Page:Samuel Gompers - Out of Their Own Mouths (1921).djvu/75



early as September, 1918, Mr. Wilson, then President, made an effective appeal to the civilized world against the crimes, the "barbarism," the "mass terrorism" and the "indiscriminate slaughter" of the Bolshevists. He called for all civilized nations to withdraw their official representatives from Soviet Russia, and every civilized nation without exception responded to his call.

The reign of terror continues and in many respects has grown worse. Again and again the Bolshevist chiefs and assemblies have re-endorsed terrorism. At the second congress of the Communist Internationale, in the summer of 1920, Lenin declared that "no dictatorship of the proletariat is to be thought of without terror and violence against the bitter foes of the proletariat and the laboring masses." Let us remember that this international meeting is the highest Communist authority and the principles accepted there are binding until the next annual meeting, and that Lenin and his immediate associates reserve to themselves the right to define just who are to be regarded as "the bitter foes of the proletariat and the laboring masses."

Anybody Lenin and Trotzky desire to destroy they first label "bourgeois," but they are just as ready to apply this term to laboring men or their elected leaders