Bourgeois Journalists and war - Lunacharsky 1929
There is nothing more disgusting than a bourgeois journalist during the war paroxysm* of any bourgeois fatherland.
* Paroxysm - exacerbation of disease. There is an aggravation of the international situation here. —Approx. ed.
Our delegation in Geneva experienced all the tricks of bourgeois journalists very well. How skillfully they hushed up Litvinov's strong speeches, how they distorted their meaning, how they surrounded the short pieces torn from these speeches from all sides with the most false and hateful comments! How they tried at the same time to discredit not only the delegation itself as Soviet, as the delegation of the "government of bandits", but also every single person who was part of the delegation or who was near it!
The gigantically powerful bourgeois press is always in full readiness to begin its military function, no less murderous and poisonous than even suffocating gases and destructive rays.
Even a completely fair assessment of the coming war as especially homicidal, even the horrors of this coming war and memories of the horrors of the war already experienced will be used to instill animal fear in their own population and, against the backdrop of this fright, with a nightmare of journalistic fiction, with fiery letters, write repeatedly words:
"Defend our fatherland, defend yourselves, otherwise everything is lost."
At the same time, as was launched before, all the methods of the most shamelessly polluting the enemy will be put into action; his whole history will be distorted and smeared with tar; all the great men of the hostile nation in the past will be dishonored, dragged through the muddy puddles, the present life of all classes of the enemy will be even more depicted in the crudest stinking caricatures. There will again be a scarecrow like that “Bosch”, as the German was depicted by the patriotic feathers of French hacks. The funniest thing is that the same tricks will be used from all sides. As in war itself, gasses, zeppelins*, and submarines rush into the line of fire with the same generosity and shamelessness, with mutual accusations of disloyal methods of warfare, so gentlemen journalists on both sides will equally call on the same Lord God to bless the weapons of each of his own army; Priests of all religions will echo such "God-fearing" journalists. Opponents on both sides will say that this nation has always been a friend of evil and scum of humanity. Almost the same terms, the same curse words with slight variations will be used against each other.
* Rigid airships—Approx. ed.
A neutral person, and a person who has generally seen the secrets of the military tactics of the newspapers, will listen with a bitter smile to the voices on both sides of the front, and it will, of course, be perfectly clear to him that everything here is entirely a lie and that if both sides were to be believed, it would turn out to be - all of humanity consists exclusively of moral freaks and villains.
Fiery correspondence will be sent from the theater of operations, in most cases obviously false. Characteristic for them will be, on the one hand, the motive “thunder of victory, resound”, and on the other hand, “guard advocate”.
These first battle scenes, pictures of the triumphant deeds of "our poor little soldiers" and "our great people's generals" will be intended to cheer up the rear and fill his empty chest with patriotism. And the second - in order to arouse fear and pity in him, using these feelings to continue the war until the "victorious end" is moving away.
It is not surprising that in Romain Rolland, in his bitter play Lilyuli, which depicts all sorts of monsters who feed on the war and feed it, the most disgusting figure, the most corrupt, shamelessly deceitful, nimble, misanthropic, is a journalist. Truly, these gentlemen during the war "write with blood and by no means their own."
But all the more noble is the activity of those journalists who fight against the war or expose the lies of these militaristic journalists and try to kindle at least a small flame of common sense and honesty in the thick smoke and fog of chauvinism caught up by the newspaper bastards.
But even more lofty is the calling of those journalists who, having dug to the very roots of the war, will not humanistically and futilely protest against it as such, but will carry out an energetic fiery service of informers-propagandists in the ranks of the army that really goes into battle for humanity, which, by its victory, is really capable of eradicating all war in the bud once and for all.
These are our communist or affiliated newspaper and magazine workers.
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