Melbourne Unitarian Peace Memorial Church

Several weeks ago I gave an address at this church entitled ‘A pox on both their houses’. I set out to demonstrate the failure of either of the major political parties in Australia, and indeed those in any Western country, to meet the needs of their people. Indeed, I think I demonstrated clearly that the parties of capitalism exist entirely to maintain their status quo.

If my claims are true and a reflection of our experiences, we need to look at the way forward, we need to ask ‘whither’. We are, if you like, at a crossroads. We can decide to accept the status quo, or we can emulate our Unitarians forebears who fearlessly sought change.

If we decide the latter we need much courage and commitment – change is never easy, the alternative however is more of the same and can we afford the kind of society we have now or do we owe it to future generations to change it?

Can we afford to continue with a system that promotes wars of aggression, the booms and busts of capitalism that allow the wealthy to remain untouched but condemns the poorer sections of society to endless economic misery and poverty? Can we continue to condemn whole sections of our community to homelessness, loss of jobs, disenfranchisement and denial of social justice?

Or should we develop a charter for a new society A Better Society – a blueprint of the kind of world we all want and deserve?

I believe that there is already such a system ,whose name is hardly mentioned these days and when it is, it is either whispered or condemned. Indeed, when I raised with one member of this church that I may speak today on socialism, the response was, ‘I don’t think people will like that’.’ As a freethinking Unitarian, I need to ask why are we free to discuss capitalism, imperialism, globalism, fascism, slavery and serfdom but not socialism?
In yesterday’s Age on the front page, Kevin Rudd said when asked about Bush’s vigorous defence of America’s market capitalism, said ‘ This is not a debate between capitalism and socialism’ well … I believe it is or at the least should be.

In this capitalist world the word ‘socialism’ has been given the same connotations the word ‘Satan’ has to Christianity, or the word ‘war has to peace fighters, or the word ‘drought’ has to farmers. Tony Neil Wedgwood Benn, formerly 2nd Viscount Stansgate, is a British socialist politician, as in left-of-the-Labor Party socialist. This is a statement he made in the early 80s about capitalist ‘words’.

We used to have a war office, now we have a ministry of defence. Nuclear bombs are now described as deterrents, innocent victims killed in war are now described as collateral damage, military incompetence leading to US bombers killing British soldiers is called friendly fire, those in favour of peace are called mavericks and troublemakers and those who want war are now militants, whereas the real militants are those who want war”.

How words can be changed and be manipulated by the media! good words and their significance are generally changed by the capitalist-controlled media to manipulate public opinion. I have talked about these words before: peace, love, honour, comradeship and justice. These are the words of those who seek the truth and serve humanity.

Good words can change our lives. I have a beloved book called The Scalpel the Sword about a Canadian doctor, named Norman Bethune, who became an international socialist. He died of septicaemia while operating on Chinese soldiers fighting the Japanese imperialists prior to the Second World War. I have read this book at least six times and it never fails to inspire me. As he was dying Bethune muses on war. He said, quote page 259

‘I need sleep but sleep will not come. What is the cause of this cruelty, this stupidity, A million working men come from Japan to kill or mutilate a million chines workingmen. Why should the Japanese worker attack his brother worker, who is forced merely to defend himself?. Will the Japanese worker benefit by the death of the Chinese worker? No, how can he gain? Then in God’s name who will gain? Who is responsible for sending these Japanese workmen on this murderous mission? Who will profit from it? Is it possible that a few rich reactionary men, a small class of men have persuaded a million other men to attack and attempt to destroy another million men as poor as they? So that the rich men may be richer still? Terrible thought! How did they persuade these poor men to come to China? By telling them the truth? No, they would never have come if they had known the truth.

Did they dare to tell these workmen that they only wanted cheaper raw materials, more markets, more profit? No they told them that this brutal war was the ‘destiny of the race’, it was for the glory of the emperor, it was for the honor of the state’. False, false as hell.

