tion practiced upon the soldiers or police who are picked out by one means or another to do the torturing and murdering necessary to defend and maintain the existing régime.
In all military instructions there appears in one form or another what is expressed in the Russian military code in the following words:
Article 87. To carry out exactly and without comment the orders of a superior officer means: to carry out an order received from a superior officer exactly without considering whether it is good or not, and whether it is possible to carry it out. The superior officer is responsible for the consequences of the order he gives.
Article 88. The subordinate ought never to refuse to carry out the orders of a superior officer except when he sees clearly that in carrying out his superior officer's command, he breaks [the law of God, one involuntarily expects; not at all] his oath of fidelity and allegiance to the Tzar.
It is here said that the man who is a soldier can and ought to carry out all the orders of his superior without exception. And as these orders for the most part involve murder, it follows that he ought to break all the laws of God and man. The one law he may not break is that of fidelity and allegiance to the man who happens at a given moment to be in power.
Precisely the same thing is said in other words in all codes of military instruction. And it could not be other wise, since the whole power of the army and the state is based in reality on this delusive emancipation of men from their duty to God and their conscience, and the substitution of duty to their superior officer for all other duties.
This, then, is the foundation of the belief of the lower classes that the existing régime so fatal for them is the régime which ought to exist, and which they ought there fore to support even by torture and murder.
