Dérive

  Kathe Kollwitz The Parents (1921-22) Rosa Luxemburg wrote The Junius Pamphlet while in prison in 1915. She had been arrested for speaking out against the war. The voting of war credits by the SPD and near unanimous support for the war by the other parties of the Second Internation (with the exception of Russia and the United States) was a devasting blow to the cause of the socialist revolution.  The pamphlet served as the guiding statement for the International Group, which later became the  Spartacus League  and, from 1919, the  Communist Party of Germany  (KPD). The following is a summary of important points from each chapter of the pamphlet.  Bourgeois society reveals its true colors in war: " Violated, dishonored, wading in blood, dripping filth – there stands bourgeois society. This is it [in reality]. Not all spic and span and moral, with pretense to culture, philosophy, ethics, order, peace, and the rule of law – but the ravening beast, the wi...

The boy hardly looked like he had handled civilian corpses just weeks earlier, if it weren’t for the side caps and the hall’s decorations no one would know. The war was over now and the 20 year olds had not aged at all but had ended an age. “I am going to dance tonight,” said the one with the white shoes. The voices of the black and brown shoed boys around him blended into a patchy incongruence that resembled their suits as they yelled across to each other. Once, the dance routines were nearly synchronized, the grand waltzes founded by the clockwork switching of partners. Today the band was playing faster and the partners were switching with less fidelity as the excitement of a different kind of abandonment seized the young people and their drab dress shoes were submerged into the wood floor. Above the floor and above the frenzy was a long way that the banners reached before originating from the ceiling. The old banners with their fathers’ stern faces had b...

  The Division of Korea Japan annexed Korea from Russia in 1910 following the Russo-Japanese War, where it then ruled for thirty-five years. Koreans were not willing colonial subjects, and resistance included a nonviolent protests in 1919 that ended in 7,000 Koreans deaths and 50,000 arrests. The Korean language and culture was attacked, while millions were forced into labor and thousands conscripted into the Japanese military. In 1943, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Chiang Kai-shek, met and agreed that Japan should lose all territories conquered by force, and determined that “in due course Korea shall become free and independent.” Yet, an independent nation of Korea still does not exist. Two years later, Harry Truman, the new champion of freedom and independence, authorized the murder of some 230,000 Japanese in the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On August 9, the “Fat Man” fell on Nagasaki and Russia invaded Korea. In response, a line was...