Page:Lars Henning Söderhjelm - The Red Insurrection in Finland in 1918 - tr. Annie Ingebord Fausbøll (1920).djvu/98

 was extremely difficult, for a refusal to join the ranks of the Red was dangerous if once they belonged to the co-operating trade unions. With threats and violence they were forced into the movement, and those who resisted compulsion as long as possible were disposed of with a couple of shots.

It may seem incredible that the greater part of the working-men had such a clouded conception of the situation. But nevertheless it was the case. All talk of starvation and oppression by capitalists being causes of the movement is false, for the insurrection did not break out because a sweated proletariat wanted to achieve an existence worthy of human beings, but because by the force of circumstances the masses had succeeded in establishing a dictatorship of violence, a terrorism which its leaders would not let go. And if we rightly consider how abnormal the state of affairs in Finland had been for the last twenty years, if we recollect that the whole people for two decades had aspired towards one single aim: liberation from political oppression, then we understand that in the soul of the people there slumbered mighty leanings towards such a thing as a struggle for liberty, a rising of the people, a revolution under any form. These were chords that vibrated to the lightest touch; it was a smouldering fire which could be brought to flame up in a fury the instant anything inflammable came near it.

The leaders of the Labour Party were guilty of the greatest of crimes when they directed this stream of yearning for liberty against their own countrymen, against the first Government of independent Finland, against the most democratic of all parliaments. When they pointed out those who had fought in the first rank against Russian oppression, and were the most pronounced democrats and most eager fighters for Finland's