The agents of a criminal war of aggression such as this must be looked for like agents of other crimes, such as murder, among those who are likely to benefit from these crimes. Will the eighty million workers of Japan, the poor farmers, the unemployed industrial workers, will they gain? No these never benefit from such wars….
It would seem inescapable that the militarists and the reactionary finance capitalists of Japan are the only class likely to gain by this mass murder, this authorized madness, this sanctified butchery. That ruling class, the true State, stands accused. Behind the army stand the militarists, behind the militarists stand reactionary finance capital.

What do these enemies of the human race look like? Do they wear on their foreheads a sign so that they may be told, shunned and condemned as criminals? No, on the contrary, they are the respectable ones, they are honoured, they call themselves and are called gentlemen. They are the pillars of the state, the church, the society. They support public and private charity out of the excess of their wealth. In their private lives they are kind and considerate.

These are the men who make the wounds.”

These were the last words of Dr Norman Bethune who sacrificed his life for others, he died at twenty minutes past five on the 13th November 1939, but his socialist words continue to inspire millions who want a better world.

For the profiteers, war is an important weapon for amassing power and money. These people amass their fortunes through war or extend their power through war, steal land and minerals through war, they use patriotism to involve our young in war, and they set out to convince the mass of the people that this is the only way, the patriotic way . We know that most wars achieve nothing but death and destruction for the many. Wars are fought by ordinary people who have least to gain and most to lose. Eugene Debs, famous and beloved American patriot said of war:

Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder … the working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish their corpses have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war, and they alone make peace …they are continually talking about their patriotic duty. It is not their but your patriotic duty that they are concerned about. There is a decided difference. Their patriotic duty never takes them to the firing line or chucks them into the trenches”

Tony Benn exposed capitalism, when he was a minister in the British government said:

I experienced the power of industrialists and bankers to get their way by use of the crudest form of economic pressure, even blackmail, against a Labour Government. Compared to this, the pressure brought to bear in industrial disputes is miniscule. This power was revealed even more clearly in 1976 when the IMF secured cuts to our public expenditure. These lessons led me to the conclusion that the UK is only superficially governed by MPs and the voters who elect them. Parliamentary democracy is, in truth, little more than a means of securing periodical change in the management team, which is then allowed to preside over a system that remains, in essence, intact.

If the British people were ever to ask themselves what power they truly enjoyed under our political system they would be amazed to discover how little it is, and some new Chartist agitation might be born and might quickly gather momentum.

Such words fill me with the determination to fight on and ensure my ongoing commitment to socialism.

There are many kinds of socialism: Hitler’s national socialism; the left of the ALP used to be called democratic socialists (now they hate the word even more than the Liberals; then there is the scientific socialism of Marx and Engels, which in the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China achieved in its short time so much more than capitalism has ever provided. I wont have time in this talk to compare the two systems over that period, but will do this in a later talk, today I wont to show how capital tried to destroy the young socialist state and the conditions under which the workers and peasants had to build their new society.

Possibly the reaction to my vision of socialism will attract the view that it has been tried and failed. Shall we then condemn the world’s people to a ceaseless capitalist system with all its wars of aggression, its millions of people deprived of their rights other than to live and die in poverty? Or shall we learn from the past and try again.

Russia was the first country in the world to build a socialist society after the First World War. China built its socialist society after the Second World War, but now both have now become capitalist in their means of production. Does that mean that we should not plan for a socialist society? After all, capitalism has failed dismally and continues to fail and will continue to fail because its basis is profit for the few and exploitation for the many. Even right wing Kevin Rudd has been forced to refer today to it as extreme capitalism. It is more than extreme it is capitalism in decay – the same decay of the Roman empire that saw the end of slavery.

Indeed, capitalism has never achieved the results that socialism did in the time that it existed in the world. We must examine and compare the two systems over the same period and draw some conclusions.

