The daily Nome industrial worker., 1916-03-24

It's somewhat entertaining to ob- serve that purely socialist papers still continue to discuss the why and the wherefore of the collapse of sc- cialiom's opposition to war, and wh'' it is that those who were so strong Iy anti-militarist before tho Great War began, lined up with every re actionary powers and became in many instances more militarist than the militarists themselves. And furthermore 1t is only @ reasonable deduction from this condition thnt if any other country became in voived In war, no matter how preda- tory or how aggrsssivcly war of conquest, the socialist politicians in other couhtriSs with few academic exceptions would do exactly as the German and as the French socialists have done.
 We don't think that there can be any doubt about this; and for this very reason 1t is very necessary that, some explanation be forthcoming a5 to why it is so.
 A dispatch in this issue says that three Swedish editors who are so- cialists have been arrested ana charged with high terason because at conference a resolution was passed wherein a revolution an" general strike was urged in case Of Swoden's entering the war.
 The action of the authorities i5 reqAnable enough and readily un- - VI, but we certainly have T
 lcm on hand,tf we. per-
 IlIy ewing that should Sweden H- involved in the war, the socialists of that country would do as their comrades in other countries have done, and sacrifice all their inter- national theories to the impulsivn driving force of nationslism, falling in line to support the war just as has been done elsewhere.
 Yet it would be very question able thing to entertain for one mi mute that they would act otherwise, Possibly here and there an undaunt- ed few might protest the war, but the vast majority would rather give way to the feelings of patriotisn and nationalism and fight when called upon and still more support the idea of such fighting.
 It is an interesting thing to COL slider why men will act one way to day and another end totally differ ent way tomorrc. H4- there is no getting around ,ha 4o.i,,t fac that most of the very foremost soci- alists, men like Kaustsky in Ger many, Van der Velde in Belgiun Herye in France for eX2mple, eaC their own words and swallowed thelr own theories to adopt theories ana to speak and write words which might have been spoken and writtcf by the most reactionary among them.
 The key to thu situation we believe is not to be found in the parliament arianism of which they were the eE' ponents pure and simple. For the most radical of the anarchists with d few exceptions have thrown off their internationalism with the same case as have the socialists. Thus we discover men like Kropotkin ald hundreds of others, lining up with the patriots who yesterday were the abhorred of such.
 is it not without some significance for us that the men who have beGi the real pacificists and who have rendered strongest voice against val have not been the radical socialists or anarchists among tho belligerents but the workers who were orga- nized? And it is certainly worth thinking about that the least be!li- cose of all have been those who have had the economic pressure Of the struggle for existence with them for every day of the year. It's the em- ployed and unemployed among the workers and not the intellectuals of any brand who resisted war and frankly didn't want it, who ws.n the war was on realized its neces- sity only as a cloak to hide their dislike of it, and who persisted Tn seeing the class struggle in spite of the superior overshadowing ot the war itself.
 Not very mary cf'ths quarter mil
 ;:su