Onward Christian Soldiers – Part 10: Russia

 

Onward Christian Soldiers 

[Part 10]

 

 

 

Note

This new version of Onward Christian Soldiers that I’ve compiled consists of the original contents published by Noontide Press in 1982 plus the “missing” text that, for reasons explained below, was in the Swedish version published in 1942.

I’ve also included some supplementary texts here giving the history of the missing parts of Day’s book. Also book reviews by Revilo Oliver and Amazon readers (see Part 1).

KATANA

 

 

Contents

 

 

Maps of Northern Europe & the Baltic States

THE REST OF DONALD DAY by Paul Knutson — 1984

EDITORIAL NOTE by Liberty Bell

The Resurrection of Donald Day — A review by Revilo P. Oliver. The Liberty Bell — January 1983

TWO KINDS OF COURAGE by Revilo P. Oliver. The Liberty Bell — October 1986

AMAZON REVIEWS

__________________

ONWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS

Chapter

Introduction

Permit Me To Introduce Myself * (all new)

1 Why I did not go Home *………………………………. 1

2 The United States  *………………………………………. 7

3 Latvia  ………………………………………………………… 21

4 Meet the Bolsheviks  *………………………………….. 41

5 Alliance with the Bear  *……………………………….. 53

6 Poland  ……………………………………………………….. 63

7 Trips  ………………………………………………………….. 85

8 The Downfall of Democracy * ………………………. 93

9 Jews  …………………………………………………………… 101

10 Russia  *………………………………………………………. 115

11 Lithuania * ………………………………………………….. 131

12 Danzig  ……………………………………………………….. 145

13 Estonia  ……………………………………………………….. 151

14 Sweden  ………………………………………………………. 159

15 Norway  ………………………………………………………. 169

16 Finland  ………………………………………………………. 183

17 England  *……………………………………………………. 197

18 Europe  *…………………………………………………….. 201

19 Epilogue  *…………………………………………………… 204

Index of Names  ………………………………………………….. 205

* Contains new material (dark blue text) missing from original Noontide edition.

MAP

of Northern Europe 1920s (click to enlarge in new window)

MAP

of Baltic States 1920s (click to enlarge in new window)

 

 

 

LIBERTY BELL PUBLICATIONS

June 1984

THE REST OF

DONALD DAY

by

Paul Knutson

Donald Day, who had been for many years the foreign correspondent of the Chicago Tribune in northern Europe, wrote a record of his observations, Onward, Christian Soldiers, in 1942. His English text was first published as a book in 1982. It was printed by William Morrison and appeared under the imprint of the Noontide Press of Torrance, California, As Professor Oliver pointed out in his review of that book in Liberty Bell for January, 1983, the text had been copied, with some omissions and minor changes, from an anonymously issued mimeographed transcription of a defective carbon copy of the author’s manuscript, which had been brought to the United States in someway, despite the vigilance of Franklin Roosevelt’s surreptitious thought-police.

That was not the first publication of Day’s book. A Swedish translation, Framat Krististridsman, was published by Europa Edition in Stockholm in 1944. (That paper cover, printed in red, green, and black, is reproduced in black-and-white on the following page.)

 

 

Copies of this book still survive in Sweden and are even found in some public libraries. There may still be a copy in the Library of Congress, where, however, it was catalogued and buried among the very numerous books of a different Donald Day, a very prolific writer who midwifed the autobiography of Will Rogers and produced book after book on such various subjects as American humorists, the folk-lore of the Southwest, the tourist-attractions of Texas, and probably anything for which he saw a market, including a mendacious screed entitled Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Own Story. By a supreme irony, the Library concealed Framat Kristi stridsman in its catalogue by placing it between the other Day’s Evolution of Love and his propaganda piece for the unspeakably vile monster whose millions of victims included one of the last honest journalists.

The Swedish translation contains some long and important passages that do not appear in the book published in California and are not found in the mimeographed copy. By translating these back into English, I can restore Donald Day’s meaning, but, of course, I cannot hope to reproduce exactly the words and style of his original manuscript. I can also restore from the Swedish the deficiencies of the mimeographed transcript.

It seems impossible to determine now whether the parts of Day’s work that are preserved only in the Swedish were deleted by him to shorten his text when he sent a typewritten copy to the United States or were added by him before he turned his manuscript over to the Swedish translator at about the same time. At all events, the Swedish now alone provides us with some significant parts of bay‘s book and many Americans will want to have Day’s Work complete and entire.

For the convenience of the reader, I have, by arrangement with the publisher of Liberty Bell, included corrections of the printed English text where it departs, through negligence or misunderstanding, from the mimeographed text from which it was copied. I have passed over obvious typographical errors in the printed book, and omitted small and relatively unimportant corrections. For example, near the end of p. 44 of the printed book, the sentence should read, “All reported that the officials of the Cheka, later known as the GPU and NKVD, were Jews.

Day did not use footnotes, so the reader will understand what all the footnotes [indicated by the symbol *] on the following pages are my own explanations of the text.

The supplements below are arranged in the order of pages of the printed book, as shown by the note in the small type that precedes each section, The three sources are discriminated typographically thus; Italics show what is copied from the printed text to give continuity.

Ordinary Roman type is used for what is in the mimeographed copy but was omitted from the printed version. This, of course, is precisely what Day wrote in English.

What I have translated back from the Swedish appears in this style of type. These passages, as I have said, convey Day’s meaning without necessarily restoring exactly the words he used in his English original, from which the Swedish version was made.

*****

 

 

Editorial Note

 

Liberty Bell

With the foregoing supplements, we have at last as accurate a text of Donald Day’s Onward, Christian Soldiers as we are likely to have, barring the remote possibility that the manuscript Day gave to his Swedish translator may yet be discovered.

The Swedish translation is pedestrian, as indeed is Day’s English style, but a comparison of the Swedish with the extant parts of the English assures me of the translator’s general competence. In one passage, which we have only in the Swedish, in which Day reports his refusal to become a well-paid and dignified member of our Diplomatic Service with a “little Morgenthau” as an “adviser” to tell him what to do, the translator was evidently confused by the irony of some English phrase such as “executive for a Jew” and reversed Day’s obvious meaning;, this was corrected in the foregoing text.

