V. I. Lenin

Source: ru:LS/v30 (Leninskiy Sbornik XXX, p.201). English: machine translation.
Translated: machine translation (DeepSeek deepseek-v4-pro) from the Russian; AI-translated.

NB 11 From the "Neue Rheinische Zeitung". "National Revolutions" Cologne, June 17. ... "A nation which has allowed itself to be used as a tool of oppression against all other nations throughout its entire history—such a nation must first prove its real revolutionary character by its deeds" (109). "Revolutionary Germany had to renounce its entire past, especially in relation to the neighbouring peoples. Together with its own freedom, it had to proclaim the freedom of those peoples it had hitherto oppressed" (109). Cologne, July 2... ... "Now that the Germans are shaking off their own yoke, their entire policy towards other nations must also change, otherwise we shall strangle our own young, as yet barely hoped-for freedom in the very chains with which we fetter foreign peoples. Germany will become free to the same extent that it sets the neighbouring peoples free" (113). Cologne, July 11... ... "At the very moment when the Germans are struggling with their governments for internal freedom, they are made, under the command of these same governments, to undertake a crusade against the freedom of Poland, Bohemia, Italy. What depth of combination! What a historical paradox! Engulfed in revolutionary ferment, Germany seeks relief abroad in a war of restoration, in a campaign for the consolidation of the old power against which it has just made a revolution. Only the war with Russia is a war of revolutionary Germany—a war in which it can wash away the sins of the past, in which it can grow strong and defeat its own autocrats—a war in which, as befits a people shaking off the chains of long, submissive slavery, it will purchase the right to propagate civilisation NB with the blood of its sons and free itself internally by liberating peoples externally"... (114).