Today marks 102 years since the start of the Spartacist Uprising, in which a group of revolutionaries led by Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht launched a general strike in Berlin — and were massacred by the Freikorps at the orders of SPD President Friedrich Ebert. 
Ebert unleashed some 3,000 soldiers from the Freikorps — a proto-fascist militia that incubated parts of the Nazi leadership — on the strikers. Using weaponry from World War I, the Freikorps murdered over a hundred striking workers.
Ten days later, the Freikorps captured, tortured, and murdered both Luxembourg and Liebknecht, dealing a deadly blow to the prospects of socialist revolution in Germany and paving the road towards Nazism. Ebert later dubbed himself “the bloodhound” for his actions.
Over a century later, with workers and societies the world over weakened by decades of assault, liberalism is once again lurching rightwards — forging unholy alliances with fascism to safeguard an unjust and exploitative social order that has put us on a path towards extinction.
Rosa Luxembourg understood the twin paths that lay ahead: “either the triumph of imperialism and the collapse of all civilization... – a great cemetery. Or the victory of socialism, that means the conscious active struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism.”
If they are to have meaning, the words “never again” must be directed not just at the individual monsters of war — sculpted to depoliticise our collective indignation. They must be aimed at the political alliances — forged in violent opposition to socialism — that created them.
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