Neither Your War Nor Your Peace!, by the Surrealist Group (1938)
A leaflet dated 27 September 1938, distributed around the time of the Munich conference
The war announced under the hypocritical form of repeated and multiplied security measures, the war threatening to surge from the inextricable conflicts of imperialist interests with which Europe is afflicted, will not be the war of democracy, nor the war of justice, nor the war of liberty. The states which, for the needs of the hour as well as for those of history, pretend to serve themselves with these notions as if with identification papers, have acquired their wealth and consolidated their power by methods of tyranny, arbitrariness and blood.
The latest proofs of the unworthiness of these states are still alive in collective memory.
They permitted Italy to annihilate Ethiopia, notably because any successful resistance to the white invader would encourage the colonial peoples to free themselves from the grip of imperialism.
They refused Spain, in July 1936, the weapons it had every right to demand, weapons which would have permitted the swift defeat of fascism; they refused to supply these weapons because the victory of the Spanish workers would open new revolutionary perspectives to the world proletariat.
They delivered China to Japanese imperialism.
Today, if the pseudo-democratic powers set themselves in motion at last, it is only to defend a state they have created in their own image, a state thoroughly capitalist, centralised, policelike and static.
Betrayed on all sides, forgetful of its subversive function, the working class is preparing to join in salvaging the plunder of Versailles. In response to this suicidal attitude, we declare that the only question concerning the social future of mankind, the only one serving to mobilise human lucidity, and creative energy, is that of the liquidation of a capitalist regime which manages to survive and to surmount its own paradoxes and its own bankruptcy only thanks to the scandalous complicity of the Second and Third Internationals. With the guilty as with their accomplices, with the justifiers of war as with the falsifiers of peace, no compromise is possible. To the insane Europe of totalitarian regimes we refuse to oppose the defunct Europe of the Versailles treaty, even if this treaty is revised. We oppose to both, in war as in peace, the forces called on to re-create Europe, in its entirety, by proletarian revolution.
THE SURREALIST GROUP