This Memorial Day, we should rededicate ourselves to fighting the horrors of war. So here’s a 1916 Eugene Debs piece, never before republished, about why internationalism is at the heart of socialist politics.
By Eugene Debs and Shawn Gude, Jacobin
In 1916, with World War I raging, socialist leader Eugene V. Debs wrote a short piece condemning the nationalism that had thrown soldiers into trench warfare and machine-gun slaughter.
Debs’s article appeared in the January 1916 issue of the National Rip-Saw, a mass-circulation socialist newspaper based in St Louis. The United States still hadn’t entered the war, and Debs wanted to keep it that way. He reminded his US comrades of their duty to oppose the conflict — the fetid fruit of the ruling class — and excoriated the many European socialists who had fallen in line behind their nations’ leaders.

“True socialists,” Debs wrote, “cannot at the same time be nationalists, militarists and capitalist ‘patriots.’ . . . The self-called socialists who are nationalists first and who set the ‘fatherland’ of their masters above the whole earth and above all the workers of the world are not socialists at all but either mild and harmless capitalist reformers and stool pigeons or traitors to the cause.”
Strong words. But this Memorial Day, it’s a reminder that the best way to honor those killed in war is to fight the ruling-class forces that repeatedly send soldiers off to die.
Recent Posts
NATO Admits That Ukraine War Is A War of NATO Expansion
September 25, 2023
Take Action Now In testimony to the European Union Parliament, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg made clear that it was America’s relentless…
‘The World Is At Stake’: Defuse Nuclear War Kicks Off Nationwide Week Of Action
September 25, 2023
Take Action Now “The need for action to curtail the possibility of nuclear conflict could not be more urgent,” said the campaign’s…
A Judge Has Thrown Out Charges Against Line 3 Protestors
September 25, 2023
Take Action Now A Minnesota judge ruled that criminalizing Enbridge Line 3 water protectors would be a crime. by Alleen Brown, Exposed by CMD……
Is The U.S. Violating International Law With Its Claims In The Pacific?
September 25, 2023
Take Action Now Officials argue that Washington has the authority to block enemy navies from an area ‘nearly as large as the continental United…