The Daily Worker Newspaper, July 26, 1924, Page 11

By HARRISON GEORGE. The first Tuesday after the’ first Monday in the month of November, 1916, I stood in a snowdrift in the streets of Virginia, Minn., watching the bulletins of the election returns. Two of the I. W. W. leaders then most famous, Gurley Flynn and Joe Ettor, tended to favor Woodrow Wilson be- eause he had “kept us out of war.” . The syndicalist suspicion I held against all politicians did not fully ac- count for my foreboding that Mr. Wil- son would not continue his pacific role. He was elected on that supposi- tion, however. But hardly before that snowdrift had melted, Woodrow Wil- son had indorsed Morgan’s loan to the allies in the blood of American work- ers. : * * # Every one is “against war.” Every war minister of every capitalist gov- ernment on earth will assure you he is against war. Even while he is signing mobilization orders to throw millions of workers into battle and death, he will emphatically assure you he is against war. But only sim- pletons believe that capitalist politi- cians, who are necessarily the tools of imperialism, are not hypocrites—are not willing and waiting to send armies of workers to slaughter in the interest of profiteering exploiters. Gompers, too, is against war. He says so. But when he says so he lies. In 1917 he did not even wait for the war declaration. He helped to rouse sentiment in favor of that declaration before it was issued. Gompers called a special convention of the A. F. of L. at Buffalo in February, 1917, to pledge class collaboration. in the oncoming war. Woodrow Wilson addressed this convention, thanking Gompers for “loyalty” and threatening any labor element that “kicked over the traces” with being “put in a corral.” Those Who Were “Put in a Corral.” This is a story of those who were put in a corral. It is not a case rec- ord of war persecutions. It aims rather to give a survey of those pro- letarian elements and organizations which suffered persecution in the war, and how they emerged from the strug- gle. Neither shall I dwell upon the real persecution suffered by the petty bourgeois pacifist elements. What- ever their extent and degree, they count for nothing in the class strug- gle. They were individualists and re- mained individualists, objectors upon grounds of conscience not of class, If imperialism could exploit the prole- tariat bloodlessly, if capitalism could get its pound of flesh without one drop of blood—then the petty bourgeois pacifists would have no quarrel with capitalism. Inherently, in the last war crisis, they cared only for their “souls.” They quibbled over legal loopholes— if they should refuse to fight before or after mobilization, if they would or rwould not accept non-combatant serv- ice with the war machine. While all the Babbitts regarded these sweet souls as dangerous, nothing could be sillier. They were only a nuisance, not a menace, to capitalist wars. They did not divert the war machine for one moment. They will never stop any war. Moreover, until they cease their subjective attitude, and carry even their weak anti-war propaganda vig- orously into the ranks of the soldiers and sailors Who are to do the fight- ing, all their protests against war as an institution will be justly branded as insincere, - Littie Glory for Any One. However, even those who opposed the war not from a personal, but from proletarian or supposed proletarian reasons, have nothing in an organiza- tional sense of which to be proud. Unless, of course, one insists that it is the main purpose of revolutionists heroically te be dragged off to prison and gloriously to rot therein for a term of years. In this accomplishment all groups, even the socialist party, had to yield first place to the I. W. W. Only by War. Persecutions and Their Results the sentimental element was the St. Louis resolution of the S. P. against war taken seriously. Everybody knew that Berger’s opposition to the war was not proletarian, but German-na- tionalistic, disguised with a pacifist veneer. Oscar Ameringer went from St. Louis back to Oklahoma and joined the terrorizing council of defense to help persecute the naive socialist farmers of Oklahoma who took the St. Louis resolution te mean some- thing, and who took to the hills with their Winchester rifles prepared to re- sist conscription. The Rise and Fall of the North Texas Republic. I met some of these Oklahoma farm- ers in Leavenworth prison, together with those Texas farmers who, to show the world their resentment against the unconstitutional behavior lof the conscriptionists, seceded from the United States and set up the Re- public of North Texas..I believe the whole cabinet of the North Texas Re- public was at Leavenworth, altho I recall meeting only its secretary of war. He was then tending the flock of prison poultry. I believe his name was Bryant—a fine type of fighting farmer, and I recall two things