The mimeographed version is evidently a transcription from Day’s carbon copy, with only such errors as only the most expert typists can entirely avoid. There is, however, one very odd error in the mimeographed version corresponding to our printed page 4 above; it reads “the Great Rocky mountains of the border of Tennessee and North Carolina.” That is geographically absurd, of course, and the Swedish (stora Rijkiga Bergen) shows that Day wrote “Great Smoky mountains,” as we have, printed above. It is probably only a coincidence that the Swedish word for “Smoky” could have suggested, to a person who knew no Swedish, the error made by the typist in California who copied Day’s carbon copy.

When Day relies on his recollection of what he was told years before, his memory is sometimes faulty, and we have naturally made no changes in what he wrote. He makes an obvious error on our page 4, where he says that the Cherokees were driven from their lands and moved to Indian Territory “toward the end of the last century.” Actually, the expulsion of the Cherokee Nation by an American army took place in 1838. The Cherokees, by the way, were the most nearly civilized of all the Indian tribes in the territory that is now the United States and Canada, and it is true that their expulsion from the lands that had been guaranteed to them by treaty inflicted great hardships on them: they lost most of their property, including their negro slaves, and large numbers of them perished as they were quite brutally herded from the Appalachians almost half way across the continent to what is now the southern border of Arkansas.

Ethnologists who have made intensive studies of the Indians of North America (e.g., Peter Farb) regard Sequoyah (Sequoia) as perhaps “the greatest intellect the Indians produced.” He was the son of a Cherokee woman by an unidentified white trader, and, growing up with the mother’s people, regarded himself as a Cherokee. He, however, was an exception to what Day says about half-breeds. Day may have been confused about the date of the expulsion because a few of the Cherokees succeeded in hiding from the perquisition in the wilds of the Great Smokies and were eventually given the small reservation they now occupy east of Bryson City in the toe of North Carolina. There was some agitation about them “near the end of the last century.

The circumstances in which Day’s carbon copy was smuggled into the United States remain obscure. When the mimeographed transcription was made and first issued, it contained a prefatory page on which an anonymous writer said,

It is my understanding that this book was published in; 1942, and then merely made an appearance at the book-sellers, when all copies were immediately withdrawn and destroyed without a single copy escaping the book-burners, I was also told that Mr. Day died shortly after this incident.

The page was presumably withdrawn when its author learned that Day was still alive at that time and an exile in Helsinki, since the Jews who rule the United States would not permit him to return to his native land.

It is curious that the man who made the transcription, which did effectively preserve Day’s work for the future, and who was evidently a resident of California, had heard a somewhat less plausible version of the rumor that was current in Washington in 1943. (See the review by Professor Oliver in Liberty Bell, January 1983, p. 27). It is quite possible that the source of both rumors was an effort by the apparatus of the great War Criminal in the White House to prevent the publication of the Swedish translation, which, as Day tells us in the last item in our supplements, was delayed in the press for two years by a “paper shortage” and it is noteworthy that the paper for it was finally obtained in Finland, not Sweden,* Until the book was finally published in 1944, the enemies of mankind could have imagined that their pressures on Sweden had effectively prevented Day’s exposure of one phase of their activity from ever appearing in print.

[* Day’s book was published by Europa Edition in Stockholm, which, however, had to have the printing done by Mercators Tryckeri in Helsinki. Although copies of the Swedish book have been preserved, Day’s work would not now be generally known — and would be supposed lost by Americans who heard of it — if the anonymous gentleman in California had not issued his mimeographed transcription.]

_______________________

 

KATANA — The Liberty Bell article continues with a list of text to be added or amended to the Noontide edition. All these changes (indicated by the dark blue text) have been entered in this expanded version of Onward Christian Soldiers.

 

 

Word Totals for the Additional Text

Introduction – –

Permit Me To Introduce Myself – 5,738 (all new)

Chapter 1 – 23

Chapter 2 – 307

Chapter 3 – –

Chapter 4 – 653

Chapter 5 – 1,225

Chapter 6 – –

Chapter 7 – –

Chapter 8 – 408

Chapter 9 – –

Chapter 10 – 907

Chapter 11 – 6

Chapter 12 – –

Chapter 13 – –

Chapter 14 – –

Chapter 15 – –

Chapter 16 – –

Chapter 17 – 2,167

Chapter 18 – 1,179

Chapter 19 – 89

Total words in original = 85,311

Total additional words = 12,702

_______________

Total words in expanded version = 98,013

 

 

ONWARD

 

CHRISTIAN

 

SOLDIERS

 

 

1920-1942: Propaganda, Censorship

and One Man’s Struggle to Herald the Truth

Suppressed reports of a 20-year Chicago Tribune

correspondent in eastern Europe from 1921

Donald Day

With an introduction by Walter Trohan,

former chief of the Tribune’s Washington bureau

THE NOONTIDE PRESS

 

 

 

Chapter 10

 

Russia

 

 

 

 

 

Dinner parties in Riga generally began at eight. Very often the guests were still seated at the table at two in the morning. But conversation did not end then. Talk continued until three, four or even five o’clock. Then after sandwiches, another round of vodka or some beer, the party would disperse.

Many years passed before Riga society degenerated to bridge. Conversations were captivating, interesting and sometimes charming. Everyone spoke from three to ten languages. Table-talk was in Latvian, German and Russian. People, telling a story, would begin in one language and continue until they found a better word to describe their thoughts in another tongue. They would switch over and continue. Sometimes, before the story would be ended, all three languages would be used.

At one of these parties, some time ago, a Russian woman attempted to monopolize the conversation. She was evidently homesick. We heard of the lavishness of Petrograd, the dazzling riches of Moscow, the bounteous Ukraine, the beautiful Crimea, the exotic Caucases, the uncouth Siberia, the wild North. Russia, she declared in ecstacy, had everything, really everything.

Here I felt constrained to interrupt.

There is one important thing which Russia lacks,” I contended.

And what is that may I ask?” she questioned.

The right kind of people to inhabit the country,” I replied.

There was no answer and we turned to other subjects.

[Page 116]

In my twenty years residence in Riga I sought to avoid close association with Russians, all shades of Russians. It was not actual dislike, for the average Russian is a very likable person. My articles were often quoted in Russian language newspapers published in Europe and I was invited to Russian gatherings and functions. These invitations I did not accept, not even to the annual Russian navy ball which was one of the season’s most enjoyable functions. I knew many of these White Russians and some of them I felt instinctively that I could not trust.

