Page:Karl Radek - Proletarian Dictatorship and Terrorism - tr. Patrick Lavin (1921).djvu/57

50 of the firm of "castrated Marxism," now repeats with his master that terrorism is absolutely immoral; and the brave George Ledebour foams at the mouth against the immorality of the Bolshevist Terror. George Ledebour, in defense of himself, can point to the fact that in the Kerensky epoch he protested energetically at the Stockholm conference of the Zimmerwaldians against the terrorism of the Kerensky Government. Messrs' Kautsky and Co. cannot even plead humanitarian confusion in extemiation of their conduct. They were silent while Russian soldiers, peasants and workers were driven to fight in the interests of Entente capital with all the means of the most savage terrorism. They were silent when the Kerensky Government threw into prison the revolutionary peasants who had organized themselves to expropriate the large landowners; when it sent punitive expeditions against the peasants and for the defense of the landlords; when it ruthlessly persecuted thousands of workers on account of their Bolshevik propaganda; when it suppressed the Bolshevist Press; when it persecuted leaders of the Russian proletariat as German spies. The apostles of morality only discovered the absolute immorality of terrorism when the question arose whether the proletariat should, with tooth and nail, defend their power and endeavor to secure the possibility of freedom. Then these Marxians, who had hitherto taught the proletariat that there was no such thing as absolute truth, and no absolute moral law, discovered that the proletariat had the right to conquer when they could do so without endangering human life. If they are so solicitous for human life why do they see only the sacrifice of the Extraordinary Commission, and not the masses who must starve because the Russian bourgeoisie, with the help of Entente capital, destroyed the railway bridges in order to disorganize traffic; because the Russian bourgeoisie begin an offensive against Soviet Russia which has no prospect of military success but can only hope to destroy the harvests so as to compel the masses to capitulate through hunger. But if the accusation of immorality, which