The Guardian And Evening Star, with which is incorporated the West Coast Times. SATURDAY, JUNE 18, 1927. THE RED TERROR.

Hokitika Guardian, 18 June 1927, Page 2

The Guardian And Evening Star, with which is incorporated the West Coast Times. SATURDAY, JUNE 18, 1927. THE RED TERROR.

The lte<l Terror has reared its head again in Russia with a vengeance. News is being received on successive days of numerous executions and banishments—the latter probably akin to a living, if not a certain death. In connection with this uncivilised state of affairs tho Auckland Star remarks that once more tho civilised world is herrified by the bloodthirsty excesses of the Bolshevik hierarchy which now controls the destinies of the Russian people. It is quite superfluous to ask whether any of the victims of this orgy of massacre have really been guilty of sedition or conspiracy against the dictatorship of the proletariat. For terrorism, as the Bolshevik leaders have frequently avowed, is an essential feature of the Bolshevik policy. When the Bed terror was first let loose in 1917-18, and the infamous Cheka was engaged in hunting down ‘intellectuals” and aristocrats and “bourgeoisie” alike, Trotsky and his colleagues cynically declared their faith in torture and murder as necessary to the coercion and the extirpation of their enemies, and the revival of terrorism in Russia to-day needs in their eyes no more justification than this. It is true that the Soviet Government has attempted to offer some sort of explanation of this 1 related survival of the abominable brutalities of the hekn. The Bolshevik leaders know that they hold power in Russia on a precarious tenure, and that widespread discontent and resentment, occasioned by cruelty and maladministration, can be kept in check only by main force. Therefore they have seiz-

ed eagerly upon the raid on Soviet House, and Britain’s refusal to maintain commercial or diplomatic relations with Russia, as pretexts for fresh efforts to crush all possible adversaries within the Russian borders or to terrorise them into submission. Ti olneial statement about the executions does not mention the murder of Voikolf, which was committed two days before the date of the sentences. The charges laid against the British envoy at Moscow and other British residents or ollleials are manifestly false and fictitious. Tin; resurrection of the Cheka under another name, and the renewal of its fiendish activities, is part and parcel of the public policy of Bolshevism, and in tho eyes of the Soviet hierarchs it requires no other excuse. The explanation of the barbarities that have marked the BoMievik regime may be found to some extent in the past history of the Russians. Largely an Oriental people, they have not that sympathy For unman suffering which is characteristic chiefly of the Western nations. Brutalised and degraded by centuries of tyranny under the Czars, the mass of tho Russian people are not so. easily shocked or appalled as Western nations might he by exhibitions of ferocious cruelty on tbe part of their rulers. But apart from these considerations, we believe that tbe explanation of the Bod terror—its organisation and its apathetic acceptance by the masses—is to be found in the teaching from which Bolshevism sprang. By far the most depraved and demoralising doctrine ever preached to mankind is tho Marxist doctrine of the class war, with its predestined consummation in the dictatorship of the proletariat. Once convince the masses that all who belong to any other social or economic class are their natural enemies, doomed to ultimate destruction, and there is no possible limit to tho bitterness of tho hatred generated in the proletarian mind, or to the ferocity with which that feeling will ho expressed. The Bed terror in Russia to-day is simply Marxism carried to its last logical extreme.