THE CRIMINAL LUNACY

Evening Star, Issue 16824, 28 August 1918, Page 7

THE CRIMINAL LUNACY

OF BRITISH BOLSHEVISM FIERCELY DENOUNCED BY ROBERT BLATCHFORD. - In the appended essay Mr Robert Blatchford has a few words to say in tho ' Sunday Chronicle' (London) concerning British Bolshevism, and his observations may be taken to heart with profit by some of our local pacifists. If the British Bolshevists can spare half an hour from their favorite occupation of holding conferences and drawing up manifestoes, I should like them to " read, mark, learn and inwardly digest" a short passage from one of Sir Anthony Hopes stories, and to apply the said passage as a touchstone to their'recent lamentable Bolshevist policy. I found tho passage a few days ago, and it struck me as a very happy description of tho reasoning of our cosmopolitan Labor idealists. It occurs in a love story and is the opinion which a practical man of affairs oxpresses of a brilliant but shallow theorist: The man is constitutionally incapable of thinking in the right order. Its always the same with bim) I don't care whether it's his article about North Africa or that book of his about primitive man. He always—not occasionally, but always—starts with his conclusion, and works backwards to the premises. North Africa ought to be that shape—it is I Primitive man ought to have thought that—he did ! You see? Tho result is that tho facts have to adapt themselves to these conclusions of his. Now, that habit of mind makes a man who has to do with public affairs a dangerous and pernicious fool. He ought not to be allowed about. What, I should liko to know, does he think the Almighty made facts for? Not to be looked at, evidently. That is tho quotation. We now take an interval for silent prayer. Thank you. And now, dearly beloved, let us remember with Captain Cuttle that the "bearings of this observation lie in the application thereof." ARGUING BACKWARDS. The German Democracy ought to exist—therefore it does. The German Democracy ought to join us in our desire for a "people's peace"—therefore it will. The German Democracy ought to overthrow the Kaiser —therefore it must. Let us, then, meet and agree with our " German comrades," and wo shall find them exactly wh.'t we want them to be—because they ought to bo just like that. There we have the reasoning upon which the whole cult of Bolshevism and " solidarity " has been built up by a number of amiable persons who, according to Sir Anthony Hope's man of affairs, are political idiot;- and " ought not to be allowed aK.'it."

Let us subject that sweet and dove-like piece of reasoning to tho one essential test —a comparison of the assumption with the facts. The German Democracy ought to exist. Beautiful. , But it does hot exist. It is a political Mrs Harris. "There ain't no sich person." Instead of a German Democracy there exists a German Autocracy with a cult of blood and iron, and a policy of slave-driving and plunder. If we call the Kaiser and Hindcnburg and Tirpitz a German Democracy, and if we treat with them for peace on Bolshevist lines of no indemnities and no annexations and no fiscal or economic boycott, we shall get what Russia has got. The blood and iron Democracy annexes 350 millions of square miles of Russian soil, seizes all the Russian naval ports, puts 50 millions of Russians under the German yoke, demobilises the Russian army, interns the Russian navy, forbids the Russian democratic propaganda, saddles Russia with an economic " agreement" which amounts to economic slavery and the death of Russian industry, and condemns the Russian people to pay an indemnity of £300.003,009. That is the kind of democratic pence which the Bolshevists have achieved b\ their brotherly conference with a German Democracy

which ought to have existed but did not, which ought to have done right but h;i3 not, which ought to have overthrown the I\aiser*but could not. AN AMAZING CATACLYSM.

This Russian debacle is the most tremendous and amazing cataclysm in modern history. Russia was a great empire The conquest of Eussia has long been regarded by military authorities as impossible. Men of the greatest military genius, leading enormous and puissant armies, have been checked and defeated and utterly routed in their attempts to conquer Russia. For centuries the Germans have feared Russia. Frederick the Great confessed that the Russians had always beaten him. and left the sound advice : "Never fight Russia!"

In this war, despite the treachery, the corruption, and the incompetence which maimed and checkmated the Russian armies and generals, the Germans were again and again defeated in Russia. Had the Russian people after the Revolution remained true to the army and to their Allies, the might of Germany would have battered its life out against the Russian rock. And now we see Russia humiliated, betrayed, and disgraced. We see hor mighty Empire shattered and split up into a congeries of ]setty feudal States. We seo her invincible armies reduced to a broken, disaffected rabble. And wo see her enemies marching on her capital. Russia is defeated, she is broken, she is in process of enslavement—she who, single-handed, might have overthrown the Kaiser's power and conquered Austria and Germany. And this almost inconceivable Tesult has been brought about by the insane action of a number of amicablo idealists who would not see facts, who always reasoned backwards, who had becoms "dangerous and pernicious fools." This reasoning brings us up against a hostile army or stubborn facts. To begin with, the war aims of the alleged Gorman Democrats are not the war aims" of the German lulers. We know the war aims of the German rulers, and we know the war aims of the Comrades —Fritz and Hans don't matter. The wife of Bill Sykes may be an honest woman but her honesty is no assurance for the householder against her husband's burglaries. Mrs Sykes may have moral aims of the most impeccable kind, but they are not practical politics because Mr .Sykes has a big fist and a heavy hoot. IMPOTENT HANS AND FRITZ. The Russian Bolshevists, by a process of retrograde reasoning, arrived at the conclusion that Hans and Fritz did matter because they ought to matter; that the German Democracy ought to stop the war—therefore they would. The results of this Bolshevist faith in the German Democracy are not encouraging. The loveliest of airy castles falls to dust under the shell fire of the apostles of Blood and Iron. The outstanding defect of castles in the air is that they carry no guns. A small coterie of well-meaning political idiots have in a few months wrecked an Empire which defied the armies and genius of Napoleon and Frederick and Charles of Sweden. Incidentally, the blind reaching out of the Bolshevists to embrace a phantom peace will cost the Allies of Russia, and champions of real democracy hundreds of thousands of lives.

