couraging the assassins of Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg and other proletarian martyrs. The courts of Justice of the bourgeois democracies solemnly legalize all the crimes of the White Terror.
The bourgeois press bears the impress of the golden calf like a trade mark. The leading newspapers of the international bourgeoisie represent a monstrous fabrication of lies, slander and moral adultery.
The state of mind of the bourgeoisie is just as feverish and unsettled as are the prices on its markets. During the first few months following the termination of the war, the international bourgeoisie, especially the French, trembled with fear before the oncoming Communism, measuring the degree of its immediate peril by the enormity of the bloody crimes it had committed. It has, however, sustained the first onslaught. The Socialist Parties and Trade Unions of the Second International, bound by ties of common responsibility to the bourgeoisie, shielded the bourgeoisie and made themselves the object of the first wrathful onslaught of the toilers. The bourgeoisie bought a temporary respite at the price of the uttter collapse of the Second International. The counter-revolutionary elections to the French parliament pushed through by Clemenceau, a few months of unstable equilibrium, the failure of the May strike—all this was sufficient to make the bourgeoisie feel confident of the security of its regime. Its class arrogance is as great today as was its fear yesterday.
The only method of persuasion used by the bourgeoisie to-day is that of intimidation. It believes no more in words, it demands action—arrests, confiscations, raids, executions. Wishing to play up to the bourgeoisie, the bourgeois ministers and parliamentarians pose as men of steel. Lloyd George drily recommends to the German ministers to shoot down their Communists, as France did in 1871. It is sufficient for any third rate official to accompany his inane report by defiant threats against the working class, to receive the loud approval of the Chamber.
The official government apparatus has become transformed into a bloody weapon to crush the labor movement. Alongside with it and under its auspices various private counter-revolutionary organizations have been organized and have started to work. They resort to violence in order to break strikes, to provoke disturbances, to trump up charges, to raid revolutionary organizations and wreck Communist institutions, to organize massacres and incendiarism, to murder the revolutionary leaders and perform similar deeds for the purpose of safeguarding private property and democracy.
Scions of the landlords and of the big bourgeoisie, petty bourgeois who have lost their bearings and the declassed elements,
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