ROOSEVELT SCORES REDS
“Smash ’Em!” Cries Teddy, Jr., in Talks Telling of Perils in Radicalism
That was on Sunday morning. On Monday morning again, the “Times” had not a word about Bullitt, and not a word about the agitation over the peace treaty in Washington, the most important news of the day; the reason being simply that Washington was talking about the Bullitt report, and about nothing else! But on Tuesday, the British government issued a denial of some of Bullitt’s statements—one of those evasive denials whereby the gigantic trading corporation tells lies without quite telling them; so once more the “Los Angeles Times” was willing to mention William C. Bullitt!
I call up the “Los Angeles Examiner,” to ask if the Associated Press handled the Bullitt report. The “Los Angeles Examiner,” you understand, gets the Associated Press service—is one of the “forty-one vote” newspapers. Both the city editor and the telegraph editor assure me that the Associated Press did not send the “Examiner” a word of it—the most important news about Russia yet made available to the American people! Says the “Nation”:
No newspaper has printed Mr. Bullitt’s testimony in full or even in generous part; there were only three press representatives present when he testified, and he has had the invariable experience of having his testimony misquoted and altered, and interviews attributed to him which he never gave.
The Social Revolution came in Hungary. It came in an orderly and sensible way, without terror, without bloodshed; and how was it treated by Capitalist Journalism? It was treated just as the Russian Soviets had been treated—as an outcast and outlaw. All the power of World Capitalism was turned against the Hungarian Communist government. Poland, Roumania, the Ukraine, all made war upon it, with French officers and British tanks and American money; and at the same time the great lying-machine was put to work. The news agencies brought the report that Bela Kun had fled to the Argentine; and two days later that he was about to be overthrown in Budapesth! All the power of American Journalism was set to keeping the workers from realizing that a nation of fifteen or twenty million people had overthrown the profit system, and was making a success of the Co-operative Commonwealth.
I have before me some letters from a correspondent in Budapesth, representing one of the most influential and supposed-to-be-respectable of the great New York newspapers. This correspondent explains that she sends her articles with the instructions that they shall be published as written or not at all—and they are not published. “One of my confrères here had an article twisted and turned about so badly that it meant exactly the opposite of what he knew and wrote to be true.” And there is a group of correspondents in Budapesth, all having the same experiences, it appears:
Their economic sentences are cut out of articles and their radical articles are paid for but never printed. There isn’t a day passes that we don’t have an indignation meeting. One man wrote a long article for one of the prominent magazines two months ago alluding to the new order. He received a fat check with the letter announcing that the article could not be used; they wished him to write more moderately. Since my trip to Hungary and my conviction that Budapesth is the only honest place in Europe outside Russia, I am not any longer willing to write “moderately.”
Only once before in modern history was there a crime like this—when the kings and emperors of Europe went to war to wipe out the French revolution, which their hired propagandists described in precisely the same terms as we now see applied to the Bolsheviki. Then it was political revolution, now it is social revolution; but the program is the same—the earth is to be soaked with the blood of revolutionists, their new ideal is to be corrupted in the military campaign necessary to its defense, and the world is to be made safe for another Holy Alliance—this time of the profit-system, of Industrial Exploitation. It is for the people, who pay for all privilege and maintain all parasites, to decide whether history shall repeat itself to the full; whether the Holy Alliance of World Capitalism is to crush for another century the hopes of the working masses of the world.