The proletariat and peasantry, instructed by the Communists, began by hating the Czar, the aristocrats, bankers, factory managers, engineers, technicians, schoolteachers, dentists, undertakers, physicians, lawyers, priests and policemen, everyone who occupied any position noticeably superior to that of the masses. It took them about ten years to slaughter this lot, and then they began hating and killing the better-off farmers. I was there during the final mopping up of the first victims and again for the extermination of the second group, and as the last of the identifiable enemies of the Bolsheviks disappeared in the cellars of the G.P.U., or in the wastes of Siberia, we in Moscow used to discuss quite seriously what these furious haters were going to do when they ran out of “classes” to hate.
It was no joke. It had become indispensable to Bolshevik life to have an object of hatred and when the object was exterminated another had to be found. We guessed they would have to begin hating and killing themselves, and we were right. To us it was not surprising. When you lived among them, you realized that Communist “class hatred” is hatred of anyone who gets along better than oneself and there is just as much hatred of Communists by Communists as of capitalists.
In no organization has there ever been more back-stabbing, poisoning, strangling, murderous mutual hatred of one another than in the Communist Party, from the malignant Russian Central Committee through all its verminous offspring in the Comintern. They used to boast of the “monolithic” character of the Russian Communist Party. It was like a block of granite without a crevice. The Russian Jacobins declared they would never commit the error of their French forebears who found they could not stop killing when once they had started to kill one another. For years the outside world observed this Bolshevik self-restraint and there was much fear of it.
Then suddenly the prodigious store of hatred within the Bolshevik breast burst the bounds of self-preserving sanity and the apostles of Marx fell to killing each other with bewildering ferocity. Howling “Wrecker,” “Saboteur,” “Trotzkyist,” “Bukharinist,” “Rightist,” “Leftist,” “Nazi,” “Fascist,” they shot their own Soviet-reared professional men, generals, admirals, government officials, in a whirl of self-destroying madness which left even persistent Soviet sympathizers unable to explain what was going on because nobody, possibly including Stalin, understood it. It was like a mad dog biting himself, tearing out his own viscera. What could be the fate of the eviscerated animal?
Even before the war, in both Germany and Russia, the omnipotent, omnivorous State had devoured all but a vestige of happiness. As the two regimes of hatred went forward along their respective paths each lost gradually even the desire to promote the happiness of anybody, even of its own people.
In the land of the Bolsheviks, the bigoted struggle against men of another class became a struggle against men of another view. The internal political conflict impaired production, hampered the campaign against poverty, and protracted the wretchedness of the population. Nobody ate, drank, slept, lived even decently, much less comfortably, and there was no security. They had given up liberty for security. Now security was gone, for to their dismay the Bolsheviks saw that the one thing for which everything had been sacrificed, the defense apparatus, was inadequate.
In the land of the Nazis, the attempts of the Supermen to rule the world led the Germans to forget individual happiness as completely as the Bolsheviks. The Nazis believed that if they gave up butter for guns today, they could tomorrow win with their guns more butter; but the Nazi chief never had any intention of stopping for butter. In comfort-loving, once-bourgeois Germany, food, clothing, fuel, transportation deteriorated until it was impossible to find even a physically happy person outside the young armed forces for whom the nation sacrificed all. These favored youths found their chief pleasure in the exercise of a technical skill and lust in combat which enabled them to crush a continent with playful ease.
Now from the Atlantic to the Pacific, across the greatest continuous land surface on the globe, from the English Channel to the Sea of Japan there exists not one comfortable, secure, happy family. Not among the more than five hundred million persons now in Europe with its neighbor states could be discovered a trace of the happiness, imperfect though it was, which used to exist. The Nazi Bolsheviks had achieved triumph as far as Europe was concerned. The Wave of the Future had swept happiness from its path.
2. RUSSIA
Q. What is the best way for the United States to help the Russians fight the German Army?