LET GOVERNMENTS BEWARE!

New Zealand Tablet, 17 July 1919, Page 9

LET GOVERNMENTS BEWARE!

(By Austin Harrison, in the English Review.)

Whatever kind of a peace the ''Big Four," or, more correctly stated, the "Secret Three," arrive at, or think they have arrived at, this truth will remain: that until some, working equation is found for the accommodation of revolutionary Russia the League of Nations will be a mere mechanism and the League itself will be a futility. Russia constitutes the major part of Europe. Russia is, in fact, the key to the New Order, and on the solution of the Russian problem will depend stability in Europe and all hope of progress.

Great lies have been systematically fostered about the whole Bolshevik movement, and so to-day we have this utterly shameful paradox, that the democracies of Europe are blockading and starving not only the nation which militarily saved them in 1914-1915, but using the soldiers of liberty and free government to reinstate in power the forces which would restore the old Tsarist, bureaucratic order, and who, if ever they came back into power, would victimise their peoples in pogroms and holocausts of blood. Now, I know something of Russia, havings lived there for a year during the revolution of 1905. 1 propose to state a few leading facts which sooner or. later we shall have to learn. Now the revolution of 1905 was a bourgeois movement, as was the Cromwellian revolution. In no wise can it be called a people's rising, for the peasantry remained for the greater part listless, and it was led entirely, by the so-called intellectuals." It was suppressed. I wonder how many of us realise how Listen. It "was crushed under just when,, through the constitutional action »of the Duma, it was about to win through by the financial aid we and the French gave, to the Tsar. Allied money stifled the freedom of Russia in 1906. We paid the Tsar to smash the liberating movement, and so the Duma became a puppet show and thousands of Russians went to their death in Siberia, were shot or removed, and thousands fled the country. When we talk of the terrible crimes of Bolshevism, we do not consider the terrible crimes committed • for two hundred years by the Tsars. We do not pause to remember, that only our money, saved the Tsar and his police -rule;; in 1906. We do not understand that Bolshevism in its Russian or physical form is a quite natural reaction, the back-play of a people, exasperated and driven by years of the most brutal tyranny, corruption,:-: extortion, and oppression, and that the real wonder is not that Bolshevism is so terrible, but rather that;; it has not been infinitely:, more "terrible/ The French in 1789Were?far- more drastic. Indeed, so far as bloodshed is concerned*;-!' seriously ; -:doubt_ : whether more lives have : - been taken c;; by ; the Bolshevists than were taken in any yearq under the late Tsar's

' >' ' .• ; ' - ■ ■ regime, for we must not include battles in an estimate of bloodshed. if We rank not forget that the Bolshevists: are being attacked North, South, East, and West by other Russians supported, financed, and armed by the Allies, f and that this loss of life cannot be reckoned on the Bolshevist account.

~ I was present at Petrograd in 1905, at the first public meeting of the University in the name of liberty. A more orderly meeting could not be imagined. Every day on my walks I saw gangs of prisoners marching through the streets—handcuffed .. and roped together like animals--on their way to the prisons. I have seen the Cossacks lashing the people with, their whips. Ever/ night men were seized and transported to the mines without trial.- Anything more pitiful than the enforced enslavement of these long-suffering Russians in those awful years I cannot picture. Daily men were cut to ribbons in the police —flogging was a recognised" thing. The Tsar triumphed, thanks to our financial aid, and yet they fought for us in 1914 with an enthusiasm that surprised all parties in Russia. The people thought it was a war for liberty. All Russia joined in the crusade, and ; we I will only understand the significance of this when we realise that the army was hated in Russia, that the soldiers were despised as the instruments-of;. persecution, that war is temperamentally alien to the Russian psychology. And .these Russians saved Europe.

Badly armed', corruptly led, suffering fearful privations, they died by the million and unquestionably prevented the Germans in the two critical years of the war from using their major strength in the "West. The battle of the Marne in 1914 was won because the Germans had to send such large forces against the Russians to save East Prussia.

