Conclusions

Strong and powerful individuals and states are never afraid to admit the mistakes they have made. Lies and deceit are the weapons of the weak, who are conscious of their own helplessness.

This historical truth comes to mind of its own accord when one watches the efforts of Polish society to deny the plain facts set out in the protest of French public figures against the "white terror in Poland." The Polish reactionaries, the present masters of the situation in Poland, evidently understand very well that their strength and their rule will not last long. They understand that only with lies and deceit can they still fool their own people and foreign countries for a while, but that all this will soon come to an end. And, in full awareness of their weakness and short-livedness, like flies in autumn, they bite all the more painfully, and with their buzzing they want to drown out the cries of those they bite. A symbol of Polish reaction is that chief of a police "posterunek" (station) who, as the Sejm commission of Mr. Thugutt exposed, ordered the musicians to play during the torture of the arrested, so that the cries of his victims could not be heard….

Thus the lies and deceit of the "Right," which strains to show that "all is quiet at Shipka," are entirely understandable to us. History shows that a dying power is always the worst. But the position taken on the matter of the French protest by the leader of the Polish "Left," Mr. Thugutt, is quite incomprehensible. Claimants to power, who write on their banner the slogan "Rząd robotniczo-włościański" (a workers' and peasants' government) (P.P.S.) and during the Sejm elections promised the people mountains of gold ("Wyzwolenie"), have gone down the very same road as the "Right," and, just like Polish reaction, are afraid to speak the truth about present-day Poland. In this we can see only one thing: a feeling that they too have no firm ground under them among the popular masses, for all along they have knowingly led those masses not by the road of struggle for their liberation, to complete and final victory, but by the road of eternal compromises with the existing state of affairs, the road of reconciliation with what is, at any price….

True, even among the Polish "Left" voices of protest are beginning to appear against the policy of Mr. Thugutt and those like him. And even among the activists of "Wyzwolenie," which is falling apart before our eyes, there are quite strong and robust people, certain that their aspirations and the aspirations of the popular masses agree with each other. And these individuals look the truth boldly in the eye and declare publicly: we are not guilty of the blood and tears of the tortured!

We note with great satisfaction the statement in the pages of the journal "Wyzwolenie Ludu" by Deputy Rudziński, who affirms the truthfulness of the charges made in the French protest against the reaction ruling in Poland. "In various spheres of life we could point to reactionary methods that contradict the basic notions of humanity, and even all sound reason," writes Deputy Rudziński, and he calls for a struggle against the predatory aspirations and wild obscurantism of black reaction. We welcome the healthy Polish popular thought expressed in Mr. Rudziński's statement, which represents the covenant of the birth of a new Polish "Left."

However, such statements in Polish society are only few and far between. On the other hand, the outcries and knowingly false "protests" against the highly humane statement of the French socialists in defense of the rights of Belarusians and of the other oppressed minorities of Poland we read every day. Even Polish scholarship has joined this campaign against the truth….

What conclusions follow from all this for us Belarusians?

There can be two conclusions here. The first: that in the present state of affairs and with the present moods of the vast majority of Polish society and of its representatives in the Sejm, we cannot hope for any change whatsoever in the position of our people under Poland, since that majority has declared this position "ideal." The second conclusion concerns those Belarusians who, believing in the goodwill toward our people and in the sincerity of the official Polish "Left" with Mr. Thugutt at its head, went into the ranks of Polish democracy, whether at the Sejm elections (on the lists of "Wyzwolenie") or, lately, on the ground of the "Belarusian-Polish Society"; with the best of wishes, this is powerless to give any practical results and is used only by Polish reaction to mislead foreign countries into thinking that really "all is quiet at Shipka." Indeed, it is time, long past time, for the Belarusian members of the Sejm from the "Wyzwolenie" party to correct their mistake and to leave their unworthy "service" to strangers, all the more so as that party is living out its last days…. It is time, too, for all Belarusians in general finally to take their own path, the path of the Belarusian working masses!