d) Interpolated Ave Maria: “ Blessed, thrice blessed are you women, 
being chosen to pronounce the first consecration of the long-promised 
kingdom of bliss.” 

12) ‘Beloved sisters.” 

13) “Not love but hatred” (contrasting bourgeois and communist 
society). 

14) “You loved ones.” 

15) “Raise love on to the throne.” 

16) “Active people in loving community.” 

17) “True priestesses of love.” 

e) Aesthetic parenthesis: “If your trembling soul has not yet 
forgotten the flight sublime” — (a feat whose feasibility has yet to be 
demonstrated). 

18) “The world of love.” 

19) “The kingdom of hatred and the kingdom of love.” 

f) An attempt to hoodwink women: “And therefore you have a 
most mighty voice in politics too. You but need to use your influence, 
and all the old kingdom of hatred will fall in ruins to make way for 
the new kingdom of love.” 

g) Philosophical fanfare to drown reflection: “The ultimate goal 
of their activity is that all mankind should take an ever-joyful delight 
in itself.” 

20) “Your love.” At this point women are required to be 
“unstinting”’ in their love so that it may “embrace all mankind with 
equal surrender’. A demand that is as indecent as it is extravagant. 

h) Fugue: “That thousands and yet more thousands of deserted 
orphans are abandoned to the fearful massacre of circumstances.” 
What does this “fearfulness” consist in? In the “orphans” massacr- 
ing the “circumstances” or the “circumstances” massacring the 
“orphans”? 

i) Unveiling of the neo-communist policy: “We have no wish to lay 
hands on the private property of any man; what the usurer now has, 
let him keep; we merely wish to forestall the further pillaging of the 
people’s assets and prevent capital from continuing to withhold from 
labour its rightful property.” This purpose is to be achieved as 
follows: ““Every poor man ... will instantly become a useful member 
of human society as soon as he is offered the opportunity of produc- 
tive work.” (According to this no one is more deserving in respect of 
‘human society” than the capitalists, including those in New York 
against whom Kriege thunders so mightily.) “And this opportunity is 
assured him for ever, as soon as society gives him a piece of land on 
which he can produce food for himself and his family.... If this vast 
area of land” (the 1,400 million acres of the American state lands) “‘is 

withdrawn from commerce and ensured to labour in limited quantities, at 
one stroke all the poverty in America will have been eliminated; for 
each man will be given the opportunity to establish with his own 
hands an inviolable home for himself.” That it does not lie in the 
legislators’ power to decree either that the patriarchal system desired 
by Kriege shall not evolve into an industrial system or that the 
industrial and commercial states of the east coast of the United States 
shall revert to patriarchal barbarism — one had a right to expect that 
this would be realised. Meanwhile, for the day when the paradise 
just described will have arrived, Kriege prepares the following 
country-parson utterance: “And then we can teach men to live 
together in peace, to lighten for each other the burden and toil of 
their life and: 

21) build the first dwelling-places on earth for celestial love” (each 
one 160 acres in area). 

Kriege concludes his address to married women as follows: “Turn 
first to 

22) the men of your love, 
ask them ... to turn their backs on the politics of old,... show them 
their children, implore them in their name” (who are without reason) 
“to adopt reason.” Secondly, to the “virgins”: 

23) “For your lovers 
let the liberation of the land be the touchstone of their human worth and 
have no faith in 

24) their love 
until they have sworn fealty to mankind.” (What is that supposed to 
mean?) If the virgins behave in this manner, he guarantees them that 
their children 

25) “will become as loving 
as they themselves” (that is, “the birds of heaven”) and concludes 
this cant with another round of 

26) “true priestesses of love’, “great kingdom of community” and 
“consecration”. 

No. 13 of the Volks-Trib[un]:—“Antwort an Sollta.” 

27) “It” (the great spirit of community) “flashes from fraternal 
eyes as the fire of love.” 

28) “What is a woman without the man whom she can love, to 
whom she can surrender her trembling soul?” 

29) “To join all mankind in love.” 

30) “Mother-love’’.... 

31) “Love of mankind”’.... 

32) “All the first sounds of love’’.... 

33) “The radiance of love.” 

k) The purpose of communism is to “subject the whole life of 
mankind to its” (the sentient heart’s) “beating”’. 

34) “The sound of love flees before the rattle of money.” 

35) “Everything may be achieved by love and surrender.” 

In this one issue, then, we have love in approximately thirty-five 
shapes. It is in perfect accordance with this amorous slobbering that 
Kriege, in his “Antwort an Sollta” and elsewhere, presents 
communism as the love-imbued opposite of selfishness and reduces a 
revolutionary movement of world-historical importance to the few 
words: love — hate, communism — selfishness. Part and parcel of it is 
likewise the cowardice with which he here panders to the usurer by 
promising to let him keep what he already has and with which 
further on he assures that he does not want “to destroy the cherished 
sentiments of family life, of belonging to one’s native land and people’ 
but “only to fulfil them”. This cowardly, hypocritical presentation of 
communism not as “destruction” but as “fulfilment” of existing evils 
and of the illusions which the bourgeoisie have about them, is found 
in every issue of the Volks-Tribun. This hypocrisy and cowardice are 
matched by the attitude which he adopts in discussions with 
politicians. He declares it (No.10*) a sin against communism to attack 
political visionaries like Lamennais and Borne who dabble in 
Catholicism, with the result that men like Proudhon, Cabet, Dézamy, 
in short all the French Communists, are just men “who call 
themselves Communists”. The fact that the German Communists 
have left B6rne as far behind as the French have Lamennais, is 
something Kriege could have discovered back in Germany, Brussels 
and London. 

We leave Kriege to reflect for himself on the enervating effect this 
love-sickness cannot fail to have on both sexes and the mass hysteria 
and anaemia it must produce in the “virgins”.