A Dirty Lie
In the “Daily Chronicle” of Jan. 24th appears the following, purporting to be sent by that paper’s “diplomatic correspondent.” It occurs in a pronouncement dealing with Wilson’s proposal to ask Russian representatives to a conference on one of Prince’s Islands.
The conditions of existence in Russia were shown to be appalling; the nationalisation of women and other facts of Bolshevik rule pointed to a species of organised depravity.
Whoever this “diplomatic correspondent” may be he is a filthy-minded liar. His statement that the Russian Revolutionaries have nationalised women is so ridiculous one would think only the mental and moral dregs of the bourgeoisie could swallow it. It bears the impress of the organised campaign of slander and villification which the parasitic ruling class invariably launch against any section of the working class which has the temerity to challenge its supremacy. Such stuff is written for working-class consumption. Our masters, arguing that a class which will for ages permit themselves to be plundered by another class must be fools indeed, never hesitate to show their contempt for working-class intelligence, and too often they are justified by results. But in this instance, surely, they have reached a little too deep into their mental cesspool in their eagerness for unnameable filth to throw at those they are at a loss to combat in any other way. The muck they have reached up reveals its source in its stench. It stinks of capitalism. It reeks of the system in which, as notorious cases at present before the Courts show, the young beautiful women—nay, children, for “suffer little children to come unto me” is no less the command of the capitalist ravishers than the capitalist Christ, and their victims often are dead and buried before they can be called women—of the working class are at the disposal of the “rich friend”—private monopoly, not nationalisation! Note the difference.
No, working class revolution has never yet failed to effect a moral cleansing. When the Commune of Paris was in being the prostitutes of Paris flocked to Versailles, to their bourgeois patrons. In Paris no woman had to sell herself for food under the Commune. Prostitution is a pillar of capitalism, a common foundation of starvation wages. That this feature of the system of private property should assume a “nationalised” form along with the “nationalisation” of all the other means by which they are enabled to plunder the workers easily enough suggests itself to the filthy minds of the capitalists, and it goes without saying that there will be some mugs in the workers’ ranks ready to swallow the noxious concoction.
J.