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bourgeoisie sidetrack the German workers. It must find popular men. who will make it their special business to preach against Red terror. Such a man is Ledebour. The German bourgeoisie could not have found anybody better fitted to serve its ends. A man who for several decades took part in the Labour movement. and who is fairly popular as a mass speaker, a man who himself suffered at the hands of the bourgeoisie for the Labour cause, now goes from meeting to meeting, and with an ardour worthy of a better cause, proves that it is "immoral" and inadmissible for a worker to raise a punitive hand against the bourgeoisie. What more can the bourgeoisie desire?
Before the Halle Congress, when the conflict was specially acute, Dissmann and Crispien started to spread lies in the press and at meetings to the effect that the Left Independents were going to use terror in their struggle against the Rights and had organised for that purpose an "Assassins' Committee" ("Morder Zentrale"). It need hardly be said that the bourgeoisie of Germany was not slow in seizing upon this legend.
But this is not all. When the question of terror was debated in connection with my deportation, the Right Independents sent forward Ledebour as their spokesman, who played a very mean game. When Konnen, the speaker of the Left Independents charged the German generals with being guilty of the imperialist war, and of the murder of millions of men, when Konnen reminded the deputies of how the White Guard officers shot innocent workers in the streets of Berlin and other towns, Ledebour flung in the speaker's face the accusation that the Communists in Germany during the January days and later were organised in a "Communist Committee of Assassins."
Of course, all the White Guards in the German Reichstag howled with delight when they heard such a "revelation"! This debate in the Reichstag is undoubtedly the precursor of an epoch of new persecutions against the Communists. The bourgeoisie is preparing a new massacre of the German workers. Everything points to it! And under the circumstances such an accusation emanating from Ledebour is more valuable to the German bourgeoisie than a gold mine. We can state without exaggeration that Ledebour has paved the way