In my earlier contacts with the Russians I was impressed with the great similarity existing between them and the American Negro. Both races are artistic. They have natural gifts for music and dancing. They have a childish love for adornment. Just as the Russian peasant will hang up his new pair of boots beneath the ikon in the comer of the wall to admire them better, so the Negro will place his new shoes on a table to contemplate them with the rapture of a child.

It is remarkable fact that the best bass voices in the world are to be found among the Russians and Negroes. Both are collective minded, they like to live in groups. Both are lazy and not inclined to work except under compulsion. They are both irresponsible and unreliable. If you send either a Russian or a Negro out to do something for you, you are never certain that it will be done the way you want it to be. This sounds childish but they are childish in many ways. They have many of the good and bad characteristics of children.

The mentality of the Russians and the American Negroes has been affected by centuries of slavery. Both were freed from slavery about the same time. The Negro in 1863, the Russian 1858-63. These generations of servitude developed an aptitude for petty intrigue and duplicity, which, coupled with their instability, spells tragedy. This comparison could be continued and broadened, but in defense of the Negro I must report that he has a higher conception of honor than the Russian, probably because in his homeland he most generally saw high standards of honesty and honor.

For many centuries the Russians have lived in groups. That pioneer spirit which is a fundamental characteristic of the Nordic-Teuton is absent in the Russian. When the Slavs spread out through the vast expanse of Russia this colonization of tremendous areas was motivated chiefly be a desire to get as far away as possible from the government. For more than a thousand years that government, with only brief intervals, represented oppression and terror. Following the rivers, penetrating great forests and wide swamps the Russians attempted to hide themselves from their despots, but without success. The church and the chinovnik (official) followed them everywhere.

[Page 117]

Life in these primitive communities centered around the Starastvo, which means literally “the oldest.” He was elected by the village to rule as chieftain. He had two rivals competing for his authority. One, the local government official. The other the priest. All three used chicane, intrigue and petty espionage.

One of the features of life in a small community is that everyone seems to know what everyone else is doing. Gossiping is a fundamental human attribute everywhere. But in the Slav this is developed to a far greater degree than in the Nordic-Teuton. The starastvo, chinovik and priest competed for levies and taxes. Informers were well paid by all three. The priest and chinovnik were paid by the central government. The former received a percentage of the taxes he helped collect, the latter a percentage of the fines. Over the course of centuries this system of rule demoralized everyone. This demoralization penetrated so deeply that it has influenced the Russians in their national and individual development. Treachery and duplicity seemed to become an ingrained trait in the Russian character. To betray a friend or a neighbor does not mean much to a Russian.

Now this is a pretty broad statement to make. I reached this conclusion only after observing and studying Russia, Russians and Russian history for many years. In Nordic-Teutonic countries a man’s word of honor is everywhere considered to be something real, the tangible, something that can be depended upon. In Russia there is a widely quoted proverb which roughly translated runs:

That bridge is hanging on a word of honor.

Meaning the bridge is apt to collapse at anytime. The proverb reveals the depth of the gulf separating the two races. It is due to these traits that the Russian, compared to the Nordic-Teuton, is a sub-man. These sub-men have developed nothing in their form of government which can be adopted with profit by other nations. But what they have developed to a higher degree than any other nation is something which repels Europe with horror. It is treachery and terror.

Bolshevism succeeded in imposing its rule upon Russia by taking over espionage network of the Okhrana, the political police of the Czarist regimes. The leading officials of this organization were eliminated and the Okhrana was converted into the Cheka (extraordinary commissions) by Felix Djerjinski, a maniac Pole whose chief assistants were two Jews, Menshinski and Jagoda. Djerjinski died suddenly and mysteriously at a meeting of the presidium of the supreme executive committee in Moscow when he was attempting to help Leon Trotsky obtain control of the communist party after the death of Lenin. He is said to have been poisoned by Stalin. In any event his death arrived at a convenient moment for Stalin who then seized power.

[Page 118]

Since then the Cheka has changed its name twice. It became the GPU (State Political Administration) and later the Nar. Kom. Vnu. Del.

(People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs). These changes in name were to delude people abroad into thinking this agency for terror had been abolished. The second change of name was ignored abroad which continued to call the terrorists the GPU. Since the death of Djerjinski, the GPU has had five leaders, Menshinski, Jagoda, Akulov, Yezhov and Berija. All are Jews. Under their administration millions of Russians perished. I have mentioned this once before and repeat here for emphasis.

It was this organization which systematically massacred all members men, women and children, of the upper and middle classes in Russia. The Jews applied terror to all classes of the population. It was used to enable them to obtain complete control over the people living within Russia. The system of terror and treachery which the Russians had themselves devised was used against them by the Jews who exploited this fatal weakness in the Russian character.

Mankind has evolved many different forms of government. In modern times civilized forms of government have only limited power against individuals whom they can fine, imprison and execute. In Russia the Jews expanded terror into a science. The Soviet form of government, under their direction, not only can fine, imprison and execute, but it can also discharge a man from his position, prevent him from obtaining further employment, confiscate his food and clothing cards, seize his living quarters, expel his children from schools, evict his wife and children into the street, and destroy an entire family by sending its different members to different places of exile.

The terror of the Czarist regimes of olden days has been made complete. Every man knows that should he commit an offense against the Jewish regime, not only himself, but also his entire family, including his parents and relatives, may suffer; that even his friends may be included in the purge.

In Soviet cities where the chief concern is obtaining more food or better living quarters, everybody was at the mercy of his neighbors. It was sufficient — to ruin a man and his family — to report to the nearest GPU office that he was the son of a wealthy farmer (a farmer with two horses is classified as wealthy by the communists) or that his father occupied a good position before the revolution.

[Page 119]

Life became hell on earth everywhere Jewish authority expanded. This system of espionage and terror was just as strongly organized in the village as in the city. The local GPU man has almost unlimited authority.

He can dispossess any peasant he wishes and compel him and his family to move at least fourteen miles away before he can settle again in some abandoned shack. Or worse, he can order them to be deported to the far North or Siberia.

Long before the world war the average American had only a dim idea about Russia. Very few knew anything about Russian history of literature.

