World War 1 thoughts of pacifism and revolution expressed in Grain Growers Guide and other Canadian newspapers

hard-hitting column in the Grain Growers Guide, Country Homemakers conducted by Marion Francis Beynon, speaks of how the German chancellor statement that peace will come through German victory and no other way has been repudiated by both German newspaperman and labour leaders such as Karl Leibknecht. Thus not all Germans were war-crazy like the chancellor and hope for peace, postulated Beynon, lay in the direction of those grassroots and progressive thinking elements of German society.

This is in the Grain Growers Guide of July 26, 1916, p. 9.

Beynon could not have known the ultimate outcome for Karl Leibknecht would be a bloody death at the hands of anti-Communist German military officers in Jan. 1919after the defeat of the Spartacist uprising in Berlin. The memory of Leibknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, similarly executed about the same time, still burns strong even a century after their killings.

Beynon's column showed there was appreciation among some anyway that Germany was not one monolithic society but had both pro-war elements and pacifist-minded elements.

Interesting for any newspaper to show tht understanding and even more so for the GGG, which can be stereotyped as farmers' newspaper that would not so coherently break from nationalist jingoistic sentiment during the war.

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