ao ini

CAN dimly remember the

birth of the century, the fig-
ure XX in shop windows, the talk
of the grownups about a “histori-
cal date,” the fancy dresses and
the toasts to ““A new century!”

And far from Moscow, in the
Siberian village of Shushenskoie,
Lenin spent a _ sleepless night
writing an article in the first
workers’ paper, Iskra (The
Spark). Perhaps he thought to
himself: “From this spark will
burst a flame... .”’ For Russia
was silent and few were those
who guesed what lay in her heart.

The bourgeois of the West
would smile when Russia was
mentioned. He wag somewhat
troubled by the silence of this
sphinxlike country, its size and
the stories about those “nihilists.”
He knew that Russia was the
home of the odd and famous writ-
er, Count Tolstoy. But the bour-
geols of the West was not over-
interested in literature; he was
far more enthralled by rates of
interest and by daredevil Coss-
acks.

Monied people met the New
Year gaily. Corks popped in the
expensive restaurants of Paris
and London, Berlin and New
York. Hotheads dreamed of, the
sound of gunshots: for arguments

“were in full swing over the last

slices of the cake. France had
clashed with Britain in the Su-
dan. Japan had swallowed Korea.
The Italians were turning greedy
eyes to Abyssinia, The Americans
had seized islands in the Pacific.
- Celebrating the New Year, the
English discussed events in South
Africa, where the Boers were put-
ting up a desperate resistance.
The gentlemen-in London were
worried that a certain young Win-

-ston Churchill had been taken

priscner by the Boers. These gen-
tlemen also marked the century
with a new invention: they put
the wives and children of the
Boers in concentration camps.
The Americans, not wishing to
be outdone, burned a few vil-
lages in the Philippines in honor

of the New Year: they were put-
_ting down a rising of the Fili-

pinos, who had not appreciated
the honor of being crushed under
a generous Yankee heel.
Disturbing news came from
China. The vultures had divided
up that vast country into spheres

“of influence; the people had re-

belled and this revolt, called the
' Boxers Rebellion, began on the
eve of the new century. Diplo-
mats were reaching an agreement
_ about its repression, which was

~ eventually entrusted to Field Mar-

shal Valderzee.

Everyone was most anxious for
China to be pacified: Prussian
” Junkers ‘and French radicals,
Nicholas Romanov and the gen-

». tlemen.in London, Samouris and

‘o-Chieago businessmen. They could
“stil! unite ‘for war purposes. But

~

ae

") opal

‘ohey’ could’ no longer unite for
“An international confer-
. ace. I et ‘at The Hague. Diplo-
‘mats. talked of. the necessity to
limit armaments, but there the
matter ended, while armaments

_ continued to increase.
5 e

' The monied world peorhent: un-
- shakable. “True enough, the towns
ie France occasionally resounded
“with the strains of the Interna-
’ ‘tionale, or ‘the volleys of the re-
__ pression. But the French bourge-
ois knew well enough that at the

. side of the “Socialist” Millerand —

“dnl the government. sat General
- Gallifet, who had. drowned” the
‘Paris Commune in“ bléod,”

“The French bourgeois still ee

_. firmly on his feet and could af-
eet to be disturbed that a mil-
_ itary tribunal had condemned the
. innocent Dreyfus; he could allow
- himself to admire poets who ex-
tolled disorder; he was convinced
that the Eger ite had established
was’ eternal.

‘Tt is: true’ that ' Liebknecht and

aes

Bebel spoke of the rising votes:

cast for Social Democrats. But
every self-respecting bourgeois
was convinced that the people
who voted for Liebknecht and
Bebel would go quietly to fight
for the Kaiser and Krupp.

It is true that strikes occasion-
ally “broke out in America; the
more daring protested against the
newly born “Steel Trust.” But the
businessmen had a blind faith in
the dollar and in the man who
had most dollars—John Pierpont
Morgan, head of the Steel Trust.

They all greeted the New Year
with confidence, these ghosts of
the past, these emperors and cat-
tle traders, these bankers and
colonials, the aged Queen Vic-
toria and the young cotton king,
Sultan Abdul Hamid, whose hands
were stained with blood, and
Schneider, the manufacturer of
lethal weapons, the French cap-
italist-and the leader of the Rus-
Sian provincial nobility, the mor-
alists from the brothels and the
humanitarians from colonial ad-
ministrations. Franz Joseph, who

remembered how he had dealt .

with the storm of 1848, felt sure
that nothing could ever threaten
his Apostolic Empire.

