Now reaction is in full swing. The actual reality is even darker than
our worst predictions. Liberty is dead, and white terror on top
dominates the country. Free speech is a thing of the past. Not a city in
the whole wide land but that forbids the least expression of an
unpopular opinion. It is descriptive of the whole situation that after
thirty years’ activity in New York, we are unable—upon our return from
prison—to secure any hall, large or small, to lecture even on the
subject of prison life or to speak on the question of amnesty for
political and industrial prisoners. The doors of every meeting place are
closed to us, as well as to other revolutionists, by order of the powers
that be.
Free press has been abolished, and every radical paper that dares speak
out, is summarily suppressed. Raids of public gatherings, of offices,
and private dwelling places, accomplished with utmost brutality and
uncalled for violence, are of daily occurrence throughout the United
States. The headquarters of Anarchists, of Socialists, of I. W. Ws., of
the Union of Russian Workers, and numerous other progressive and
educational organizations, have been raided by the local police and
Federal agents in practically every city of this country. Men and women
are beaten up indiscriminately, fearfully clubbed and blackjacked
without any provocation, frequently to be released afterwards because no
offence whatever could be charged against them. Books and whole
libraries of “radical centers” are confiscated, even text books of
arithmetic or geography torn to shreds, furniture destroyed, pianos and
victrolas smashed to kindling wood—all in the name of the new Democracy
and for the safety of the glorious, free Republic of these United
States.
The half-baked radicals, their hearts as soft as their heads, now stand
aghast at this terrible sight. They had helped to win the war. Some had
sacrificed fathers, brothers, husbands—all of them had suffered an agony
of misery and tears, to help the cause of humanity, to make the world
safe for democracy. Is _this_ what we fought and bled for? they are
asking. Have we been misled by the fine-sounding phrases of a Professor,
and have we in turn helped to delude the people, the suffering masses of
the world? Is the great prophet of the New Democracy strong only in
rhetoric?
Pity the mind that awaits miracles and looks expectantly to a universal
Savior. The clear-sighted man, well informed, may reasonably foresee the
inevitability of certain results from given causes. But only a charlatan
can play the great Savior, and only the fool has faith in him.
Individuals, however great, may profoundly influence, but are powerless
to control, the fate of mankind. Deep socio-political causes produced
the war. The Kaiser did not create it, though the spirit of Prussianism
no doubt accelerated its coming. Nor is President Wilson responsible for
the present bloody peace. He did not make the war: he was made by it. He
did not make the peace: he was unmade by it. The social and economic
forces that control the world are stronger than any man, than any set of
men. These forces are inherent in the fundamental institutions of our
wage-slave civilization, in the social atmosphere created by it, and in
the individual mind. These forces are by no means harmonious. The human
heart and mind, eternally reaching out for greater joy and beauty—the
spirit of idealism, in short—is constantly at strife with the
established, the institutionalized. These contending social and human
factors produce war, as they produce revolution.
The powers that succeeded in turning the instinctive current of man’s
idealism into the channels of war, became the masters of human destiny
for the nonce. By a campaign of publicity and advertising on a scale
history had never witnessed before, by chicanery and lying, by
exaggeration and misrepresentation, by persistent and long-continued
appeals to the basest as well as to the noblest traits of man, by every
imaginable and unprecedented manner and method, the great financial
interests, eager for war and aided by the international Junkers, thrust
humanity into the great world war. Whatever of noble impulse and
unsophisticated patriotism there was in the hearts of the masses, in and
out of uniform, was soon almost totally drained in the fearsome rivers
of human blood, in the brutal, filthy, degrading charnel house of
elemental passions set on fire. But the tiger in man, once thoroughly
awakened, grew strong and more vicious with the sights he witnessed and
the food he was fed on. The basest propensities unchained, the
anti-social tendencies engendered and encouraged by the war, and the war
propaganda, are now let loose upon the country. Hatred, intolerance,
persecution and suppression—the efficient “educational” factors in the
preparedness and war campaign—are now permeating the very heart of this
country and propagating its virulent poison into every phase of our
social life.
But there is no more “Hun” to be hated and lynched. Commerce and
business know their interests. We must feed Germany—at a good profit. We
must do business with its people. Exit the Hun—_der Moor hat seine
Schuldigkeit gethan_. What a significant side-light on the artificiality
and life-brevity of national and racial antagonisms, when the fires of
mutual distrust and hatred are not fed by the interested stokers of
business and religion! But the Frankenstein and intolerance and
suppression cultivated by the war campaign is there, alive and vital,
and must find some vent for his accumulated bitterness and misery.
Oh, there, the radical, the Bolshevik! What better prey to be cast to
the Frankenstein monster?
The powers that be—the plutocratic imperialist and the
jingo-profiteer—all heave a happy sigh of relief.