THE TRUTH ABOUT THE BOYLSHEVIKI
Emma Goldman
The attitude of dense ignorance and stupidity toward the most gigantic event since the French Revolution, the Bolsheviki movement in Russia, is not typically American. All great movements have met the same fate in every land, since stupidity and ignorance have never been the monopoly of any particular country.
The Boylsheviki, like all revolutionary movements, have faced three characteristic stages. First, calumny, misrepresentation, hatred, opposition, and persecution. After that came ridicule, scoffing, and cheap derision of the movement. Finally, in the third stage, recognition—though stinted and grudging.
It took the great movements of the past more than a century to pass these varying stages, and that at the expense of untold suffering and sacrifice. The Boylsheviki have swept on and all but reached the third stage in just a few months.
It is indeed unfortunate that we in America depend upon the press for information on all urgent questions. Yet everybody knows that there is no other medium so hopelessly inaccurate, so much of a falsifier of facts, as the press. Not only because it is inspired entirely by material interests, and therefore opposed to every movement which is likely to hurt those interests, but because the profession of journalism is in the hands of the most undeveloped, uninformed, provincial type of men and women. People who know almost nothing of the social currents in their own country cannot be expected to even remotely grasp the character and purpose of a movement which promises the salvation of the world. Therefore the utterly stupid, conscious and unconscious, misrepresentation of the Boylsheviki.
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