Page:Lars Henning Söderhjelm - The Red Insurrection in Finland in 1918 - tr. Annie Ingebord Fausbøll (1920).djvu/140

 authorities at Helsingfors on the 27th February (the telephone conversations of the Tammerfors staff were secretly pried upon by the White): "A deputation wall arrive from Sweden under the leadership of Mayor Lindhagen—four persons in all. Our Swedish comrades' behaviour to us will depend on the way we treat the captive butcher guardsmen. Warn the staff there to see to it that the prisoners have no complaints to make. The prisoners will be personally questioned." How little a humanity of this kind was in accordance with the habits of the Red is seen from the next telephone conversation. It is Björneborg ringing up. "The Russians will not go to the front before they have plundered. What are we to do?" The answer is: "Let them plunder as many millions of citizens' palaces as they like."

The Red campaign abroad was very energetic. It employed many other means than that of the 600 live prisoners, who were exhibited with pride. It attempted to make the Social-Democrats of Europe believe that the Red were noble fellow-partisans who had been obliged to take up aims against a black reaction, and, above all, it tried to make it credible that the White army carried on with brutal cruelty. Finally, it was very positively asserted that the outrages committed by the Red which could not be denied were carried out by the anarchist elements which had crept into the army, and which it in every way attempted to exterminate. On the whole, the efforts were directed towards convincing the foreign countries—above all, Sweden—that the civil war was carried on by two equal parties, of which one was no better than the other, and that the only proper attitude for the foreign powers to take would be a strictly neutral one.

The value of all these assertions need not here be