Their knowledge of Russia was based on the contents of occasional newspaper articles and stories told by Russian emigrants. These were almost entirely Jews. And the stories making the most lasting impression upon the minds of the average American were those tales of pogroms in Ruthenian and Ukrainian villages, of exiles sent to Siberia and of the allegedly cruel and despotic regime of the Czars.

In his book Innocents Abroad, our Mark Twain devoted a few scathing paragraphs to the Czar and his regime. Twain exemplified the attitude of the average American who is little different from the average human being and is prone to form opinions upon hearing one-sided or insufficient evidence.

The extremely bad reputation which the Czarist regime had abroad for cruelty and despotism was largely manufactured by the Jews. The old ruling class in Russia was mostly of Nordic-Teutonic origin. This class learned to know the Jew through centuries of contact. And the better they can know them, the more adamant they were against allowing them more privileges.

The Jews were largely segregated in the provinces of Ruthenia, White Russia and Poland. Those few who were permitted to live in Petersburg, Moscow and other larger Russian cities were required before the war to have a higher education. Because of these restrictions against their rapacity the Jews hated the Czarist regime virulently.

This world-wide Jewish campaign against the Czarist government of Russia, which developed towards the close of the last century, so undermined the prestige of Russia abroad that the world welcomed the revolution in Russia and hailed the downfall of the Czarist regime as a sign of progress. From all over the world Jewish revolutionaries poured into Russia to take vengeance upon the Russian people and to help the erection of a new imperialist Jewish power, one of whose first decrees was to make anti-Semitism a crime punishable by death.

[Page 120]

The revolution in Russia attracted the support and attention of the so-called liberal element throughout the world. They hoped out of the massacres, civil war, plagues and famine which followed the turnover would come a new, wonderful and enlightened government which would embody all or most of those principles they pretended to be fighting for in their own countries. Instead they witnessed further depravity and class warfare.

The liberal movement has its followers among the educated class, which has sometimes been miscalled the intelligentsia. Its record reveals that its leaders and their followers really belong to the unintelligentsia.

In his creation of forms of government, man has generally tried to achieve security and progress. The Bolsheviks pretend to be on the side of progress. They set out to form a heaven on earth by completely exterminating all classes of the population who defended property, that is to say, security. They murdered millions of Russians and starved and exiled millions more. The liberals of the world applauded. Occasionally one of their number was shocked into protest. But he was howled down by the Jewish inspired-and-led liberal clique.

In their own lands and under their own governments, the liberals oppose bitterly all attempts to curb individual freedom, which includes:

freedom of press, speech and religion. In Russia, where Bolshevism abolished these varieties of freedom, the liberals found this justifiable and excusable. In their own countries they have enthusiastically defended the most horrible atrocities of Bolshevism while at the same time they have held protest meetings, collected funds, employed attorneys and used every possible form of agitation against their own governments when these have placed communists and revolutionaries under arrest, or sentenced them to prison for violations of the law. In thus doing they proved the liberal movement is no longer liberal. It has aged quickly and become senile. It has acquired, not the harmless childlike manner of an old man, but the violent ravings of a lunatic. Defenders of Bolsheviks are mentally degenerate. They are the enemies of the better elements of society.

This unintelligentsia often prides itself on having a very liberal code of morals. It throngs into Soviet representations abroad on revolutionary holidays to partake of caviar, vodka and other delicacies provided by the new Jewish rulers of Russia. It accepts subsidized journeys to Russia and permits various agencies of the Soviet regime to stuff its pockets with money. It thinks it perfectly proper for an orator, lecturer, author or journalist to earn his living by becoming an advocate of communism. But anyone condemning the Jew, the Communist, the Communist International, or the Soviet government is branded as a traitor to society who is somehow or other in the pay of the reactionary elements.

[Page 121]

The unintelligentsia was one of the first classes to be thoroughly and systematically liquidated in Russia by the Jewish terror. All Russian liberal leaders, and this included the Social Democratic party, were exterminated. The portent of this action was never grasped by the unintelligentsia abroad. That is, if with the assistance of their efforts a communist regime should be established in their own country they would be one of the first classes to be purged from the ranks of society. This seemingly has never entered their thoughts. This is because the unintelligentsia in their secret hearts are also revolutionaries. They are dissatisfied with the makeup of the society in which they live and wish to change it. So long as they support the Bolsheviks they are anti-social. And as long as they follow the banners raised by the Jews they are a dangerous element.

These members of the unintelligentsia who have visited Russia since the revolution had no first hand knowledge of the Russia of the Czars.

Towards the end of the last century and the beginning of this, Russia, under a Nordic-Teutonic ruling class, was making rapid and tremendous progress. New schools were being opened and great strides were being made towards abolishing illiteracy. Progress was being made in all branches of human endeavor. This is not in defense of the Czarist regime but a reminder that under the former government life was incomparably better for the inhabitants than it is today, or has been during the past twenty five years.

Let us remember when the Russian Premier Stolypin was shot and killed in the Kiev opera house in 1911, five people were hanged for this crime and a few score conspirators were sentenced to Siberia. When Commissars Uritzski and Kirov were shot by assassins in Leningrad, five thousand prisoners having nothing to do with the crime were shot after Uritzski’s death while an unknown number were shot in Leningrad and 137 were shot in Moscow following the assassination of Kirov.

Exile to Siberia was once regarded as awful punishment. But this form of exile under the Czarist regime was a summer vacation compared to the fate suffered by exiles of the GPU. In pre-world war Siberia the political exile could live in luxury and even have servants. And revolutionists invariably had money. Confinement in Siberia did not affect the health of the commissars.

Germany has often been blamed for sending Lenin to Russia. But the United States permitted Trotsky and many thousands of sadistically minded Jews to leave the ghettos of New York to go to Russia. But how did those revolutionary exiles reach Switzerland and New York from Siberia? That is a question which liberals never ask or attempt to answer.

[Page 122]

In Czarist Russia the nobility was a closed caste. In England it is a semi-open caste. In England when Max Aitken made a few million pounds he was told to kneel before the King and he arose as Lord Beaverbrook. In Russia this advancement in social rank was denied to the wealthy merchants and industrial leaders. Some of these men secretly helped the revolutionists. They provided the-money which enabled Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and other revolutionary degenerates to live in comfort in Siberia and to bribe their way to freedom and to cross into China and journey around the world to New York or Switzerland.