con- cerning him, He was continually and visibly engaged in chewing tobacco, and he was patently disillusioned with the socialist party. The obscure rank and file were too unimportant for the fine gentlemen at the head of the S. P. to defend from persecution. The “League for Democratic Control” Gets Controlled. At Leaveifworth I met, also, the left wing socialist group led by Com- rade Earl Browder and his brothers. These were, perhaps, the most sophis- ticated prisoners of the war. They had few illusions. By organizing the ephemeral League for Democratic Control to “test the constitutionality of the draft act” it was hoped to dis- illusion others. Some of these others shared both the disillusion and prison with the Browders, but did not come out as they did to resume the fight. The most revolutionary plank of any anti-war program I know of was writ- ten into the demands of this organiza- tion, i. e., should be under the control of rank and file committees. No wonder Com- rade Browder and I met at Leaven- worth! But tho I waited there for five years, Berger never arrived. When he purchased immunity in 1919 by throwing out the left wing, I wrote Jim Reed—then at the first Commun- ist convention—that Leavenworth was only for honest rebels anyhow. In speaking of these rank and -file committees in the army, we must not forget the two “strikes,” or rather mutinies, of the military prisoners at the disciplinary barracks at Fort Leavenworth. The first one was quite a success, led by an “intellectual ob- jector,” Hi Simon. The second was ruthlessly crushed — according to grapewine from “the barracks” to “our” civil prison—with deliberate murders of mutineers in their cells. Vegetarianism in the Class War. The symbol that best represents the decline of the socialist party from war persecution is the change in Debs. Debs, who had threatened to lead an army of workers to rescue Haywoof, Moyer and Pettibone from an Idaho hangman, who had counseled miners to buy rifles and machine guns, be- came, by passing thru the war perse- cution, the typical petty bourgeois pacifist, preaching Christly sweetness and non-resistance—a staunch uphold- er of vegetarianism in the class war. In prison I have seen strong men weep like children, those thought most courageous to turn into arrant cow- ards—rationalizing their cowardice with polemics as to tactics, men re- spected and still respected by thou- sands treating an imprisoned comrade no better than a prison guard would have done—just to curry favor with officials and receive some slight ben- efit. So I am not surprised to see what, by comparison, is a comparative- ly innocent change in Debs, from a (Continued on Page 5) The Real World War is Coming (Continued from page 2.) secret archives of their government, proved this. The illusions are gone. “God,” for whom the fair-haired English boy died in the Turkish desert, proves to be Henri Detering, the oil man. “My Country,” for which the French boy strewed his guts on Flanders Field, proves to be Mr. Lou- cheur who has iron mines in Lorain and who could make profits out of the Ruhr coal. “Democracy,” for which 77,000 American boys were buried in France, proves to be the board of directors of the United States Steel Corporation, “Der Vaterland,” faded before the suffering German. work- ing-class boy into the picture of his boss, Mr. Stinnes, interested in the twelve-hour workday. The illusion is gone. But the substance is not gone; in the absence of God, Sir Henri Deterr- ing still commands British armies and -fleets.- Mr. Loucheur runs France. J. P. Morgan makes presi- dents, and orders armies and war- ships to Mexico or Japan or where he will. New illusions, and old ones, patched up, are being made—they are being made for new wars. The New War. crisis. And the French, and the Sritish, have the same urgent com- mand: Get control of new territory to exploit or face your unemployed mobs at home! “And there is the Japanese capita battling for the great miles of China’s wealth, in his very back yard invaded by the big Powers of the West. The Japanese capitalist feverishly fights all he dares and conspires all he can to keep the Big Powers out. And he gazed in dread upon his new-made proletariat fast generating the culture that made its great neighbor Russia a free Soviet Republic over the dead bodies of capitalists, All, all of you, Imperialists!