FIGHTING WITH FOOD, NOT FORCE

Evening Post, Volume CII, Issue 37, 12 August 1921, Page 6

FIGHTING WITH FOOD, NOT FORCE

There is the usual conflict of evidence as to the internal condition of Eussia and the magnitude of the famine) but it is safe to assume that the condition of the populace is very bad, and the prospect is worse. With the increasing mastery of famine and plague, the. Russian question, in its international bearings, profoundly changes. In the days when the issue was merely economic reconstruction, the constitutional Powers might, with some reason, hesitate to assist in rebuilding an unconstitutional regime which was not only passively but actively revolutionary, and which flaunted the purpose of carrying communistic revolution into every constitutional country. We do not say that, even in those days, the policy of hostility towards the Communist (Bolshevik) regime was a wise one ; even then it might have be^n true that Bolshevism could better be/ fought with food than> with force. But any doubt that may have existed on the point is now dissolved, because the call from Russia is not for the economic reconstruction of a political terror;- --; istic. tyranny, .but for, the ( , relief jof a 'starving people. A constitutional Government that, rightly or wrongly, might hesitate to^assist a de facto Government in its revolutionary, career cannot be deaf to a people's cry for succour. The end to be attained (becomes, in that case, more important than the means to the end. In Mr.' Lloyd George's words, " the official machinery is not a political but a' humanitarian question." , Of all Governments, the United States Government has been the most consistent and dispassionate opponent of recognition of the Communist or Soviet or Bolshevik Government led by Lenin and Trotsky. But Mr. Hoover's recent utterances indicate a realisation that'though an act of mercy may bear the colour of technical recognition, that circumstance does not avail against the humanitarian and practical necessities of the case. Private charity applied thvough private services, independent of official co-operation, is, says Mr. Hoover, unequal to the gross burden of Russian relief. Also— Relief, even^were funds available for food, involves the rehabilitation of transportation, agriculture, and indus-. try, necessitating measures which again are beyond the reach of charity.. Therefore, however politically obnoxious may be the Moscow autocracy, he who would help its victims must do so through the Soviet machinery,' All this seems to be simply a return to the principle that it is easier to fight Bolshevism with food than with force. With food must be bracketed medicine, preventive and otherwise ;- for the Bolshevik physical contagion may be much more deadly to the West than the Communist moral infection. Eussian relief by the outside world is, indeed, not pnly help but self-help.