The great majority of these wealthy Russians who helped the revolutionists conspire against the Czarist government were massacred by their communist proteges when they came into power. A few, like Lomonossov, Krassi, Aralov and others entered Soviet service and were used as Soviet agents abroad, naturally under the watchful eye of their GPU guardians.

The Czarist government of the past century was certainly not a model government. It was an imperialistically minded regime which sought to extend Slav influence far over the frontiers of Russia. It was expanding into the East and sought expansion into the South and West. But under its Nordic-Teutonic ruling class, however backward and reactionary it may have been, forces were developing which were giving the Russians a higher standard of living.

Living standards in Czarist Russia were very low compared to western European standards. The exploitation of the workers in Russian industries was cruel. But the great majority of those industries had been founded, organized and developed by western European capitalists and enterprisers. Those foreign factory owners in Russia whom I have met were never tired of telling me of their tremendous profits. It is a little known fact that American and English capital and American engineers founded and expanded the industries of Petersburg, now Leningrad and that the American church there became the English church when the Americans were supplanted by English specialists. Belgian and French capital entered Russia to build street car lines and other public utility projects. German capital was largely engaged in expanding Russian trade and commerce. Russia was a booming country up to the world war and world capitalism was finding dividends there just as luscious and rich as those which poured from the United States.

So when the Jewish led group of revolutionists murdered their way into control of Russia in the moral chaos which followed the world war, they seized a country which had been making good progress despite the fact a few thousand revolutionaries and criminals were living in Siberian villages and prison camps.

During my twenty year’s residence in Riga I frequently made comparisons between conditions of life under the regime of the last Czar and living standards under the communist government. And no matter what the unintelligentsia abroad might claim after their specially conducted tours of Russia there is no doubt but what life there has become worse for the inhabitants. At the outbreak of the present war the average Russian had less to eat, was more poorly clad and lived in more primitive quarters than the average Russian of 1914.

[Page 123]

Only in one respect had conditions changed for the better. The Russians had more books to read and people could read them. But this reading matter was controlled and expurgated by Commissar Chalatov.

Where dissenters appeared they were liquidated with haste. All who disagreed with the Lenin line, or the later Stalin line, were executed or exiled with their friends and supporters. Under Bolshevism massacres became a regular feature of Russian life.

When Stalin announced his first five year plan in 1928 it was discovered that in liquidating its opponents the Soviet government had liquidated the brains of Russia. The GPU was ordered to search through its prisons and concentration camps to salvage all engineers and persons with a technical education. But these communist slaves were insufficient in number.

Russia decided to employ foreign specialists. Many thousands of trained American engineers, unemployed victims of the capitalistic depression in America, went to Russia attracted by high salaries and special inducements.

These men had to renew their passports every two years and were obliged to visit Riga, the nearest point where existed an American consulate. Many of them visited my home. They all painted a picture of poverty, misery and terror. They were glad to leave Russia when their contracts expired. When they returned to the United States many attempted to warn the American people against communism. They contradicted the false propaganda being spread by Soviet agents and their paid dupes, the unintelligentsia. But they soon ceased their efforts, for the gangster communists of the U.S.A. beat some as a warning to the others and threatened them with death or worse unless they kept their mouths shut about Russia. Terror had become a main export article of the Soviet government.

From the experiences of these travelers, from official Soviet plans and speeches and from official Soviet publications and technical journals, it was impossible for observers to judge the extent and success of the industrialization program. I was interested in the production of agricultural machinery in Russia. By collecting every article I could find in the Soviet press over a number of years I hoped to be able to write a report about this industry. But there was never enough concrete information to make such a story. Communist writers carefully avoided giving any real information. All production figures were given in rubles and since the cost of the machine was never mentioned the figures quoted meant nothing.

[Page 124]

I spent many thousands of hours reading the Soviet press during these years. I found much information concerning communist interference into the affairs of other nations, including the United States. I found much information proving the predominant position the Jews held in Russia. I read many long treatises about the world revolution which would develop as a result of the new capitalistic war which the Soviet government was energetically helping to ferment by promoting mistrust and hatred between the nations and between the various classes of the population within these nations. I found much proof for the Jewish-communist persecution of Christianity and the seeming immunity of Jewish religious leaders and synagogues from persecution and oppression.

The Bolsheviks used their three agencies: the communist party, the communist international and the Soviet government to prevent any agreement or alliance between the three Baltic States, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. They prevented a similar alliance between the Scandinavian countries. They sowed mistrust between Poland and Germany, between France and Germany and between England and Germany. They encouraged quarrels in the Balkans. International rivalries, hatreds and mistrust were supported wherever they appeared. And everywhere the Bolsheviks were assisted by their friends, the untelligentsia, the so-called liberals. Their power was tremendous and it was used for evil.

One of their weapons, in their program of world revolution, has been the Soviet monopoly of foreign trade. The trade delegations the Soviet government established in many foreign countries did not confine their activities to trade. They indulged in political and economic propaganda.

Where they could they promoted economic disorder and hardship.

It was a common practice for the Soviet trade delegation to close a contract with a factory owner for a much larger amount of goods than his plant could produce within the stipulated time. The factory owner, being cordially assured this was only the first of a steady succession of similar orders, would borrow extensively to enlarge his plant, increase the number of workers and the output. When the time arrived to negotiate the second order he would be informed, on one excuse or another, that no further orders could be given.

Instead of making a profit he had incurred liabilities which sometimes forced him into bankruptcy. This class-conscious manner of doing business resulted in large losses in the Baltic States. Poland, Germany and other countries where attempts were made to promote trade relations with the Soviet government.

[Page 125]

When the plants were forced to reduce the number of their workers, communist agitators spread propaganda alleging the owners had been refused new Soviet orders because they failed to comply with the wishes of the Soviet government. In this manner the Soviet trade delegations promoted social unrest abroad. They were further active in promoting economic instability in the countries where they were stationed. It is sufficient to recall the revelations made by the Arcos raid in London to realize the communists have used their foreign trade monopoly to undermine socially and economically those countries who have concluded trade agreements with the Soviet regime.

