Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/126

 mands that we resist those who have disturbed the peace of Europe. This is a re-hash of the declarations made by all the governments, and of the rant published in all the bourgeois sheets of the entire world. Plekhanov even improves upon his usual Jesuitism, and says that when facing concrete facts we must first of all determine the guilty party and settle accounts with him, putting off till some other time the solution of all other problems. (See Plekhanov's pamphlet on The War, Paris, 1914, and a reprint of its conclusion in Axelrod's Golos, Nos. 86 and 87.) When it corner to sophistic dialectic Plekhanov beats all records. Sophists always manage to spirit away some of the evidence and even Hegel confessed once that one could build up an argument about anything on earth. Intellectual honesty demands that one investigates all the sides of every social phenomenon and every stage of its development, and all the visible manifestations of the various forces at work and of the class struggle. Plekhanov falls back upon a quotation from the German press saying that even the Germans recognized the guilt of Austria and Germany. And that sort of evidence is perfectly satisfactory to him.

He remains absolutely quiet on the Czarist plans of conquest in Galicia, Armenia and other parts of the world, plans which have been exposed many times by the Russian Socialists.

He does not make the slightest effort to look into the diplomatic history of even the last thirty years; that history proves incontrovertibly that the two groups of belligerents had set as their main object the seizure of colonies, the annexation of foreign lands, and the destruction of their successful competitors.