This famous dictum belongs to one of the most profound writers on military questions, Clausewitz{218}. Marxists have always rightly considered this proposition the theoretical foundation of their views on the significance of any given war. Marx and Engels always examined various wars precisely from this point of view.

Apply this view to the present war. You will see that over the course of decades, almost half a century, the governments and ruling classes of both England and France, Germany and Italy, Austria and Russia have pursued a policy of plundering colonies, oppressing foreign nations, suppressing the workers' movement. It is precisely such a policy, and only such a policy, that continues in the present war. Specifically, both in Austria and in Russia the policy of both peacetime and wartime consists in the enslavement of nations, not in their liberation. On the contrary, in China, Persia, India and other dependent countries we have witnessed over the last decades a policy of awakening to national life tens and hundreds of millions of people, their liberation from the oppression of reactionary "great" powers. War on such historical ground can even now be bourgeois-progressive, nationally-liberatory.

It is sufficient to look at the present war from the point of view of the continuation of the policy of the "great" powers and the dominant classes within them in order to immediately see the glaring ahistoricity, mendacity and hypocrisy of that opinion which seeks to justify the idea of "defence of the homeland" in this given war.