The Daily News. WEDNESDAY, MAY 7, 1919. BOLSHEVISM APPROVED.

Taranaki Daily News, 7 May 1919, Page 4

The Daily News. WEDNESDAY, MAY 7, 1919. BOLSHEVISM APPROVED.

We would direct the attention of our readers to a short report of the views uttered at Wellington on Sunday night by Mr. P. Fraser, M.P., upon Bolshevism, appearing in another part of this issue. The statements show exactly where the Labor Party—or, at least, the extreme section of it, represented by the Frasers, Hollands and Semples—stands. In the first place Mr. Fraser questions the truth of the reports regarding the atrocities committed by the Bolshevists, whom he actually applauds. "We are not satisfied," this delightful Parliamentary representative tells us, "to applaud the deeds of our brothers; we are determined ourselves to fight against the forces of privilege and monopoly, and to fight until capitalism is u thing of the past." Thus it will be seen that Mr. Fraser joins issue with the tyrannical cut-throats whom to-day our soldiers are actually fighting and who have done their best, or worst, to destroy the whole social and economic fabric of their own great country.. If Mr. Fraser had uttered the'same sentiments towards our oljiher enemies, the Germans, he wotuld at once be arrested for seditwn; it is quite possible the same, war regulations apply in the ease of our Russian enemies. If so, Mr. Fraser may have to explain his co_nduct in a court of law. Still, it must be acknowledged that he has only repeated what he denied /•saying in Christehurch a few •months ago, and'said in public what he and his ilk say amongst themselves. To know just where extreme labor stands to-day in New Zealand is of distinct advantage to the public, who in future will know how to act towards a party that aspires to take charge of the affairs of the Dominion, i Now, Mr. Fraser professes to disbelieve reports of the inhuman behaviour and excesses of the Russian Bolsheviks. The favorite charge he and his class hurl is that the reports are manufactured by the-capitalistic interests and Press But we need not depend upon these sources for the reports. We can go to Labor leaders themselves. Such a one as, for instance, Colonel John Ward, the navvies-' M.P., one of the foremost and most* courageous British labor

leaders, who did not, like some of his New Zealand prototypes, seek to dodge his duty when the call came, but took up his rifle like a patriot and a man. Colonel Ward was with the British forces in Russia, and can tell of what he actually saw and experienced. He wrote to the London Daily Express from Omsk, in Siberia, under date February 14, and we can only do justice to his letter by quoting from it:— "For the love of Allah, never more talk of the glories of revolution lam in it here. Friend strikes down him he thinks his foe anH rinds the dead man his brother Princes, peasants, plutocrats, workmen, rich and poor, go down together in one welter of blood and dirt. The Bolshevik thinks nothing of standing five hundred social revolutionists against the wall and shooting them down before breakfast, because of some small petty difference of opinion as to whether the railway* should be national or communal. How ihe gods must cry with rage that i men can be so mad! How "\cr any of our Labor leaders failed to grasp the] Bolshevik creed of blood and presumed to condone the horrors committed by this mob of fanatical maniacs, I cannot imagine. Rather pray heaven defend our old country from such a calamity. I have entered Ekaterinburg and heard the Bolshevik shells hurtle overhead. That is war; but, oh! the sight of the Cossacks pulling the lumps of ti»l up out of the well near where the Czar was imprisoned, with an occasional grand duke mixed up with the timber! Then the end of another poor piece of flesh recognised as a grand duchess, then another as the foreman at the near-by ironworks, and then a few workmen and workwomen, all murdered and mutilated just to prove the love for humanity!"

Here we see Colonel Ward repeating in his own language the im-j mortal sentiment of Chamfort: j ''Sois mon fere ou je te tue"—Be my brother or I will kill you. Col-1 onel Ward goes on to declare that j the Bolsheviks have tried to des-! troy on a regular plan the intellec- j tual elements of their nation. " 1 have so far not seen a single educational institution from Vladivostok to Ekaterinburg that has not been the scene of bloody conflict." He passed through places where hundreds of the sons of well-to-do peasants who were being too well educated for the liking of the local Soviet had been lined up and shot. "In one batch, as at Irkutsk, the oldest was sixteen." Turning from those horrors, Colonel Ward : ends his letter with these words : "And then! What about our dear little old country called England, which, now we are here, seems like a sort of heaven on earth, which we pray to see almost to the exclusion of the other heaven we used to think about. As for hell —well a bit of it is here, but we don't feel any the warmer."

Although Colonel Ward goes into no elaborate explanation, his I meaning is clear enough. A great contrast is in his mind. He sees side by side the picture of Russia, reeking with blood and cruelty, and of the untouched smiling English landscape. He imagines, of course, what would happen if Bolshevism were let loose in his own beloved country. The other thing to which we beg attention is an appallingly brutal and sordid proclamation on the subject of marriage which was posted up by order of the Soviet at Saratoff, in East Russia, and also at Ekaterinburg, and which was published in the London Times. This proclamation makes it very plain that the Soviet's idea of woman is that she is to be regarded as a slave and a chattel, a common possession without individual rights, destined to serve a purely physical purpose without influence on man or on the children she may bear. Readers of the history of the French Revolution will recall the insane and bestial orgies which took place at the worship of the Goddess of Reason, But those things were a kind of licentious mania, a fit of hysteria. They cannot be compared with the horribly cold and merciless proclamation of the local Russian Soviet. This, then, is the condition of things for which the bloodthirsty Bolshevists are responsible, which Mr. Fraser says is untrue on the convincing ground that he "knows it is untrue. '' These tyrants he acclaims as brothers. "We are determined ourselves to fight . , . until capitalism is a thing of the past." The people of New Zealand should remember that this man, and others of his type are members of the Parliament of this fair land, which, if they could, they would lay in the dust without regard to the claims of justice or rights, so long as Labor kept in the saddle.