War on War
Lenin, the Zimmerwald Left, and the Origins of Communist Internationalism
The First World War represented a tragic crossroads for the international Left. The pressing decision of the hour—whether to collaborate with or to resist imperialist war—was answered overwhelmingly with the former choice by almost every major party of the Second International. Here is the story of those who chose the second road; a road that, the author argues, renewed socialism after the cataclysm of war.
R. Craig Nation has been a professor of strategy and director of Eurasian studies at the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, since 1996. He is a specialist in war and peace studies.
Reviews
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"War on War is the most comprehensive study to date on the great socialist struggle against war that began at the Zimmerwald Conference in 1915. Dismissed by contemporaries and all too many historians as a mere defeatist grouplet of the Second International, the Zimmerwald Left led by Lenin emerges in Nation's book as a noble if doomed tendency within European social democracy."-- Woodford McClellan