I have
not taken any non-Bolshevist authority; I have not even restated his views
in a summary of my own, lest into the summary might be injected some
reflexes of my own critical thought. Bolshevism is revealed in all its
reactionary repulsiveness as something between which and absolute,
individual dictatorial power there is "absolutely no contradiction in
principle." It will not avail for our American followers and admirers of
the Bolsheviki to plead that these things are temporary, compromises with
the ideal due to the extraordinary circumstances prevailing in Russia, and
to beg a mitigation of the severity of our judgment on that account.
The answer to the plea is twofold: in the first place, they who offer it
must, if they are sincere, abandon the savagely critical attitude they have
seen fit to adopt toward our own government and nation because with
"extraordinary conditions prevailing" we have had introduced conscription,
unusual restrictions of movement and of utterance, and so forth. How else,
indeed, can their sincerity be demonstrated? If the fact that extraordinary
conditions justified Lenine and his associates in instituting a regime so
tyrannical, what rule of reason or of morals must be invoked to refuse to
count the extraordinary conditions produced in our own nation by the war as
justification for the special measures of military service and discipline
here introduced?
But there is a second answer to the claim which is more direct and
conclusive.
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