Page:The Third International to the Workers of all Countries Concerning the Polish Question (1920).pdf/6

 But bourgeois France intends to make use of Poland not only in the presumed coming war with Germany..France intends to force upon her the duties of executioner of Soviet Russia, to compell her to stifle that country with her own hands, and the sooner the better—at all events, if possible, before the victory of the working class in Germany. If by the time of that victory Soviet Russia is wiped off the face of the earth Marshal Foch will occupy, unimpeded, the Rhine coal basis with black and yellow troops, cutting off the proletarian German revolution from its most important source of life and of power. Once the Russian and the German revolutions are severally settled the French exploiters calculate that to put an end to the insurrection of thertheir [sic] own proletariat will be a comparatively easy matter.

This is the reason why France is so persistently, so anxiously encouraging Poland to fight Soviet Russia. The reason for the impatience evinced by France is the apprehension lest the Worker Peasant Government in Russia gather sufficient strength to impress Poland of the hopelessness of her, Poland's, undertaking, and lest the movement of the Polish Working masses, which is growing from day to day compell the ruling classes of that country to repudiate this military adventure.

What is the attitude of capital, which his a presentiment of its inevitable ruin, towards the adventurous policy of independent Poland? Independent Poland did not arise as the result of the insurrection of the wide Polish misses. The wide masses of Poland submissively bore the yoke of national oppression, mutely dying for their several «fatherlands» at once in the war, or, in the person of the leading Polish proletariat, closing its ranks under the banner of socialism, bravely fought against the war. The ruling landlord and capitalist classes of Poland made use of the banner of independence to carry on during the war an auction with the three governments with whom they wore historically connected. The Polish landlords in Galicia clamoured for Polish «independence» under the sceptre of the Hapsburgs, giving up all idea of the liberation of the Poles groaning under the yoke of the Hohenzollerns—for the simple reason that Wilhelm Hohenzollern was the friend and the ally of that same Carl Hapsburg who was the Polish landed gentry's nominee for the throne of the future independent Poland. On the other side of the trenches