And while the old war was not yet cold
in its grave we prepared for a new war against Bolshevik Russia,
arranging for the spending of more millions, the sacrifice of more
boys of ours, not openly, with the consent of the people, but on the
sly, with a fine art of camouflage.
The purpose of the new war seemed to many men who had fought for
"liberty" an outrage against the "self--determination of peoples"
which had been the fundamental promise of the League of Nations, and a
blatant hypocrisy on the part of a nation which denied self--
government to Ireland. The ostensible object of our intervention in
Russia was to liberate the Russian masses from "the bloody tyranny of
the Bolsheviks," but this ardor for the liberty of Russia had not been
manifest during the reign of Czardom and grand dukes when there were
massacres of mobs in Moscow, bloody Sundays in St. Petersburg, pogroms
in Riga, floggings of men and girls in many prisons, and when free
speech, liberal ideas, and democratic uprisings had been smashed by
Cossack knout and by the torture of Siberian exile.
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