The policy of no annexations, no indemnities, and no economic war lias resulted in, the enslavement of a Russian population greater than the population of the British Islands, in the infliction of an indemnity greater than that paid by France in 1871, in the annexation of Russian territories larger than the whole of Austria and Germany combined, .and in an economic subjection which will bleed Russia white, and make it impossible for her ever to cast off the yoko of her greedy and brutal enemy. And there is to be no Russian democratic propaganda. Russia is not only to be denied democracy; she is not even to be allowed to talk about it. If our domocrats 'want to dis-cuss the policy of no annexations, no indemnities, and no economic war with the Germans, they had better discuss it with those Germans who have power to carry their war aims into effect. The sam« Germans who talked and dealt with Comrades Trotsky and Lenin. Why trouble poor Comrades Fritz and Hans for an expression of a merely pious opinion? As the German Socialist papers point, out the disastrous

blunders of the Russian Bolshevists have ruined the poor, anaemic German hope of a German Democracy. The absolute and irredeemable ruin of" tho Russia-n Revolution has frightened the few .German revolutionary democrats into their funkholes, and has put Hindenburg and the Kaiser more firmly than ever into their saddles. If there was any hope at all of a German democracy, that hope has been utterly blasted by Comrades Lenin and i l-otsky. THE MEN OF BLOOD AND IRON. Meanwhile the anti-democratic facts, the German facts, remain as solid_ as the everlasting hills. No words or wishes can raniove them. No inverted ''r.awmiiv/ can change t'hem. Germany—not poor Fritz and Boor flans, but" Germany—is out- for world-power or downfall.' The Genu ,r nation willingly and knowingly submitted to iron discipline, endured grinding drill, made enormous sacrifices for four decades of vears with the object of foreign conquest. The German nation went to war to achieve that object. The German people have fought and bled and 'suffoml _ and paid to achieve that conquest. Is it likely that after all they have done and given and endured they are going to be ai. E.i or persuaded out of their spoils- and their reward by a handful of persons who rta,.on backwards and "ought not to be allowed about"?

Germany has fought for the plunder. She meant to fight for it. She is prepared to go en fighting for it. She recog nis?s no argument but tho stem argument of defeat.' She abides by tho decision of the sword. Otherwise she need not have drawn the sword. The spectacle of a party of talkative allied Labor leaders hobnobbing round a table with Comrades Fritz and Hans will interest the Men of Blood and Iron, but it will only whet their purpose. The more her enemies babble of peace the better will Germany be pleased. Russian peaecmorgors have already given Germany by a few weeks' parley more than ber Ilindenburas and Liidendorffs could have won in a hundred years.

While the pacifists talk the' Germans aro starving Rumanian women to death And there is always an outside chance that disaffection or war weariness may shake the Allies' will to victory. Meanwhile Comrade Gompsrs, of the United States, has put the real situation in a few words for all who care to understand. "Wo are not talking, we are fighting," savs Comrade Gompers, and there wo have" the naked fact. The Allies can beat the Germans in spite of all that Lenin and Trotsky have done to help them. Thev will beat tho Germans if they will look at the Almighty's facts and not begin to reason backwards. But they will not be helped, they will be hindered, in their work by every day wasted in foolish and futile international palaveip about the peace aims of poor Fritz and poor .Hans. Comrades Fritz and Hans cannot give us p:-ace. Their masters can give us peace of the kind thev have given Russia. But there is only one way of getting a real peace, or, as onr Labor lenders prefer to call it, a People's Peaoe, and that is by fighting for it and winning it. LET US LEARN OUR LESSON.

"We are- not talking, we are fighting," Mr Gompers says; and when we are fighting talk is waste of breath and time. Do not let us reject the lesson which has cost the poor Russians such a price. J few weeks ac»o some of out journals am' some of our people were extolling Conrad es Lenin and Trotsky, were rallir upon the British workers to take example by the shining wisdom of Bolshevism. -■■ few weeks ago some of those Knglishiwh and Scotsmen, who "ou<rht not to_ b allowed about," were advocating strike and revolution and a People's Peace b negotiation. If the terms of peace die tated to the Russian peaeemongcrs at Civ. point of the German bayonet have no' cured our British Bolshevists of thnr dan fcrous habit of reasoning backwards th?b case is indeed hopeless. If there is any Briton or Frenchman who thinks or hope? that Germany can be persuaded into a sunv-nder, a' quick mental glance ba-ck ticioc-s the history of the war, and a loop, steady look at the map, should suffice to cure him of his obsession.

Germany has just seized territory 50 per cent. Larger than her own empire. Rh? has just 'enslaved a population almost ,v? lartre' as her own. She has just made a finr.ncial treaty winch will fill her coffer? with plunder.' She has just walked over the body of one she feared as an invincible foe. She has her grip on the wealthiest part of France. She has Kiunani--and Serbia and Belgium under her feet She Ik red with blood of murdered people Sho is wld with and partial victory She has he.- sword in her hand. What can Mr Henderson and Mr Thomas say to Com rod s Frit?; raid ITanr. about it? What can those cowed and bullied German Demo err.ts do to give us peace? Let us. leave poor Hans and Fritz alone, and listen t" Comrade Gompers 'We are not talking, we arc fighting." That's the tunc.