In the present war the Soviet government is not interested in the fate of its soldiers taken prisoner by the enemy. It refused information about the prisoners its forces have captured. But it has always taken a paternal interest in revolutionaries imprisoned abroad. These are regarded by Moscow as casualties in the class war, which for Bolsheviks, is the most important form of war. In European jails these communists were provided with food, clothing, tobacco and money. Where possible they were exchanged for prisoners arrested in Russia. In some of these exchanges, notably between Lithuania and Poland and Russia, the Soviet exchanged Catholic priests for communists. Membership in the communist party is regarded by Moscow to entitle the revolutionist of foreign nationality to the protection and help of the Soviet government.

Naturally the question arises, why didn’t the world hear more about this state of affairs? In my reports to The Chicago Tribune during the past 23 years I frequently made detailed surveys, quoting official Soviet sources, of the above and other developments in Russia. These were published in The Tribune and some eighty other newspapers which subscribed to The Tribune’s foreign press service. The Tribune is owned by Christians and is one of the very few American newspapers which have been courageous enough to publish articles about the activities of the Jews in Russia and Europe. It is also the only American newspaper which has consistently employed American trained newspapermen as correspondents.

In 1921 I sent from Riga the first stories concerning the great famine in Russia. Floyd Gibbons was then chief of The Tribune’s foreign press service. He was for many years the star reporter of The Tribune and was one of the best American newspaperman ever to become a foreign correspondent. Floyd started to work on The Tribune in 1916, the same year as myself. He came to Riga to cover the famine story and made a trip to the famine centers on the Volga. Before he returned to Paris he tried to persuade me to leave Riga and become a member of either the Paris or London bureaus of The Tribune. I was, however, determined to remain in Riga until I could either obtain a Soviet visa or enter Russia without needing Soviet permission. In those days no one thought Bolshevism would survive as a form of government.

[Page 126]

I did succeed in making Riga an important center for Russian news and from this point covered events in Poland and Northeastern Europe. I have already mentioned some of Moscow’s attempts to discredit me. Riga soon became Moscow’s rival as a source of Russian news.

For 18 years Moscow’s star reporter was Walter Duranty, an Englishman employed by The New York Times, a newspaper owned by Jews.

Duranty became the apologist and advocate for the Soviet Government.

He was afforded many privileges by his communist friends. For many years Walter occasionally included in his messages to The Times denunciations of:

The White Guard Colonels who were spreading lies about the Soviets from Riga.

Once, when I met him in the Hotel Adlon in Berlin, I asked why he persisted in denouncing me as a White Guard Colonel. I pointed out that I have never exposed, or even mentioned in my messages, the correspondents stationed in Moscow, although there were many opportunities to do so. Duranty excused himself saying:

Donald, you have no idea how nice the Soviet authorities are to me after I sent our a message denouncing the White Guard Colonels in Riga.

This explanation did not satisfy me, but I made no attempt to retaliate. I knew and could prove the correspondents in Moscow were accepting favors and bribes, both direct and indirect, for advertising and defending the Soviet regime and reported these facts to my boss, Colonel McCormick. I made no attempt to use the columns of The Tribune to defend myself. The Tribune did that for me in the editorial columns.

I only knew of one correspondent representing American newspapers in Moscow whom I respect and whom I am proud to call a real colleague. He is Junius Wood, who represented the Chicago Daily News. He is now retired and living in Holland, Michigan. Junius was a real newspaperman. He came out to Riga occasionally for a breath of fresh air and to replenish his stock of coffee and I was always glad to have him as our guest.

After he had lived in Hotel Polshoye Moskovskaija for a number of years, the management decided they would install a wash basin with hot and cold running water in Junius’ room.

Several committees called examining the premises. Extensive plans were made. Repeated meetings and conferences were held.

At last the workers appeared to begin the undertaking and holes were broken in the floor. The unsheathed hot and cold water pipes were brought side by side up to the basin so that while the hot water was hot the cold water was luke warm through contact with the hot water pipe.

While this convulsive endeavor at progress was being completed, Junius one morning missed his razor, of the straight-bladed variety. He took up his telephone and called up Commissar Jagoda, then chief of the G.P.U. When he got the commissar on the phone, Junius explained his razor had disappeared.

But what has the G.P.U. to do with that?” asked Jagoda indignantly.

Well,” returned Junius, “Your agents have been searching my room and belongings for a number of years, and besides most of the employees of the hotel work for your G.P.U., so I want my razor back.

Jagoda began to get excited and attempted to order Junius to complain to the ordinary police.

Junius refused.

I’ve heard a lot about the G.P.U. and what a wonderful organization it is,” he said. “Now you have the chance to prove that you are not just a cheap second-class detective agency. If you can find my razor, then I will agree that the G.P.U. is a real secret service. I hold you personally responsible for the return of my razor and I want it back.

A short time later, some leather-clad G.P.U. men entered the room. They made a thorough search. They also arrested and searched the workers who had installed the wash basin. But they did not find the razor. The plumber’s union held an indignation meeting, where protest speeches were made that an American correspondent should accuse some of their membership of complicity in the disappearance of his razor.

The dignity and honor of the Soviet worker had been impugned. Junius refused to apologize and continued to demand the G.P.U. find his razor. But he gave them an impossible task. The incident ended with the plumber’s union sending a delegation to hand Junius a check to enable him to purchase a new razor and to apologize for the presence of some of their members in his room approximating the time his razor disappeared.

Junius finally left Moscow because the hotel persisted in increasing the price of his room until he was paying some twelve dollars a day. This irritated his editor who transferred him to Berlin.

Another type of newspaperman was Eugene Lyons, one-time correspondent of the United Press in Moscow. In 1935 The Tribune published the following editorial about Lyons under the headline:

NEWS FROM MOSCOW.

Occasionally readers inquire why The Tribune refuses to send a correspondent to Moscow. The reason is that an objective reporter cannot remain there. If any further evidence is required in support of this position, it is provided in this month’s issue of Harper’s Magazine, in an article entitled “To Tell or Not to Tell” by Eugene Lyons.

