Page:Samuel Gompers - Out of Their Own Mouths (1921).djvu/190

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OUT OF THEIR OWN MOUTHS

fate of hundreds of millions of workers in the capitalist countries depends on this fact.

In our country we experienced such a manifold shaping of events in the Kerensky period, among the Social Revolutionists and the Social Democrats, such a variegated color scheme in the various towns of Russia, that we may say that we have been tested more than any other people. If we look toward Western Europe we shall see that the same thing is now going on there that happened in our country. We are beholding a repetition of our own history.

This is nothing less than revolutionary chauvinism, similar to the doctrine of the French revolutionists when they undertook to force their creed on other peoples by the aid of the bayonet. But it is infinitely more crude. For while France was one of the most advanced countries of Europe, Soviet Russia is one of the most backward.

The Communist Internationale is now functioning in the United States and declares as its principal immediate object the destruction of the American Federation of Labor. By methods of secrecy, by its hold upon certain entirely foreign elements who do not understand anything about American conditions or American labor organizations, by the laid of the large sums it receives from Russia and by the sympathy and assistance it secures from our numerous "parlor Bolshevists" this organization is able to give considerable trouble to the American Labor movement.

The danger very largely takes the form of publications supporting the Soviet cause in the United States. Only a few of these are openly Communist. But a large number of publications and writers take the Communist posi-