—get control of new territory to exploit— or face your unemployed mobs at home! But how can all get control of territories that are not enough for all? Some of the capitalist powers must lose and face their unemployed mobs at home. None will do this without first a struggle, in which to lose is to be destroyed. It is a life- and-death necessity for each; if the ambassadors fail, the armies and the navies must be sent, War is ahead. The “last war” was the practicegame for wars that will make 1914-1918 look like a time of With the end of the world war, the] peace. eause of the world war did not end. All. of the international _ oligarchies Know this, and are pre for new, more terrible wars. Foreign markets must still be had, foreign territories for exploitation—more than ever before. The American financial and trade agent rushes faster than ever to China; and there he meets in a/For surlier mood than ever, the same ‘British agent dnd the same French agent, each eager to snatch from the other for exploitation the flelds, with- out exclusive control of which Amer- ican capitalists cannot dispose of their surplus, and without which, therefore, they will close their immense plants in America and plunge into economic rel The need for foreign territories to exploit is net the only trouble of the capitalist powers. For in each country the economic system is hope- lessly disjointed. For six years each country’s capitalists and their govern- ment have been trying by every des- perate device to repair the system. six years they have failed; and they have fallen into a more hopeless plight then ever, Each sees the way out—war! Each builds up its army. The armies of today are bigger than they were in the Spring of 1914, More wealth is poured into the appliances of war. Poison gas and more power- tific pursuits. The Colonial Avalanche. At the same time, hanging over the imperialist rulers as a _ trembling avalanche, are the colonial peoples whom they long held under subjec- tion and exploitation. When the com- ing war starts, we will suddenly learn that the vast majority of ‘the world’s population—by far more than half— are colonial “inferior” peoples who ar but waiting for the chance to freedom. India is still present on the tip end of Asia, with 294,000,000 inhabitants who wish no longer to be the slaves of England’s few hundred thousands of upper class. China’s 444,000,000 have lived seven years at the border of proletarian Russia who tells her the way to freedom. When the real world war breaks, the imperialists will have even more to watch than their own proletarians. The Capitalist “International.” War is the only “way out” of its troubles that capitalism knows, and it is a way into more troubles of even more desperate nature. While prepar- ing for war, capitalism seeks other and supplementary “ways out.” The League of Nations was an attempt to form a huge international machine or “super-government” (or World Court) for adjudicating these life-and-death differences between the powers—the parcelling out of the world’s popula- tions and territory for exploitation without the dangerous resort to war; but life-and-death differences cannot be adjudicated, and the League of Nations has fallen into a wreck, and the “world court” into a sham_ to cover the faces of the plotters. “Another device is tried: the Dawes plan. It is the effort to eliminate by strangulation one of the imperialist mouths to be fed on the fast dimin- ishing imperial food—the effort to strangle Germany as a competing power, and at the same time to make ful explosives are the leading scien-|the German people into a subject col- ony for exploitation by the great pow- on This merely adds Germany, willy- nilly, to the ranks of the colonial peo- ples gasping for freedom from im- perialist domination. It clears the horizon for the German proletariat to see that it must now revolt and create another Soviet Republic. The Communist International. The great Communist International is in the field fast building up the international revolutionary organiza- tion—called the Communist Party in each country—which will do as the Russians did. These are fast being mobilized, “bolshevizing” the working class culture that was left over from before the war, freeing its ideology from the last traces of bourgeois il- lusion, changing revolutionary sects into mass parties, In all of the industrial capitalist countries the working class in plung- ing on toward revolutionary class consciousness—toward disillusionment in regard to the fraudulent patriotism with an international clique of bank- ers as the “patrie.” When-the work- ing class is mobilized for the coming war, there will be in each national army hundreds of thousands of men to slaughter for the criminal purposes of murderers who sit back at home in counting houses, Tens of thousands there will be in each army who have the revolutionary understanding and purpose of the Communist parties. In the solution of the war problem the pacifist will have no part. In the real world war, which has not just ended but is coming, more imperialist armies than one will be ‘transformed into red armies. These ‘will turn upon their real enemies, the capitalist rulers of their own coun- tries, and will battle for new soviet republics in all lands, for the social- ization of industry and the end of war’ thru the end of the cause of war— capitalism. ee \ that the armed forces’ who know that they are being sent . “ PERE ‘.