449 AN OPEN LETTER 448 THE CLASS STRUGGLE the situation, and, therefore, should be more able to retain your faculty of clear judgment, would advise them, or at least not encourage them in their blind class rebellion against forces that are unsurmountable?
But nothing at all is heard from you, nor from other liberals. most curious situation has developed. America, which was expected to be the country to bring democracy into the world, is today politically more sterile than any other country in the whole world. Even from Japan we hear rumors and news of revolt, which cannot be without relation to the Russian adventure. In England liberal thought is using valiantly all avenues of expression. The English liberal papers are intelligently and radically criticizing the Russian policy. am enclosing with this letter for your information, if you have not happened to see it yourself, copies of articles in the London Nation and the Manchester Guardian, which well deserve your consideration. Here we hear nothing. One or two faint hearted whisperings in small editorials in the New Republic and in The Nation only serve as the exception which proves the rule. Not only are you not contributing anything of liberal thought to save the world from the tremendous danger of a rejuvenation of the blackest imperialism through the Russian adventure, but the liberal elements in America today are doing their best to squelch whatever liberal thought there is in Europe. Today your emissaries are in Europe on a special mission to extinguish liberalism. The presence of American troops in Siberia is used by the reactionaries to throw sand in the eyes of liberals in Europe and to whitewash anything that may be undertaken there by the imperialists.
Some time ago wrote to a person belonging to the Administration as follows. comparative detachedness of the United States from European politics, which you call the principle of the Monroe Doctrine, has been one of your peculiarities up to the present time, as long as you economically were more or less independent of Europe and Europe was independent of you. When the world war revalued all former international values, and America became a part of the world family not only in words, but in action as well, and your Monroe Doctrine became more or less a relic of the past, all lovers of international democracy rejoiced in the fact, principally, because they hoped that this would mean not America subjugation to outworn European diplomacy, but Europe becoming inoculated with the young virus of all that which is real in the democracy of America. Now am asking myself and would ask you: Shall America, now that she has the greatest opportunity ever given a country to bring new forms and new, clean views into world diplomacy and international relations, shall she submit to stale shopkeeper considerations of European diplomacy and not utilize the tremendous reservoir of democracy in Russia in order to strengthen America historical mission of bringing democracy into European policies. America, it seems, has not availed herself of that opportunity. Instead of that she has been induced, it seems, not only to serve reactionism, but, unwittingly, hope, to deceive the liberal thought in the world, or at least in America, into support of that reactionism, by giving it her indorsement, and the result of all this has been that we are now witnessing the paradox of the defenders of law and order and of a new freedom engaged in an interventionist adventure against the only force in Russia which is capable of bringing about order and the new freedom.
It is not less paradoxical that I, representing the ideas and aims of those revolutionaries whom your press is branding as the craziest fanatics, impracticals and visionaries, should talk to you urging practical and sane policies, orderliness, and political honesty, as against chaos and disorder.
For more than six months have been among you as a voice crying in the wilderness trying to hope against hope that rational thinking and common sense might mean some