African Americans; United States -- Race relations
In a land where the slave class is gaining power there is therefore a
great deal of resentment in the air. America has it; Russia has it.
To-day all the world has it. In the Great War the youth of almost every
country underwent the yoke of military slavery, and what resentment
there is against the masters! In Germany, where that slavery was worst,
it raised Spartacus from death. And who was this Spartacus who has
suddenly become a type and given a name to a movement? Himself a slave,
he led an insurrection of slaves against Rome. The masters defeated him
and killed him, and the heads of hundreds of his followers were impaled
on spikes upon all roads which led to Rome—a warning and a witness
to all other slaves of that and other times. Bitter and malignant
blood-stained faces stared at the passers-by upon the Roman highway.
They stare still in history, and they stare to-day, not from pikes, but
from an infinite number of children of slaves. Spartacus lives.
What is called the Spartacus movement in Germany is called Bolshevism
in Russia. Bolshevism is eminently a slave movement. The children of
the serfs have grasped everything. Its first expression has been class
war and revenge on the master class. There is so much of slave in the
Russian that his racial name is Slav. Now comes out all the resentment
and ill feeling of centuries. Unlike the followers of Spartacus, the
Russian serf has triumphed, and instead of having his head impaled he
has been able to impale the heads of his masters. From his example
all slaves and children of slaves throughout the world have taken
courage. Russian serfs and military slaves and wage slaves and Negroes
are finding an accord, and here we have the foundation for a grand
proletarian revolutionary movement throughout the world.
It may be objected that the American Negroes are not Bolshevik. They
are not in name, but they are potentially of the same spirit. They
hate the white proletariat because the latter uses them ill, but
curiously enough they have a common cause. The leaders of the Negro
forward movement are almost exclusively Bolshevik in spirit. We cannot
wonder at it. Persecution has developed a great resentment and class
hate. When the time comes, Dr. Du Bois and Johnson and Walter White
and Pickens and the rest will know whose side they are on in the great
world struggle.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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