HE MALIGNED BOLSHEVIK.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXVI, Issue 17570, 14 May 1919, Page 9

HE MALIGNED BOLSHEVIK.

( Sydney "Sun").

There is in Australia a small section/ but, a very noisy one, which declares that all the reports of Bolshevik excesses, cruelties, .and ineptitude io Government are mere lies manufactured by the "Capitalistic Press" to discredit the one ideal form of Government so far discoveied in this wicKed old world. The touching belief of the ignorant that the whole press ot the world is concerned in a vast conspiracy against Messrs Lenin, Trotsky, and Co., is so strong that perhaps only a visit to Petrograd would shake it.

The pressmen, however, who are out, not to comment, but to relate facts, are not capitalists, and have little reason to distort fact 3. Most pressmen are political atheists, and all governmental systems are the same to them. They are. however, almost, yjiammous it* declaring that the Bolshevik Gov<ornaments of Russia in the worst tyranny they have encountered.

One reputable English paper published a report from its correspondent an Russia to the effect that Russia under the Bolsheviks was a leal Utopia. It is now stated that the gentleman who wrote this.report was a convinced and hard-shell Bolshevik, and saw Russia through the rose-tinted spectacles of his belief. The British Government has denied him re-adnussion to England, t

It may be as well for those who are inclined to consider seriously the cry of the Bolsheviks of New South Wales to read carefully the report of Mr H. V. Keeling, an English unionist, who has just returned to London after live years in Russia. He is no "minion of the Capitalistic JPress," hut his statements, published in " The Sun" on Thursday, are as damning as any which have been given to the press. "I have been six days without bread,' he says. ''To feet food you must be in with the Bolsheviks." "The children are starving in great numbers.'----"It is terrible to live in Russia in these times. Men and women are like shadows, and little children so wasted that they seem to be all eyes." A Government which starves its children may be actuated by Utopian motives, #but it is hard to believe it. Even the Kaiser's Government did better than that.