Mr. Lyons represented the United Press, an American news agency, in Moscow. He went there, he said, a firm sympathizer with the revolution. He deliberately set himself the task of presenting Russia to his American readers in as favorable light as he could. He played up the items which reflected credit upon the Bolsheviks. He glossed over the news which was unfavorable. His home office encouraged him in this practice, he says, in the expectation of being rewarded with the inside track on news. In this hope they were not disappointed. Because he had been the best of the good boys, Mr. Lyons was given a first exclusive interview with Stalin. Life was made extremely comfortable for him.

Mr. Lyons now concedes that Communism as practiced in Russia is brutal oppression supported by torture, murder, starvation. He laments that so-called liberals in America are not alive to the truth. The fact that their simple faith in Bolshevik goodness was supported by his deliberate distortion of the news seems to cause him no pangs of conscience.

This is not to say that Mr. Lyons has no conscience. It is merely a bit slow in its operation. He went to Russia in 1932. After five or six years there he made the momentous decision to tell the truth.

Now the gates of Russia are closed to him. He can’t go back any more, he says, because the commissars won’t permit that kind of reporting.

Until this attitude changes there will be no resident Tribune reporter in Russia.

Of course, Lyons is a Jew. And like many Jews, he tells the truth when it pays him well to do so. Other American correspondents in Moscow reported that when Lyons arrived he was a member of the American Communist Party in good standing and his employers knew of this political affiliation.

Being the most unscrupulous and unprincipled of the American news agencies, the United Press naturally became the unofficial news agency of the Roosevelt Trust.

 

Duranty, Lyons and Chamberlain (Christian Science Monitor) all made a special point of denouncing me and my reports of the great famine in the Ukraine in 1934 when some five million people died of starvation.

Lyons, after his reformation, estimated the victims at between seven and fifteen million.

The Soviet Government contended there was no famine at all. Duranty was permitted to make a trip to the Ukraine and send a number of dispatches, one from Odessa, giving an absolutely false picture of conditions. Later he told a gathering in my presence how in Odessa he had seen a woman drop a bottle of milk, which broke on the pavement, and how a man had flung himself on his knees and lapped up the milk from the street with his tongue like a famished animal. In books written after they had left Russia both Lyons and Chamberlain admitted it was they who had done the lying and confirmed The Tribune’s famine reports.

But to return to Lyons. At the Hotel Adlon bar in Berlin, a favorite rendezvous for newspapermen, he boasted one evening how, in the course of one year, he had swindled The United Press out of thousands of dollars on his expense account by charging them the normal rate of exchange for the dollars in Moscow, while he purchased roubles on the Black Exchange.

[Page 127]

On one of my trips to Finland, I met Mrs. Lyons who was employed as an actress by a Soviet film company. She had come to Helsinki on a shopping tour and asked Mrs. Day to help her. After purchasing large quantities of wearing apparel and cosmetics they went to the culinary department where Mrs. Lyons bought dozens of potato knives, kettles, pots, pans and other kitchen utensils. Amazed, Mrs. Day asked if such things could not be obtained in Moscow. Mrs. Lyons replied the factories in Russia were too busy making big things, like tractors, automobiles, etc., to be bothered with the manufacture of small things. She said a potato knife was a very acceptable present in Russia. The value of her purchases amounted to more than $2,000, and included a Ford car. She told me she had no difficulty with the Soviet customs as she was protected by the Soviet foreign office.

Another correspondent who carefully complied with Soviet wishes for many years was Henry Chamberlain of The Christian Science Monitor.

He has also written books since he left Russia; excellent books, the result of much observation and hard work. But no matter how excellent they may be, such books and articles written after many years of doping American newspaper readers with false news and propaganda disguised as “the truth about Russia” does not excuse the writers from betraying their calling as correspondents.

Easy money seems to be about the hardest thing in the world to resist.

Correspondents and diplomats found their stay in Moscow made both pleasant and profitable by their communist hosts and they were grateful.

However, it is hard to cherish as colleagues those who betray their newspapers and readers by knowingly sending false reports about events taking place before their eyes. If we newspapermen are to pretend to have a vestige of honor, we should attempt to live up to the chief principle of our calling: to report fairly, objectively and truly to our newspapers what we have been assigned to observe. If we find it impossible to do this, then it is time for us to quit our profession and find another more honorable means of making a living.

Moscow did not only find means to obtain favorable publicity by indirect and direct bribing of newspapermen and authors, it also used similar methods to influence professors, teachers, engineers, technicians, scientists and others. There was Colonel Cooper, the renowned American dam builder, who was called to Moscow to help the Soviets plan and build the great dam across the Dneiper, the Dneiprostroy. Colonel Cooper, according to a more reliable Moscow colleague, accepted as a retainer a check for a fantastic sum.

[Page 128]

In return he sent a staff of assistants to Moscow and made a speech-making tour of the United States advocating the recognition of the Soviet Government, praising the Bolshevik regime and telling his audiences:

Donald Day, The Chicago Tribune correspondent at Riga, Latvia, is lying far more than is necessary about Soviet Russia.

Cooper never told the Americans how the Dneiprostroy dam was built by slave labor. How the dam itself and the great factories nearby were surrounded by slums where tens of thousands of families lived in huts and holes dug in the ground. Of living conditions so appalling that their counterpart can only be found in the great kettles of human misery in China and India.

Perhaps one might feel complimented at being one of the objects of attack of a perverted propagandist who has received a million dollar bribe. But we have indeed developed a most peculiar idea of honor in the United States of America if we listen with respectful attention and publish columns of reports in our press about an engineer who has received an enormous sum of money to do, among other things, a lecture tour aimed to influence and change the foreign policy of the American government which, at the time of Cooper’s campaign, was against the recognition of the bloodstained government in Moscow.

This Communist propaganda abroad was not solely to benefit the Soviets in Russia and to gain for them supporters, admirers and friends.

It went much deeper than that. It was and is part of a process of demoralization which was and is going on throughout the world. The old standards of morality, the Christian standards developed under Western civilization, were being, and are still being, undermined by the Communists and their dupes. All classes of society are affected. Events and actions which a generation ago would have horrified society are now regarded with tolerance or indifference.

