Introduction
“Bystanders will be shot!” Read the swastika-clad vehicles of the Freikorps in Berlin during the spring of 1920. The Proto-Hitlerians were only stopped by the largest display of unity in German history. Disgruntled aristocrats had put their foot on a pedal covered in blood when they backed the Kapp Putsch. Were they given the chance, millions would have been killed.
Opposition was only suicidal policemen and left-wing volunteers.
Veterans of the battle at the Berlin Schloss, sometimes called the “Bloody Christmas” in Germany, had been executed by the Freikorps the previous year.
As was done in Roman times, some 30 men of the People’s Marine Division were decimated after being lured to Französische Straße by Freikorps men. They were told they were about to receive discharge papers. A tenth of them were put in a line and the rest told to leave. The Freikorps then opened fire on the men with machine guns.
A single man survived. He played dead among a line of his friends, recently slaughtered, and is the only reason this event is known of. The criminal Freikorps never faced justice.
The Kapp Putsch was both foreshadowing for Hitler’s rise to power and for his defeat by the Allies. That spring, the world avoided mass death. Those who beat back the coup didn’t win through violence- they won by not going to work.
Dead Futures of Germany
A hand-painted sign at the funeral of martyred revolutionaries Liebknecht and Luxemburg- German Jews, lovers, and Communist insurrectionists:
ICH WAR, ICH BIN, ICH WERDE SEIN
I WAS, I AM, I WILL BE
An excerpt of her words, a day before her killing. Her words, in full, read:
“Order prevails in Warsaw! Order prevails in Paris! Order prevails in Berlin! Every half-century that is what the bulletins of “order” proclaim from one corner of the World Struggle to the next. And the jubilant “victors” fail to notice that any order that needs to be regularly maintained through bloody slaughter heads inexorably to its own demise. You foolish goons! Your “order” is built on sand. Soon the revolution will “Rise up again, clashing with its weapons,” and to your horror, it will proclaim with trumpets blazing:
I am, I was, I shall be!
They were found by Freikorps men, beaten and shot to death during their failed insurrection in 1919. Luxemburg’s body was tossed into the Landwehrkanal, where it washed up on shore four months later. Defaced and desiccated. As if she weren’t human.
Had she won, how much better would the world be today? Nobody will ever know. The two heroes’ faces were ones of a dead future. A brighter world stolen from us all.
How many dead futures do we have?
Another, maybe more controversial hero of a lost future was Ernst Thaelmann: an ugly, bald, babyfaced man. Successor of successor to Luxemburg and Liebknecht’s leadership position in the Communist Party of Germany.
He could have stopped the revanchist tension that caused World War Two dead in its tracks. His fight was not one with the Jews, the Roma, Homosexuals or Slavs. It was one against oppressors of labor and against the Nazis in his own country. Against the former aristocrats and nobles of the German Empire.
He died in a concentration camp Buchenwald. He was shot to death on the personal orders of Adolf Hitler.
How inspirational do you have to be to frighten a man so much that, while rotting away in his concentration camp, he kills you?
Two men and a woman who could have saved a continent from war, all murdered by evil men.
Dead Futures in America
“During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing class constantly hounded them, received them with the most savage malice. The most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. When they die, attempts are made to convert them into Harmless Icons.”
Some more dead futures come to mind, this time personified by some of the few actual American heroes.
El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz. Malcom X.
Shot to death in front of his family, while he stood on a podium in the New York Audobon Ballroom.
The Shabazz family and the children of Malcolm knew in their hearts what had happened. Their hero was put down by the FBI. In 2011, they received a letter from a former NYPD cop: Malcolm’s bodyguards were arrested by NYPD officers, acting after being coerced by the FBI, so that they would not be present at the ballroom.
More popular in the mainstream American consciousness, for reasons you probably can guess, was doctor Martin Luther King Junior. When you think of the Civil Rights Movement, most can hear “I have a Dream” play in their head.
James Earl Ray is his alleged killer. King was shot in the head with a rifle.
In 1997, Dexter King, Martin’s son, asked Ray if he truly did kill his father.
“I just want to ask you, for the record, um, did you kill my father?”
“No. No I didn’t.”
Ray was stabbed, at 70 years old, and died in recovery in 1998.
Legendary civil rights activist rev. Jesse Jackson, witness to King’s murder, once said:
“I will never believe James Earl Ray had the motive, the money and the mobility to have done it himself. Our government was very involved in setting the stage for, and I think, the escape route for James Earl Ray.”
A 1999 court case found the assassination to be a conspiracy on part of the executive agencies.
That government which shot him awarded him two medals after his murder. No award given after his death makes up for the world a living Martin Luther King Jr. could have created.
King was, like the martyred Shabazz and Hampton, and countless others, a “Black Messiah.” This term was coined by FBI spies in their written reports.
Who is it, then, the killer of a messiah? A Roman? Judas? The Devil?
One answer is: an evil man.
