Rabindranath Tagore, certainly no savage Bolshevik, renounced the knighthood conferred upon him by the King of England, and declared that the "severity of the punishment inflicted upon the unhappy people was without parallel in the history of civilized nations from the most remote period." This appeared in the "Manchester Guardian" on 7th June, the very time that Herr Kautsky was putting the finishing touches to his work on Terrorism. Herr Kautsky has not noticed the bloody fight of M. Clemenceau against the workmen of Paris who, on the First of May, exercised their "democratic right" to demonstrate for Soviet Russia. And we are sure that if after the enthusiastic circulation of his latest pamphlet by the Anti-Bolshevist League, a second edition appears, we shall find collected all the stories of cruelty which the capitalist Press has scattered broadcast about Soviet Hungary, but nothing about the thousands of proletarians whom the Hungarian rulers, with the assistance of the Entente, offered up as a sacrifice in the holy war for Capitalism and democracy.
His whole theory of the "softening influence of democracy on manners" conceals a simple fact. In the period from 1871 to 1918 there was no attempt in Europe, except in Russia, to overthrow bourgeois society. The proletariat accommodated themselves to capitalist rule, and sought to improve their position within the framework of Capitalism. Therefore, apart from "little" massacres in France, as in Italy, Austria and North America, the wantonness of the capitalist policemen subsided, because the bourgeoisie could afford to renounce the use of excessive force against the proletariat. In the colonies, where the proletarized peasants, in their ignorance of Marxism, ventured to rise in revolt, they were overthrown according to all the rules of the art of militarism. The softening of manners consists in the fact that the bourgeoisie do not murder the workers, by whose sweat they live, because it is not only unnecessary, but would even be prejudicial to the interest of the profit-takers.
