THE HIDDEN HAND

Southland Times, Issue 18846, 11 June 1920, Page 2

THE HIDDEN HAND

GERMANY AND FRENCH STRIKE. SOCIALIST’S LETTER TO THE TIMES. LONDON, May 22. “Was the hidden hand of Germany behind the abortive revolutionary strikes in France, the reckless unpatriotism of which surprised everyone familiar with the splendid devotion of the workers in war time? Emphatically yes!” says Adolphe Smith, who has served 28 years as an AngloFrench interpreter at International Socialist congresses. The Times gives prominence to a striking letter, in which Mr Smith, a self-pos-sessed socialist, insists on the impossibility of simultaneous organised revolutionary movements in several countries, due to the natural impulse of the average worker. A crowd of newcomers, he says, preaching the doctrines which Germany sent Lenin to spread in Russia, suddenly swamped the old French unionists and the Revolutionary Socialists alike, and swamped the Confederation of Labour, while Sorel and the notorious Griffuelhues again emerged from their temporary obscurity, promoting semi-anarchism.

A swarm of agents of' Bolshevism and the German intriguers, supplied with plenty of money, are clearly using the young workers to promote strikes and the destruction of industry, says Smith. The estrangements between France and England, and America are calculated to continue till Germany defeats the claims of the Allies and reaps the fruits of peace. Smith points out that a section of the English Labour Party is anti-Polish, and is obviously playing the German militarists’ game.

He urges all parties and newspapers to join in a vigorous campaign for exposing revolutionary conspiracies. Otherwise they will soon be dangerously intensified. The Times, in a leading article supporting Smith, refers to the existence of detailed evidence of Germany’s complicity in Lenin’s and Trotsky’s constant attempts to work through the socialist conferences, and to create trouble for the Allied coun-tries-during the war.