Page:Karl Radek - Proletarian Dictatorship and Terrorism - tr. Patrick Lavin (1921).djvu/21

14 one hand and a terrible picture of proletarian despotism in the other. His book is entitled "Terrorism and Communism," not "Terrorism and Capitalism."

He does not tell how the American trusts in the "freest democracy in the world" sought for decades to bow the workers under the yoke of slavery by open and reckless violence (as witness Colorado!), or how the same thing in another form happened in all "democratic" States before the war. He does not discuss how the capitalist cliques plunged the world into the frightful five years slaughter without asking a single one of the nations involved its opinion on the matter. He does not say one word of how during the period of the world war the Imperialist dictatorship was set up everywhere, of how millions of the sons of the people were destroyed in battle, or of how in the towns thousands upon thousands were starved in prison. He does not tell how the revolutionary Kerensky Government, at the bidding of the Paris Bourse, caused thousands to be cut down at the front in order to bring about the July offensive of 1917. The history of terrorism in the present revolutionary epoch begins for him with the Bolsheviks. "The Bolsheviks in Russia began it;" and Herr Noske, who defended German Capitalism with machine-guns and mine-throwers against the German proletariat, is certified by Karl Kautsky, with extraordinary impudence, to have "followed boldly in Trotsky's footsteps." This Noske has the honor to be the subject of an "historical" investigation by Kautsky—not an ex parte work, however, because such an examination would disclose a certain connection between the dying system of Capitalism defending its power, on the one hand, and terrorism on the other; which does not interest Herr Kautsky, since he has written a book against Communism, not against Capitalism. This book has aroused the enthusiasm not only of Fritz Stampfer, of the "Frankfurter Zeitung," but even of the "Lokalawzeizer." We might ignore it altogether, but it exhibits so well the intellectual slovenliness of the worthy theorist of the so-called Second International that it is worth a few minutes'