On 7 November 1917 the Russian people won their freedom through revolution, the most peaceful revolution in history. after the revolution was accomplished, at a two-day conference the leader of the revolution, Lenin, stood on a platform and declared, ‘We shall now proceed to construct the Socialist order’.

For all those here today who have absorbed the capitalist propaganda about the Russian revolution, I commend to you a book called The Great Conspiracy Against Russia written by two Americans, Michael Sayers and Albert E. Khan. Neither are socialists, not even left-wingers. Michael Sayers was a specialist in investigating and writing about the Nazi conspiracies in France, England and Ireland. He was also quite a famous author. Albert Khan was the Executive Secretary of the American Council against Nazi Propaganda. This book was first published in February 1946.

Professor Frederick Schuman, Professor of Government at Williams College in the USA, writes of this book and I quote:

The authors have brilliantly told a story which is more fascinating than any fiction and yet is sober fact, documented and indisputable even in its most startling and incredible episodes. Here is the fantastic tale of the long and devious series of plots against Russia from the White émigrés, anti Bolsheviks and interventionists of 1918 to the Trotskyites and Rightists of the 1920s and 30s, the American Firsters, Anti Semites and native Nazis of yesterday and the contemporary preachers of World War 111.

It documents that the Russian people’s revolution was not to go unchallenged by capitalism, which is not surprising when one considers the huge wealth of this mighty amalgamation of republics. Russia had the greatest quantity of almost every mineral needed by mankind, the richest source of wealth in the world. Would the capitalists leave this in the hands of the people?

On 23 December 1917, not six weeks after the revolution, representatives of Great Britain and France met in Paris and secretly concluded an agreement to dismember the newly formed Soviet Russia. According to its terms of reference, England was to receive a ‘zone of influence’ in Russia, giving England the oil of the Caucasus and control of the Baltic provinces and France the iron and coal of the Donets Basin and control of the Crimea. This secret Anglo French Treaty inevitably shaped the policy of these two nations toward Russia throughout the next several years.

In 1918, the position facing the Soviet Government was that Germany was preparing to overthrow it by force if the Russians refused to ratify the Brest Litovsk Peace Treaty. Britain and France were secretly backing counter-revolutionary forces that were assembling in Archangel Murmansk and on the Don, the Japanese with allied approval were planning to seize Vladivostok and invade Siberia. This information is all from the book The Great Conspiracy Against Russia and as Prof Schuman said, the documentation is indisputable.

The Brest Litovsk Treaty was ratified and a statement was issued by the Russian Republic stating that under present conditions, the Soviet Government of the Russian Republic being left to its own forces is unable to withstand the armed onrush of German imperialism and is compelled for the sake of saving revolutionary Russia to accept the conditions put before it.

By the midsummer of 1918, although the United States was at war with Germany and not with Russia, the New York Times was already describing the Bolsheviks as ‘our most malignant enemy’ and as ‘ravening beasts of prey’. Soviet leaders were being universally denounced in the American press: paid agents of the Germans, butchers, assassins and madmen, blood-intoxicated criminals and human scum were some of the typical terms by which American newspapers referred to Lenin and his associates. In the US congress they referred to them as damnable beasts.

By the summer of 1919, without any declaration of war the armed forces of 14 states had invaded the territory of the Soviet Russia. These were Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, US, Czechoslovakia, Serbia, China, Finland, Greece, Poland, Rumania and Turkey. They were supported by the counter-revolutionary white armies who wanted to restore the feudal aristocracy that the Russian people had overthrown.

Winston Churchill, who supervised the allied campaign against Soviet Russia, later wrote in his book The World Crisis, The Aftermath:

Were they, the allies at war with Russia? Certainly not; but they shot Soviet Russians on sight; they stood as invaders on Russian soil; they armed the enemies of the Soviet Government; they blockaded the ports and sunk its battleships; they earnestly desired and schemed its downfall. But war – shocking! Interference sham! It was, they repeated a matter of indifference to them how Russians settled their own affairs. We were impartial – bang!

