However, at present, even the most unenlightened peasant, in the most backward of all countries drawn into the war, knows that the government of his country in 1914-1918 was, as a whole and in every detail, a clear, simple, elementary refutation of these regulations of bourgeois democracy. Democracy, parliaments, elections, freedom of the press, remained — in so far as they did remain a mere screen; in reality all the countries drawn into the war — the whole world — were governed by the methods of dictatorship, which utilized, when it happened to be convenient and profitable, elections, parliaments and the press.
One must be a blind fool or a conscious deceiver of the masses not to see, or to conceal, this fundamental fact; at the most critical period of their history, at the moment of their struggle for existence, the bourgeois States of Europe, Asia and America defended themselves not by means of democracy and parliamentarism, but by openly passing over to the methods of dictatorship.
It was the dictatorship of the general staffs, of the officers’ corps, and of large industry, to whom belonged, not only actually, but also formally, all power both in the army and in the country; who commanded, not only lives, but also the property of the whole country and of every citizen, not only living at the time but yet to be born (the military debts of Messrs. Romanoff, Hohenzollern, Clemenceau and Lloyd George will cover the lives and work of future generations). During several years, before the eyes of the whole human race, a picture of the practice of dictatorship is unrolled — a dictatorship ruling over the whole world, determining everything, regulating everything, penetrating everything, and confirming its existence by 20,000,000 corpses on the fields of Europe and Asia. It is natural, therefore, that to the question, “What is dictatorship?” the Communists should answer: “Open your eyes, and you will see before you a splendidly elaborated system of bourgeois dictatorship, which has achieved its object: for it has given that concentration of power into the hands of small group of world imperialists which allowed them to conduct their war and attain their peace (of Versailles). Do not pretend that dictatorship — as a system of government, as a form of power — can frighten anyone except the old women of bourgeois pacifism. The dictatorship of the proletariat suppresses, not ‘equality,’ ‘liberty,’ and ‘democracy,’ but only the bourgeois dictatorship, which in 1914-18 showed itself to be the most bloody, most tyrannical, most pitiless, cynical and hypocritical of all forms of power that ever existed.”