Our great blunder was made over Kerensky. Instead of understanding that Russia was on the verge of collapse and that only a full, regenerated, democratic Russia could re-enter the war effectively, we made them fight, thereby causing the inevitable debacle, leading automatically to Bolshevism. Bolshevism originally meant the land for the people—communism. We answered it by negative war and the blockade. To-day, five months after the Armistice, we are still fighting the Russians and blockading them. And we wonder that they are .starving! We wonder why Lenin's power is growing ! We wonder why the Russians regard our protestations of democracy with suspicion ! We wonder that brutalities are perpetrated under the goad of famine! Does any man know why we have left a forlorn band of men freezing in the perpetual darkness of the Murmansk regions ? Can any man explain why we are keeping soldiers, who joined up in 1914 to fight the Germans, at Baku ? Will any man be able to give a coherent, ' account of the Japanese-Allied Army in Siberia? Why it is there at all, in support of Royalist Russian forces ? Yet I suppose some policy motives this condition of semi-war. What is it? And how can we make peace or talk about a League of Nations while this war is on—this shameless war of capitalism For that is its reason, no other. We who entered the war for freedom are fighting . our former Ally in the interests of money, in the interests of the old Russian expropriators of the soil and the people; we are fighting the peasants because the land has been given to them. And the root cause of it is —the fear of capitalism. S| '.■'>

Governed now ourselves by secret propaganda and secret conclaves, we swallow the lies about the Bolshevists; and their women as we swallowed the Kadaver lie. The -public do hot know! They are deliberately led to regard the Russians as outlaws and fiends, and almost every day some propagandist falsehood appears in our press,;, which in reality only discredits us. Wo cannot continue; this game. Either we make up our minds ; to , conquer Bolshevism—7-that is, j to fight the Russians back into bondage and; serfdom-—or we develop {aj; policy of reason. Now s the-military way would lead to ruin—absolute bankruptcyfor America would not support us,- other way demands statesman-

ship: applied"; sincerity. That is the position. And the longer a solution is, delayed . the greater will ~ unrest grow throughout Europe, and the nearer we shall approach the-collapse of credit, upon which our civilisation rests. You cannot' fight Bolshevism in Russia with force. It is an idea. It must be met and corrected by a better idea. In plain words, the secret caucus at Paris will find its Treaty and Covenant worthless unless it faces the Russian problem honestly and solves it oh the basis of self-determination with principles of political sincerity and economic .opportunity. ifSffs ;-.,,,.;'-'" - r t : '" ; ii £3 '-';"■;-' | That this can be done promptly and justly admits of no dispute among all cognisant of the Russian situation. The first thing is to raise the blockade, which will stand to our lasting discredit. The second step is to remove all the armies fighting against the Russians. The third step is to have a policy which, if the League of Nations is to possess any meaning at all, it should be quite easy to formulate so long as that policy is based =oh 'principle and not political or, still worse, Parliamentary opportunism (as is the case today), and that principle harmonises with the application of League of Nations law, supported by public sanction.

.'"'■ Russia cannot revert to Tsarism. She must work out her own destiny. So far, the Russian revolution has been the greatest event of Armageddon, the one certainly that will leave the most active impressions upon civilisation, and no force of man can to-day subvert it. In reality, Russia has freed Europe. She has given Europeans, that is, a new sense, which will make it henceforth impossible for kings and dynasties to organise Europe in units of militarism as a game of regal ambition. Without the Russian revolution, Europe would not have progressed, and, though Bolshevism may be an anarchic theory and self-destructive, it must be viewed historically ; we must regard it as a physical reaction, as a temporary expedient, as a social purging and puking of the foundations which have for centuries held Russia in the thraldom of servitude and stagnation.

To take the opportunist or journalistic view of Russia is to misunderstand ; is to prolong the warcondition of Europe is to make anything in the nature of a constructive peace impossible. The truth is, we simply dare not embark on a great war of destruction against the Russians, for, if we do, we shall have lost ? the great war, whatever Pyrrhic victories we may snatch, however deeply we penetrate into the interior of Russia. Russia will be the supreme moral test of Armageddon. Only a fool or a pigmy politician could hope to conquer Russia and hold her down, and the attempt would in a high degree of likelihood precipitate general revolution. That, of course, may be our European fate. Yet I can hardly think so. Our business is not that of European policemen. Attempt it, and we shall sign away the justification of our civilisation, thereby heralding our own doom. The treatment of Bolshevism is reason—food, justice, sympathy ; dare I write the word in this mad hourspirituality ? Only so can we regain .the mind of Russia, who in twenty years' time will probably be the dominant force on the Continent, the leader of thought, of art, of ideas—the pulse of the new Europe that will slowly evolve from the wreckage of the war.