By the end of 1919, the British forces in Archangel and Murmansk numbered 18,400; 5,100 Americans; 1800 French; 1200 Italians; 1,000 Serbs and 20,000 White Russians. What were they doing there if there was no war?

In the United States, there was a rising popular demand for American soldiers to be withdrawn from Russia. Despite the incessant propaganda this demand grew. On 5 September 1919, Senator Borah rose in the Senate and said:

Mr President, we are not at war with the Russian Government or the Russian people. The people of the US do not desire to be at war with Russia. Yet while we are not at war with Russia, while Congress has not declared war we are carrying on a war with the Russian people. We have an army in Russia, we are furnishing munitions and supplies to other armed forces in that country and we are just as thoroughly engaged in conflict as though a declaration of war had been made. There is neither legal nor moral justification for sacrificing these lives. It is a violation of the plain principles of free government.

The young Soviet government struggled for its life in the face of desperate odds. The country had been laid waste and exhausted by the world war. Millions were destitute and starving. The factories were idle; the land un-ploughed, transport was at a standstill. It seemed impossible that such a country could survive the fierce onslaught of an enemy with large well-equipped armies, vast financial reserves, ample food and other supplies.

Besieged on all sides by foreign invaders, imperiled by endless conspiracies at home, the Red Army retreated slowly across the countryside, fighting grimly as it went. The territory controlled by Moscow dwindled to one sixteenth of Russia’s total area. It was a Soviet island in an anti-Soviet sea. What had the fledgling socialist state done to deserve this? Simply put, they had introduced a new system based on a planned economy that was in the hands of the working people of that country and it couldn’t be tolerated.

I bring these facts before you in order to demonstrate the conditions that faced the fledgling Soviet government that was trying to bring order out of chaos. They were beset by enemies within, that is the landlords and the wealthy classes, using counter espionage, and enemies without, interested not in the Russian people or their needs, but with greedy eyes on the wealth of the nation. While the wars of intervention were publicly described as a political crusade against Bolshevism, in fact, the major factor was Soviet coal, gold and oil.

The two-and-a-half years of bloody intervention had high costs both for the Russian people and the interventionists. Some estimates placed the death by battle, starvation or disease at seven million Russian men, women, and children. In these conditions the achievements of socialism until its destruction by the Krushkev revisionist leadership were miraculous to say the least.

Hewlett Johnson, the Red Dean, in his book The Socialist Sixth of the World said:

I know only too well the deep-rooted hostility and prejudice that exist among certain strata of our people toward Russia. I would beg them to lay aside those feelings for a short space while they examine what this book has to say so that perhaps a fairer picture and a deeper understanding may take possession of their minds.

The Dean of Canterbury recounts his extensive examination of how socialism developed. He said:
Russia crossed my path like a brilliant meteor and flung down its extraordinary challenge to capitalism. What called for my close and continuous study was the programme designed to replace private profit for gain as the driving force for industrial production by the motive of service to the community. To give every man woman and child regardless of colour, race or language and in a union extending over a sixth of the globe, equal opportunity for remunerative work and abundant leisure, equal education in childhood and youth and equal security in sickness and old age.

Add to this that rents were pegged at 2% of income, medical care free entirely as was education from pre-school to university. How could a nation achieve all of this and more in those conditions – that is what we need to ask?

There is much more to be said about the difference between capitalism and socialism. Socialism is not perfect; it is a society in transition, but it can only be an improvement on the system we have that allows millions to live in and die in poverty. I hope to pursue this issue and the reasons for the temporary set back in socialist society in those countries in further talks if I am permitted.

I would like to conclude with the final statement by the Dean of Canterbury in 1939:

In this fresh dawn, men see the promise of a new world, not a perfect world and not a utopian world, but at least a world free from poverty and exploitation and with heightened possibilities for all to work together for the common good …

As Unitarians, can we do less?