The New Crisis
WHEN all allowances are made for the reserve necessary in accepting Russian intelligence, especially that coming through Riga, which has a bad reputation as a centre for the dissemination of...
...It has now been in power ten years...
...But, again like the first French republic before it, only more persistently and flagrantly, it has erected its conception of government into a human evangel, and has claimed to be the natural spokesman and ally of every country that finds itself threatened by imperialism, and every social category upon which economic fact is pressing hardly...
...The theory that all Russians (like all Thebans of old) are liars may dispose of the stories of beating and gagging and searching of women employees by police that are sworn to by the staff of Arcos...
...This is moderate and dispassionate reproof...
...Winston Churchill and Sir Joynson Hicks," said a recent editorial in the Irish Statesman, pleading for more decent language in diplomatic messages, "speak about Soviet statesmen in exactly the same tone that they would refer to some rascal in their own country...
...WHEN all allowances are made for the reserve necessary in accepting Russian intelligence, especially that coming through Riga, which has a bad reputation as a centre for the dissemination of colored news, the outbreak of another Red Terror, after some years of comparative quiescence, was disheartening in the extreme...
...It is filled with the "contempt" which Lord Bacon has told us must be left out of any quarrel if it is to be solved without recourse to violence...
...The theory that Mr...
...Details published in a recent number of the New York Nation, and buttressed by depositions of several Arcos officials, go far to explain the painful impression created in so many English quarters, an impression shared, it may be noted, by magazines so little inclined to the Bolshevist view as the weekly edited by Mr...
...They do not dispose of the conundrum presented by Mr...
...Not only is the abrupt action for which an adventurous triumvirate in the British Cabinet seem to have been given a free hand unprecedented in international relations...
...G. K. Chesterton, and the Dublin Irish Statesman...
...The tone of those responsible is one which has not hitherto been used even between countries openly at war when some cartel restored momentary communication...
...There is in every nation a sentiment common to all parties in it, however divided, which expects a certain deference and courtesy from other nations in regard to the head of their state...
...Winston Churchill, whose aim on the morrow of war was openly a reconquest of Russia for czarism, still dreams of a lineup of powers that shall encircle and stifle Sovietism, may be inexact, though it seems to be taken into consideration by some statesmen at Geneva...
...Powerless to translate its sympathy into overt act, it has flooded the world with propaganda whose only result has been to put fresh weapons into the hands of exploitation and reaction...
...More important in its power to inflame and envenom opinion in Russia has been the manner of the raid in London, and the tone of all the discussion that has followed it...
...The main responsibility for this recurrent peril and insecurity lies, of course, at the door of the Soviet government...
...One may loathe everything connected with the outlawed rule of the Soviets, and yet approve its timeliness...
...Through famine, repression and misery unspeakable, of which Europe knows only a tithe, it has hardened into a system which the vast majority of Russians either accept or endure...
...Those few who care enough about history to apply the lessons of the past to the present, will inevitably be reminded of the grim daysl during which the French republic and Directory was fighting for its life, when every abortive conspiracy or expedition with England or Germany as its base was followed by fresh activities of the firing squad in Brittany or upon the plairt of Grenelle...
...Lord Birkenhead, Mr...
...On the other hand, it is impossible to hold Great Britain, with its imperial preoccupations, altogether guiltless for this recrudescence of barbarism and the prospect of a new Armageddon that follows in its train...
...The situation has grown to be intolerable, and most of all intolerable to the liberal thought which its support is misrepresenting and slandering...
...Such a joint note from the powers to Russia as recently suggested, insisting that the activities of the Soviet government be dissociated once and for all from those of the Third International, might, before it is too late, ease the situation, if only by taking it out of the hands of the British Home and Foreign offices on the one side and the Tcheka on the other...
...Had its energies stopped here, no more danger for the world outside would be present than is always latent when any considerable section falls away from the community of nations...
...Locker Lampson, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, who on June 23, 1926, informed the House of Commons that the chairman of the Soviet Trade Delegation enjoyed diplomatic immunity, and on May 16, 1927, after the raid, informed it that he did not...
...Unless this happens, only two alternatives remain—^battalions on the march, or a continued brawl carried on between two great peoples who cannot get at one another's throats, over hecatombs of political prisoners in Russia and assassinated Soviet agents in Switzerland and Poland, with consequences that one does not need to be the seventh son of a seventh son to prophesy...
...Unless signs only too familiar to Europe are belying themselves, or unless some diplomatic antidote, drawn from the terrible harvest of August, 1914, is to be counted upon at the supreme moment, it is no exaggeration to say that Europe seemed to stand nearer war last week than at any period since 1920...
...The parallel with the French Revolution, that fruitful mother of wars, is heightened by two later reports—one, that the British government has asked the Reich for "an exchange of views" on the question of permitting the passage of troops (presumably British) through its territory in the event of a break, and another, that Mussolini has been advised, also from London, that the time "is not opportune" for side-shows in the Balkans...
Vol. 6 • June 1927 • No. 8
