Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/119

 recognized that wars with all the horrors and misery they bring, are of more or less benefit in mercilessly exposing and destroying a great deal of the rotten, defunct and the cadaverous in human institutions. The European war of 1914–15 is beginning to bring undoubted benefit, in revealing to the most advanced class of civilized countries, that in its parties has ripened a sort of disgusting, purulent abscess, and from somewhere there is being emitted an unbearable, cadaverous odor.

Is the treason to all their convictions and problems of the chief Socialist parties of Europe evident? It is to be understood that neither the traitors nor those who well know or vaguely guess that they will be obliged to make peace and friends with them—like to speak of this. But no matter how unpleasant it may be to various "authorities" of the Second International or their party friends among the Russian Social-Democrats, we must look things straight tn the face, give them their own names, in short tell the truth to the workers.

Are there any real data as to the position taken prior to this war and in expectation of it, by the Socialist parties? Undisputably there are. They are the resolutions of the Basel International Congress of 1912, together with the resolution of the Chemnitz German Social Democratic Convention, of the same year, which live as a remembrance of "the forgotten words" of Socialism.

Summing up the propagandist and agitational literature of all countries against war the Basel resolution represents the most correct and full, the most solemn and formal exposition of Socialist views on war and of the tactics in relation to war. We can not call by any other name than treason the fact that no one of the authorities of the International of yesterday and of the social-patriotism of to-day—neither Hyndman, nor Cheidse, nor Kautsky, nor Plekhanov, dare to remind their readers of this resolution, and are either altogether silent about it or they cite (as does Kautsky) the unimportant, while they pass over the important parts of it. The most "extreme," arch-revolutionary resolutions and the most shameless neglect or repudiation of them—such is one of the striking manifestations of the collapse of the International—and at the same time of the striking proofs that to believe in "the reformation" of Socialism and in the "straightening of its line" by means of resolutions alone is a belief only of people in whom an unexampled naivete is