The Challenge of Bolshevism by Buxton D. F.;

The Challenge of Bolshevism by Buxton D. F.;

Author:Buxton, D. F.; [Buxton, D. F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-05-15T00:00:00+00:00


THE MORAL OF THE GREAT WAR

To the minds of Russia’s masses, made receptive by their sufferings during the war (we are apt to forget—if, indeed, we ever realized—how far more extreme these sufferings were in Russia even then in France or Belgium), the Great War stood as an overwhelming demonstration of the universal bourgeois faith in every method of brute force. We should study the history of 1914 to 1917 in Russia to realize how the culminating lesson of history for them was burnt into their souls. The Communists were not slow to point the moral. Let them use the same weapons as the bourgeois Government, but for ends which were really worth while—the liberation of the Peoples of all the world in place of their endless degradation. Similarly, in the Settlement of 1918, and in the Secret Treaties which so soon came to light, people saw the express repudiation of every moral principle, and even of specific promises for which the Allies had professed to fight. Here was the crowning indictment of bourgeois ethics and religion. Let us at least be honest, said the Communist instructors, let us have done with all the shams, all the hypocrisy of bourgeois ‘morality’ and bourgeois ‘religion,’ let us profess to believe only in that which is a demonstrable scientific truth, let us plant our feet squarely and honestly on the naked rock of materialism.

The Communist standpoint is roughly as follows: the ultimate objective is a democracy where all individuals, so far as human means can procure it, shall enjoy equal opportunities, and the descendants of the former ‘upper’ class shall suffer from no prejudice whatever. But the transition stage has, of necessity, to partake of the nature of a war. The existence of the new order of society is so constantly and dangerously menaced by the hostility of Foreign Powers, and by the Whites who are continually intriguing with them, that activities likely to become dangerous to the State simply cannot be allowed. Despotism of the Government appears as essential as it is to a general in the field, and the life, liberties, and property of individuals cannot be considered too nicely when the fate of the Cause, the freedom and lives of the people as a whole, and the gains of all the costly victories of the past, are hanging in the balance.

We do, in fact, find that in Russia to-day such members of the middle class as accept the new State, and are prepared to be loyal to it (and there are quite a large number of such people), escape the imprisonment and persecution to which it is often supposed (outside Russia) that they all alike are victims. There are many, indeed, in the employ of the Government. Against them as individuals there is no animus, at any rate on the part of the leaders; it is against the bourgeois ideas—i.e., their whole conception of society—and against their existence as a separate and superior class, that unrelenting war has been declared.



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