State, Colorado,
military training was being systematically taught in the high schools of
six of the largest cities. The Secretary of War in 1909 reported
forty-four schoolboy rifle clubs. In the newspapers and magazines, in
the sermons and speeches and especially in the public school,—by all
such means—the size and perfection of rifles, cannon, battleships and
the like, are held up to the children for their admiration and as
evidences of our superiority and of our “splendid civilization.” The
children are taught to clap their hands for our readiness to engage in
some great international butchering contest. But the children are _not_
taught what arsenals, armories, cannon, rifles, soldiers, militia, riot
guns and riot cartridges—what all these things mean and what war means
for the _working_ class. Never!
(=18=) Let a philosopher speak to the mother and her children in plain
language:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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