THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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It goes to show that a den of robbers cannot be reformed, it can only be cleaned out and radically destroyed. Together with cheap sympathy and philanthropy towards
Christian robbery with murder. Action alone makes what is feigned in sentimental books come true, revolutionary power alone makes room for educated, fully
educated kindness.
Bourgeois pacifism and peace
Even the noblest dream nursed by the bourgeois has to pay for its halfheartedness. It is the ancient dream of eternal peace, a genuine maternal utopian goal. But the
means of attaining it have always been of the most unsuitable kind, and the soil in which the matter was to prosper was an unchanged field of blood. A society which is
in itself geared for battle and intrinsically antagonistic cannot found any eternal peace. Despite all inclinations to it in the populace and occasionally even at the top, at
least as long as the bourgeois is earning smoothly. But the wish for peace, an unconditional one, is only natural to the peasant, worker, and petit bourgeois, as the born
and not unavailable candidates for the grave of the unknown soldier. The wish becomes all the more natural the more exactly it is associated with the insight into the
obligation to die for alien interests. Which only scantily masquerade as the cause of the fatherland, which meant here: the imperialist aims of a minority. The fight for free
time is then automatically associated with the fight against the most dangerous and most inhuman slave­driving, against that of organized murder. The ruling bourgeoisie,
however, only irregularly had epochs when it seemed to become alienated from war. Or rather, when it applied war solely to colonial soil, against Filippinos, Indian
mountain tribes, negroes from the Congo and the like. Whereas above all the Anglo­Saxon lands of capital, as the most well­worn capitalisms used to the technique of
tough deceitful negotiations or treaty­instruments, sought reconciliation with great powers for a long time, politics of the open door. Thus it is no accident that England,
the home of compromise, had apparently defeated the feudal pathos of arms by a civilian spirit or eliminated it from the constitution. There thus arose that deceitful and
temporary variety which can be called stock market pacifism: war in or with Europe appeared too risky, and even in the case of a victory too full of heavy losses in
business terms to be able to be seriously ventured upon. Thus, typically enough, Anglo­Saxon sociology, far beyond the Victorian Age, almost equated war and
feudality, war and