Famines in which millions perished. Purges in which thousands were shot and tens of thousands exiled. Pestilence. Dirty people with dirty morals. Hordes of homeless children, the product of the ferocious brutality of the Kremlin, being rounded up by policemen and sent to “special camps of designation,” there to be liquidated. Yes, the stories which came out of Russia did not make nice reading. Those correspondents in Moscow, those Soviet paid lecturers in the United States, the Communists, the Jews and their friends for many years called me a liar and claimed my accounts were either untrue or grossly exaggerated. But if there was error it was more on the side of understatement that overstatement. It is common for the mind to be unable to grasp the enormity of an event or a situation. When the human imagination cannot comprehend a thing, it frequently rejects it. That is why, after the Soviet rulers committed an especially terrible crime against their subjects and news about it was published abroad, their agents only needed to state blandly, “it is untrue” and the unintelligentsia believed them.

[Page 129]

In the United States this moral decline has been very apparent. Since the world war, the struggle for existence has become bitter and hard.

People’s respect for law and order was undermined by years of prohibition with its attendant corruption, bribery and disobedience of the law.

There has also been a campaign to shatter American ideals and to besmirch and vilify Americans who have made great names for themselves in our history. The American nationalists have been shouted down by the growing class of internationalism. There is no sign that opposition to the internationalizing of the United States has begun to crystallize. But there will be an opposition, an American opposition, for the United States today is not represented by Washington and New York.

The correspondents who forwarded twisted news and propaganda to the United States from Moscow must bear a sizable portion of the blame for poisoning American thought. They remained in Moscow year in and year out. They were seldom permitted to travel about in Russia and then they were provided with a Jewish guide to control their movements and interviews. Their chief source of news was the Soviet press, but they were not permitted to send abroad all the facts appearing in these publications.

They gave the United States a willfully distorted picture of Russia. Because the Jews there held a monopoly of the press, because the censors were Jews and because the members of the commissariat of foreign affairs who controlled the correspondents were Jews, it is clear the correspondents were compelled to give their newspapers a Jewish view of Russia.

Among the other correspondents-who after leaving Moscow admitted it was impossible to send anything approximating true news from Russia — is G.E.R. Godye, another correspondent of The New York Times, and Negley Farson, many years correspondent of The Chicago Daily News and later correspondent of The London Daily Mail. Godye continued his apologies for the Soviets after he left Russia while Farson wrote articles apologizing for the lies he had been compelled to feed the readers of The Mail during the winter of 1941-42 when he was again in Russia. Godye was so entranced by the misery he found in Moscow that he expressed the hope he would someday be permitted to return.

There was no censorship in Riga. This attractive city was an unusually favorable point to observe and report Russian developments. There we obtained Soviet newspapers and publications two days after issue. We knew what news the Moscow correspondents had been permitted to report and what had been tabooed. In Riga we further had the opportunity to interview travelers who arrived from Russia. They were largely diplomats, businessmen and engineers. The only tourists who visited Russia arrived in large groups and were under the close surveillance from the time they entered until their departure over the frontier.

[Page 130]

In all those years of watching Russia, I was struck by the remarkable fact that the only people who were allowed to travel about in Russia alone were Jews. They came from all over the world to visit their relatives.

Many came from America, but I also met Jews from Australia, South Africa, Canada, England and one from Scotland. Some were shocked by the conditions they encountered and frankly condemned Communism and all its works. Others were more favorably impressed, reporting progress and improvement. Upon closer questioning I discovered they all reacted according to the way they found their relatives. If they were suffering hardship in some backward village, the traveler was unfavorably impressed. If they were found occupying good government posts and living better than the average Russian the traveler was satisfied. The latter were in the majority.

Many of these Jewish travelers believed that some day the Jews in Russia would be called to an accounting for the sufferings inflicted upon the people by the Bolshevik regime. They reported that many Jews were anxious to migrate from Russia and tried to assist their relatives to leave.

They also anticipated a terrible pogrom should Bolshevism collapse. That the Jews recognized their responsibility for many of the horrors of Communism is further revealed by the tremendous efforts made by Jewish organizations abroad, primarily those in Great Britain and the United States, to pressurize these and other governments to grant Jews in Russia immigration visas. It was noticeable in later years how these efforts died away as the Jews realized there was little chance that their stranglehold upon Russia would be broken. For some years now the loyalty of the Jew of the world has been divided. They are definitely split into two camps, one of which regards Bolshevism as the sum of Judea’s ambition and the second, the more orthodox group, which clings to and works for the realization of the ancient Jewish dream to re-conquer Palestine, but which also helps Bolshevism where it can.

 

 

 

_______________________

 

 

NOTES

 

* Images (maps, photos, etc.) have also been added that were not part of the original Noontide edition.

 

__________________

Knowledge is Power in Our Struggle for Racial Survival

 

(Information that should be shared with as many of our people as possible — do your part to counter Jewish control of the mainstream media — pass it on and spread the word) … Val Koinen at KOINEN’S CORNER

 

Click to go to >> OCS – Part 1: Reviews; Background Information

Click to go to >> OCS – Part 2: Introduction; Permit Me to Introduce Myself

Click to go to >> OCS – Part 3: Why I Did Not Go Home; The U.S.

Click to go to >> OCS – Part 4: Lativa

Click to go to >> OCS – Part 5: Meet the Bolsheviks

Click to go to >> OCS – Part 6: Alliance With the Bear

Click to go to >> OCS – Part 7: Poland

Click to go to >> OCS – Part 8: Trips; The Downfall of Democracy

Click to go to >> OCS – Part 9: Jews

Click to go to >> OCS – Part 10: Russia

Click to go to >> OCS – Part 11: Lithuania

Click to go to >> OCS – Part 12: Danzig; Lithuania

Click to go to >> OCS – Part 13: Sweden; Norway

Click to go to >> OCS – Part 14: Finland

Click to go to >> OCS – Part 15 (last) : England; Europe; Epilogue; Index of Names

 

 

 

PDF of this blog post. Click to view or download (2.1 MB).

>> Onward Christian Soldiers by Donald Day – Part 10

 

 

 

Version History

Version 2: Dec 8, 2019 — Re-uploaded images and PDF for katana17.com/wp/ version

 

Version 1: Published Mar 24, 2015

This entry was posted in Baltic States, Bk - Onward Christian Soldiers, Communism, Donald Day, Europe, Finland, France, Germany, International Finance, Jews, Latvia, National Socialism, Norway, Poland, Propaganda - Anti-German, Race Differences, Revisionism, Russia, Sweden, The International Jew, White Nationalism, WW I. Bookmark the permalink.

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