Noisy motors appeared. on the
streets, frightening the horses and
inspiring the businessmen. Zola

said that this new means of lo--

comotion would bring the peoples
together and so remove the dan-
ger of war. Ford wag interested
not so much in bringing the peo-
ples together as in the rise of
his income: he invented mass
production of these new machines,
‘The Edison company offered the
governments of various states a
most humanitarian invention—
the electric chair.

‘The clocks struck 12 in West-
minster and in the Winter Palace,
in the luxurious home of Pierpont
i Morgan and in the Cafe de Paris,
where the Parisian financiers
were having supper. “‘To the new

| Century”, proposed Kaiser Wil-
helm. “To the New Century,”
snarled Goremykin.: “To the New
Century,” said Dr. ‘Morgan in a
sasagtan cok a tone.

The first
fifty years —

The world which seemed im-
mutable to the men with money,
trembled at the very outset of
the century. Its fifth year showed
that the Russian people would not
sell its conscience, that it was not
prepared to replace stupid and
greedy landowners by greedy and
stupid industrialists.

Meanwhile, there was still no
agreement as to the sharing of
the cake. The Kaiser coveted
Morocco and even thought of the
Ukraine. Washington reached out
for Latin America. Franz Joseph

found Bosnia to his liking. A war
between Italy and Turkey was

shortly followed by a war in the
Balkans, then by a second.

Finally the first World War
broke cut: Poland torn and shat-
tered, the desperate battles of the
“ferryman’s house”. France and
Belgium trodden into mud, the
terrible battle of Verdun, the
snows of the Carpathians stained
with Russian blood — eight mil-
lion lives sacrificed. That was
how the century began.

©

We have not tried to establish
our own calendar; we have other
things to do. The first year of a

“really new era we modestly con-

sider the 17th year of the 20th
century. On that autumn day

the world was split in two; into’

the world of money and the world
of labor.

They ehteavouraa to strangle
the Soviet Republic. They advan-
ced on Moscow from the north and
from the south, from the east
and from the west. Starving and
running blood, Russia held out.
Winston Churchill, who inspired
this campaign, was not taken

prisoner this time; he poorly re-

mained in London. :

Meanwhile, in Versailles states-.

men were trying to divide the cake
and quarreling. The old world
was still alive, but how inhuman,
how senseless that life appears.
The men of money deafened their
ears with the clash of jazz, Like
automatons they. jigged in the
convulsions of the fox trot; they
sought forgetfulness, because the
age was not developing as Joseph

By ILYA
EHRENBERG

people and things.

Chamberlain and John Pierpont
Morgan had envisaged it.

The war still continued. Ger-
mans killed Poles, and Poles led
a campaign on Lithuania. Ita-
lians seized Fiume. Romanians
and Czechs encroached on Hun-

gary. Greeks fought the Turks,

The French were quelling Moroc-
co. Japan attacked China. Ita-
lians suffocated the shepherds of
Abyssinia. For three whole years
Spain suffered from Italian and
German intervention.

The men of money no longer
tried to ape the free thinkers. In
1900 they still could evince indig-
nation over the condemnation of
one innocent man. In 1935 they
applauded the murder of hundreds
of thousands of innocents. Italy’s
ruler was conceited and unintel-
ligent:. He began with castor oil
and soon reached poison gas. And
the democrats of London came to
a “gentleman’s agreement” with
this bloodthirsty clown.

In Germany there came to pow-
er a man who can only be consi-
dered demented. He was shaped
by the industrial magnates of the
Ruhr. He began with bonfires
composed of books and ended with

the gas chambers of Auschwitz. — Thomas —- who turned Out to Be

This crazy assassin was welcomed
by British humanists and French
radicals alike; they thought that
a madman at the head of a fully
armed nation might succeed in
doing what Churchill and Clemen-
ceau had failed to achieve: in
strangling the Soviet State. «
&

What have they made of the
20th Century? Their world strikes
one by its spiritual emptiness; it
is in truth a living corpse. Na-
turally, there still were in the
countries of Western Europe
great scientists, the pupils of the
19th Century, who enriched hu-
manity with their discoveries.
But the people with money used
their achievements not to benefit
mankind but to enslave and de-
stroy it.

