Vilna, and are favored by mild weather. Their advance guards are said to be orderly, well clothed and well armed. They have committed no depredations except where they met with resistance.
And here is another from Berlin, Feb. 15, 1919, which
gives us the real reason for the world-wide dread of the
Bolsheviki. Ralph Rotheit, correspondent of the Berlin
"Vossische Zeitung," visited the Bolshevik line at Vilna.
He pictured the situation as extremely pessimistic, although so far
the Bolsheviki have always been defeated by the Germans whenever
they ventured skirmishing. However, Rotheit writes, the Bolsheviki do
not rely so much on fighting as on corrupting opponents by never-ceasing
wireless propaganda, and by sending emissaries into the districts
still occupied by the Germans, and by Bolshevik literature with
which the latter's positions are flooded. Rotheit says unfortunately
the effect of this propaganda at Kovno, headquarters of the German
commander, was only too evident, as in many other places on German
territory, as well as the Russian and Polish.
Here we have the real quarrel with the Soviets, the real
reason why they must not, cannot be permitted to survive.
They are propagandists; day and night they agitate, they
preach and they print—and for some reason, the more loudly
we proclaim that their propaganda is false, the more deeply
we seem to dread its success! Since when have we lost our
faith in the might of truth? Since when have we decided that
error must be fought with bullet and machine-gun? Surely
there must be some dark secret here, some skeleton in our
family closet!
The truth is that we have seen in Russia a gigantic strike, an I. W. W. strike, if you please; and it has been successful. The workers have seized the factories, and now we call for the militia to drive them out. The very existence of capitalism depends upon their being driven out; as the phrase is, they must "be made an example of." And so the capitalist press is called in, our great lying-machine is given the biggest job in its history. The Associated Press does for Russia precisely what Charles Edward Russell showed it doing for Calumet, what I showed it doing for Colorado. All our newspapers, big and little, do what they are accustomed to do whenever there is a strike in America—telling everything evil about the strikers and nothing good about them, clamoring for violence against them, justifying every crime committed against them in the name of "law and order."
Recently the Soviets, pressed by starvation, have bowed so
