My Mentor, who shall be known as “Promeneur” until he authorizes otherwise, has sent a correction to a description I wrote about Rosa Luxemburg, in my post on Donor Opium [a film critical of Palestinian dependence on donor aid, which was sponsored by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation]. He wrote [from London, via email]:
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“Starved to death??? How could you!
Clubbed to the ground with a rifle butt by a proto-Stormtrooper, shot between the eyes, dumped in a Berlin canal … precisely 93 years ago today Sunday [15 January]. They’ll have gathered at spot, as they do every year.
Memorise Brecht’s rhyme — ‘She told the poor what life was about / And so the rich have rubbed her out’.
Slight frail fearless she was the real deal. Just who the Occupy movement could do with. Jewish, of course. Where’s her like today? Dare one wonder where she’d stand on … well you know what.”
UPDATE: Wikipedia reports that Rosa Luxemburg was questioned “violently” by Social Democrats and then executed [hit by a rifle butt and also shot in the head, then thrown into a river] on 15 January 1919 in the suppression of an uprising that the Spartacist League she co-founded took part in. The Wikipedia entry on Rosa Luxemburg can be read in full here.
Wikipedia also reports that “Luxemburg’s last known words, written on the evening of her murder, were about her belief in the masses, and in what she saw as the inevitability of revolution:
‘The leadership has failed. Even so, the leadership can and must be recreated from the masses and out of the masses. The masses are the decisive element, they are the rock on which the final victory of the revolution will be built. The masses were on the heights; they have developed this ‘defeat’ into one of the historical defeats which are the pride and strength of international socialism. And that is why the future victory will bloom from this “defeat”.
‘Order reigns in Berlin!’ You stupid henchmen! Your “order” is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will
already “raise itself with a rattle” and announce with fanfare, to your terror: I was, I am, I shall be!”
And, Wikipedia lists some of her other better-known comments:
“Luxemburg’s best-known quotation is: ‘Freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently’ (Freiheit ist immer Freiheit der Andersdenkenden) — this is from a fuller quotation:
‘Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of a party – however numerous they may be – is no freedom at all. Freedom is always the freedom of the dissenter. Not because of the fanaticism of “justice”, but rather because all that is instructive, wholesome, and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effects cease to work when “freedom” becomes a privilege’.
‘Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element’.
And
‘Those who do not move, do not notice their chains’.”