SoT4: Weitling and Marat: 'Peasant war' theology; "the next presidential election"

      This continues from Part 3 (Table of Contents in Part 1) in a series presenting C. F. W. Walther's article defending against the political ideology of the socialists and communists coming into America in the 1840s and 1850s. — In this segment, we meet again with Mr Weitling and his rhetoric, but we get some relief with Walther's footnotes.  Weitling invokes a major name, a scientist, associated with the French Revolution that I was not familiar with. Both men had technical and scientific skills. But what about their theology? — From Der Lutheraner, vol. 7 (1851), pp. 85 (Jan. 21) [EN]: 

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Signs of the Times.

[by C. F. W. Walther, quoting the Spectator newspaper]

So much for the first part of the aforementioned correspondence. Before we share the continuation of this, we insert a passage from an essay which, under the heading "The Next Revolution", appeared in the socialist monthly edited by Wilhelm Weitling in New York: "The Workers' Republic" (Die Republik Der Arbeiter). The passage is as follows:

"Only after the abolition of all inequalities of social relations, only after the introduction of communist socialism, is it possible for a people to administer its affairs in such an easy way. As long as there are poor and rich, superior and inferior, it is not possible … You want reform? Revolution? Anarchy? — You want everything else but the old conditions! Don't worry, all this will come, and it will be a revolution such as the earth has never seen before. It cannot fail to come if we write the memories of the suffering we have endured into our hearts with fiery anger, if we revive the old images of insane despair in us with fiery rage and think of the hired traitors with the boiling bile of all outraged righteous feelings, the deceivers who, with honeyed words in the hour of victory, were able to placate us back to forbearance and calm, and then, with biting scorn, to bind us anew to the old conditions, to whom every falsehood, every hypocrisy was welcome as a means to achieve what they wanted. It will come terribly, it will end terribly, if our memory remains true to itself and gives free rein to all the furies of revenge for the thousand years of injustice suffered for only a few weeks. This week will be called the time of the blood-red republic. With it comes the dictatorship. *) Only this can complete the work of the revolution and establish true democracy. Radical communist socialism, however, will make the journey around the world or perish in this attempt. It cannot make peace with the unequal. It will wage a long war in its wake, and a terrible bloodbath will accompany it. Without this, the tobacco-snuffing, smoking and chewing human race cannot be brought to such a powerful reform. What does it matter whether they let us die slowly of unhealthy labor, of sorrow, trouble, grief and worry, of want or in prisons, or whether they beat us to death. If we do not beat them to death, they must beat us to death and starve us to death, "for the earth is overflowing with the teeming, countless race of the breadless. "Unfortunately, many good and capable people will perish, many innocent people will be slain. These are the usual misunderstandings. But let them go ahead: we are still enough of us! Our heads are innumerable, like the grains of sand in the desert! **) We cannot lose. Holy Marat ***) pray for us! — — —",

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*) Dictatorship is the office of a man to whom, in a republic, completely unrestricted power has been given for a certain time to rule at will, so that, in times of great danger and confusion, a will against which his appeal has taken place is enforced, which, if many could rule with their different views, would not be carried out.

**) In July of last year [1850?], Mr. Weitling wrote: “We now have the prospect, if all goes well from now on, that we will form a compactly organized party of at least 100,000 men next autumn, united with the Americans (especially in Boston and Philadelphia). With such a party, however, we shall carry through the next presidential election according to our wishes, and a party which becomes so strong will carry through everything it considers good.”

***) This [Jean-Paul] Marat, whom Mr. Weitling invokes here as the patron saint of the socialists, was that monster, that bloodhound, who at the time of the French Revolution at the end of the last century publicly preached the robbery and plundering of the propertied classes and who, among other things, proposed that 200,000 heads should be dropped for the final radical realization of the Revolution.

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      The readers of these lines may be a little shocked by the violent words of these radicals, as I was. One can read the secular scholars' assessment of "Holy Marat" at the extensive article in Wikipedia on Jean-Paul Marat, and find that even the "objective" Wikipedia authors admit he may have been partially the cause of an infamous massacre. The violent words turned into actions. 

      Weitling's talk about the "next presidential election" brings to mind that America is facing a presidential election now, in less than 3 months. — In the next Part SoT5…