Page:Karl Radek - Proletarian Dictatorship and Terrorism - tr. Patrick Lavin (1921).djvu/23



As a learned man Herr Kautsky has a natural desire to follow up the history of terrorism since the Creation. But, thank God! these "luminous" details are spared us. We learn only that beasts of prey, and especially our remote ancestors, the apes, knew no dictatorship. They lived for the most part on a vegetable diet which they "now and then supplemented with smaller animals, caterpillars, worms, reptiles and even unfledged birds." They never killed mammals. "No ape does the like," declares Kautsky, to our great peace of mind and to the greater damnation of the Bolsheviks, who, as is well known, take the lead in the destruction of capitalist mammals. But still the Jacobins of 1793 were before them, and as the Jacobins were overtaken by their punishment he devotes more space in his investigation to them to our venerable ancestors, the apes.

His condemnation of the Jacobins, the direct ancestors of the Bolsheviks, can be comprised in the sentence in which he compresses the French Proudhonists' opinion of them: "They (the Proudhonists) saw through the illusions which led to the Reign of Terror, which mislead the proletariat and brought them to a state of bloody savagery without taking them one step nearer to their freedom." Kautsky supports this opinion in the following manner: Robespierre and his Government wished as a party to represent the interests of the proletariat and the petit-bourgeoisie. When they attained to power they and the proletarian masses behind them sought to use the machinery of the State "in order to realize that kingdom of equality which the thinkers of the bourgeoisie had promised them." "As a result the poor Parisians came