Page:Samuel Gompers - Out of Their Own Mouths (1921).djvu/196

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170
OUT OF THEIR OWN MOUTHS

itself—is shown not only by the regime of Kerensky, but also by the present democratic republic in Germany, and by the attitude of Albert Thomas and Henderson toward their bourgeois Governments. Here is our main enemy; we must triumph over this enemy, and leave this Congress with a unanimous and firm decision to carry this struggle through to the end in all countries. This is our main task.

If that part of the labor movement which utterly repudiates Bolshevism is to be called "the upper ranks" then recent elections throughout the labor movement of Europe have proven that fully three-fourths of the membership is to be so classified.

Bolshevist enmity makes no distinction between the American Federation of Labor and the European unions adhering to the Amsterdam International Federation of Trade Unions. The fact that this international body was ready to declare not only a general strike but a food blockade of the Polish people and to forcibly interrupt the shipment of food and munitions to Poland, all in order to aid the Soviets to accomplish their declared purpose of conquering the Poles, counted for nothing in the minds of the would-be world dictators at Moscow. In spite of the servile attitude of nearly all the political parties of the Second, or Socialist, Internationale and of the controlling elements in the Amsterdam Trades Union Internationale, the Moscow dictators administer nothing but rebuffs to everybody who refuses to accept their absolute rule and demand that all existing organizations be wholly reshaped according to Moscow's revolutionary specifications.

The Bolshevists therefore decided at Moscow, last