Blasphemy and Bolshevism
574 THE COMMONWEAL October 20, 1926 BLASPHEMY AND BOLSHEVISM tor," in which girls who have...
...The details are so significant the more perverse cartoons printed by The Godless that, in spite of the fact that they are also harrow- at the Workbench, we agree with the experienced ing, we shall set forth a few of them here...
...themselves-and it is, to borrow a popular word, Here, then, is a magazine which may rightly be some text...
...Second, ground where it is now operative, the tremendous a series of what we should term "letters to the edi- infamy of materialistic scorn...
...But there seems to be an even more subtle Lastly, however, there is the most important concriminality abroad in Russia...
...of corrupting feminine fidelity and the little children The text is supplied for the most part by the readers over which it guards...
...Americans, it is true, have not been particu- is not a question of callous, indifferent unbelief: it larly interested in the matter for the reason that is truly the expression of "the spirit who eternally Leninism seems to them stupid and even, in a peculiar denies...
...We shall see...
...It is voiced in person of Christ is represented in connections so scana peculiar form of journalism abetted by the Soviet dalous and degrading that only a complete indiffergovernment and represented best, perhaps, by a peri- ence to religion and history could keep a spectator odical the Russian title of which means The Godless from righteous indignation...
...It is the kind of spir- cern of this venture into gutter journalism...
...More important than contributed by people whose vanity is obviously that, however, is the duty to oppose, on the very tickled by the chance to appear in print...
...lace had been more carefully shepherded by those First, an endless array of nasty and often indescrib- who were given power to govern it, the way might ably filthy personalities in which the clergy and other never have been opened for the invasion of chaos...
...yearns...
...574 THE COMMONWEAL October 20, 1926 BLASPHEMY AND BOLSHEVISM tor," in which girls who have gone to the dogs lambast the morality of their parents, and the Russian A RVGIME which has added so much to the equivalent for degenerate cake-eaters are permitted pleasure of the world as has Bolshevism is still to discourse upon the ignominy of religion or the spoken of kindly-strange though that may be-in advisability of putting an end to priests by various this utterly rotarian country...
...But here the sacred of one of his most important works...
...religious persons are mentioned by name and scur- But now chaos is here...
...Characteristically the format of our American Life or judge, graced enough, they place the blame for the subsisting vitalwith coarse but powerfully suggestive drawings exe- ity of religion upon women, and then shirk no means cuted apparently by an artist of Anglo-Saxon origins...
...The method...
...But though international censor- phemies certainly surpasses anything hitherto seen...
...dentally the government which subsidizes themThe Godless at the Workbench is a journal of should fume with wrath against those who refuse to humor and satiric propaganda which appears in about join in their satanic fol-de-rol...
...And the purpose...
...For the critic of Hochland in saying: "What this artist has information implied we are indebted to the German accomplished in the way of scurrilities and blasreview, Hochland...
...Here a real intellect has gone mad with ples and manifestations of it are sufficiently well hatred of the ineffable goodness of redemption...
...It is, needed the printed word, a paper which step by step of course, true that if the unfortunate Russian popuwould carry on this task of sanitation...
...The danger of infection is rilously attacked...
...ship has pretty well confined the literary output of This work is not merely cheap, vulgar, and uninBolshevism within its proper racial boundaries, exam- structed...
...The enitual fury which Dostoyevsky often alluded to and cyclopaedists and other revolutionaries have vented which is summed up pertinently enough in the title their spleen in the face of God...
...They concerned might well take notice of the facts...
...Small wonder that the editors-and incifashion, "behind the times...
...A hate which never seems quite very real, because the barriers of western civilization human breathes in these bits of gossip and slander, are not strong and secure...
...Optimistic souls who credit the Bolshevist ism) needed a destructive criticism of religion-a movement with a change of tactics where religion is steel scraper for the cleansing of their skulls...
...Third, there is the more derstand, as yet, how many tendencies converge in "scholarly" content -a number of articles which deal, Moscow-tendencies of manifold sorts toward eco- for example, with the fact that science has discovered nomic and spiritual rebellion, toward aesthetic and an island in which there is no belief in God because moral orgies for which a mankind nearer to primi- there is no society, or with the grim injustice of the tivism than it has been for centuries unmistakably British courts...
...Within a comparatively short time the taken as a symbol of what is going on in a Russia circulation has risen from 20,000 to 70,000 copies, once governed, as Stephen Graham has said, by the indicating that it is not an esoteric weekly but an ideal of pilgrimage...
...It known...
...Having seen some of at the Workbench...
...Perhaps we do not un- forms of atrocious murder...
...A jubilee number of the -no fresh discovery or method, but only an outburst journal thus stated it: "Obviously the workers (in of vile and vulgar blasphemy matched by nothing exwhose throats priestcraft was stuck like a chunk of cept the obscure and carefully guarded records of wood, thus preventing the assimilation of material- diabolism...
...In it there is no new, devastatorgan of opinion upon which the government proudly ing attack upon the principles of Christian conviction relies...
Vol. 4 • October 1926 • No. 24