In the second decade of the cen-
tury men died on battlefields, at
the end of the third decade came

the beginning of the world crisis,

and in the fourth—people were
dying in the streets, on empty plots
under bridges. In 1931 there were
30 million unemployed.

Then began the destruction of
Millions of
bushels of wheat were rotting in

the world granaries, yet daily peo-_

Ple died of starvation. Cotton
was burned in the United States,
coffee in Brazil, and in Denmark
milch cows were slaughtered. In

France, cotton factories were de-

molished, . the machines broken
up. Corn in Canada was sprin-
kled with kerosine, They grew
frantic in their effort to save
themselves; they could no longer
live in peace, so fell back on the

age-old cure of bloodletting; and.

the Second World War began,
Came a. terrible year in the
history of our century when the
insane cannibal who had overrun
17 nations threatened to destroy

human culture, SS men removed
monuments in Paris, fell upon the
Acropolis, burned children in the
ovens of Auschwitz.

The Soviet people saved huma-
nity. It saved Britain, not be-
cause it was the home of Mr.
Churchill but because in addition
to Mr. Churchill there existed a
great and proud people.

It saved France, not for Dala-
dier and Bonnet, but because
France belonged to the glorious
people of the sansculottes and the
Commune.

It saved the United States, not
because there. lived a man who
rejoiced that “the Russians will
kill the Germans and the Germans
will kill the Russians,” but be-
cause in America there are mil-
lions of simple and honest folk.
' But the bad were saved with
the good. What did Mr. Church-
ill, Mr, Daladier and Mr. Truman
do, no sooner had the world been
saved? They began to think out
ways of destroying those who had
saved them. They are incapable
of living peacefully and once
again are dreaming of a fearful
war. :

On December 1, the semi-official
French paper, Le Momde, publish-
ed an article in which Servan
Schreiber declared:

“Pessimists (among whom I
include myself) see the West in .
a situation that brings them no
comfort: the Marshall plan is

practically in liquidation, the
Atlantic pact considerably de-

_ valued, Britain in desperate

straits and a Western Europe
incapable of organizing its own
life, American Senators who as-
tonish us with their frivolity,
and an economic crisis at hand.”

Servan Schreiber lays his hopes
on individuals and considers that
one man, one move, one will, can
exorcise the specter of inexorable
fatality: “It all depends on the
strength of character of a hand-
ful of men.”

But where are these heroes ca-
pable of saving capitalism They
had Forrestal — but he turned out
a paranoiac. They had J. Parnell

a thief. Of course, they have
plenty of thieves and paranoiacs;
even crazy thieves and thieving
madmen,

In addition, they have at their
‘disposal all the hardened crimi-
nals of Europe. Artaji, the mini-
ster of the executioner Franco,
has already been to Rome; dis-
cussions are in progress for the
inclusion of Spain in a military al-
liance. At Dusseldorf, Ernest
Bevin’s representative ig coming’
to terms with that well-known
“humanist”, Hugo Stinnes, and
other magnates of the Ruhr. Yes,
they can call not only on Stinnes >

' and Franco, but on all Europe’s

criminals, It is not likely, how-
ever, that this will save them.
They can rely on one ally only:
“death”. Senator Johnson (and
was Servan Schreiber thinking of
him when he spoke of the lack of
seriousness of American Sena-
tors?) declared that “the new su-
per atom bombs will calm publi¢
opinion,” \
This statement roused even such
an admirer of America as the
writer Francois Mauriac, who
said: “I cannot understand it,
perhaps I am old-fashioned. How
can a bomb that is more deadly

than that which destroyed Hiro-

shima, calm anyone? Can there
bein America or Europe a mother
who, tucking up her little one,
would say, “Sleep peacefully, my
darling, a new bomb exists’.”
Forrestal has long been outdis
tanced. Paul Hoffman, one of the

‘most important of America’s

statesmen, recently declared: “You
may be surprised, but Moscow is

thinking of conquering the United
_ States.” I do not know whether

his audience was surprised or not

but we have not heard that any

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PACIFIC TRIBUNE—MARCH 10, 1950—PAGE 4