{"id":20968,"date":"2019-03-03T21:16:18","date_gmt":"2019-03-03T21:16:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/watchmanmedia.org\/?p=20968"},"modified":"2019-03-14T23:30:38","modified_gmt":"2019-03-14T23:30:38","slug":"the-book-no-socialist-dares-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/watchmanmedia.org\/?p=20968","title":{"rendered":"The Book No Socialist Dares Read"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"W<\/span>HEN a visitor to the Soviet Union returned to his home country, he declared: \u2018I have seen the future, and it works\u2019. While this sounds as though it could have come from the numerous British socialist<\/span><\/a>s<\/span> who made the pilgrimage to the USSR during the 1930s, it was in fact uttered by an American investigative journalist called Lincoln Steffens.<\/p>\n

He made the remark in 1919, after returning from Petrograd. According to his biography, Steffens was put up in a heated palace with servants, from which he ventured, stepping over emaciated corpses in the streets, to observe the starving local inhabitants at work in a communist society.<\/p>\n

Of this, he wrote: \u2018Soviet Russia was a revolutionary government with an evolutionary plan<\/a><\/span>\u2018 and that the dreadful conditions were \u2018a temporary condition of evil, which is made tolerable by hope and a plan<\/a>\u2019<\/span>. Meanwhile the Red Terror<\/span><\/a> was in full swing. Steffens had willingly mistaken a \u2018boot stamping on a human face for ever\u2019 for a future that works.<\/p>\n

You can read the full article here.<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n