The Idaho Republican. [volume] (Blackfoot, Idaho) 1904-1932, 1920-06-21
BLACK TROOPS ARE
MENACE, IS CLAIM
Soldiers in Germany
Menace to All
Civilization
BY E. d. MOREL

| ana recently issued StrOngi pro-
test against the French employ.
ment of black troops in the Ger
man occupied area.
Especial to Universal Service)
LONDON.-Never have the col
| ored races stood in greater need OF
the support of a public opinion in
Europe inspired by something high
er than money making or militarist
ambition.
Europe is given over at present to
a medieval reaction more destruc-
tive than any in medieval times.
1t is inevitable that what is called
colonial policy" should exhibit the
same declension, and in aggravated
form. +
The slave-owner spirit swings
back to power. 1t assumes many
forms and is disguised under vary
ing aliases.
1t has seldom been more cynical
ly avowed than in the recent circular
of the governor of British East At
RIGA, with it's dishonest clap-trap
about providing power by legisla-
ton to prevent idleness "-idleness
signifying in actual practice a dis
inclination on the part of the native
population to labor away from its
homes for parasitical interests, in
stead of in it's homeland for its own
needs.
A few years ago such circular
would have provoked wide indigna-
ton. Today it hardly raises rip
pie. We are going back.
What was the so-called identured
Asiatic labor in Fiji but slavery, and
under atrocious conditions? The pro-
posal to introduce it into Samoa,
against which l rejoice to see the
New Zealand worker is finely pro-
testing, is a mere extension by the
sugar trust of what is, in effect, a
slave system.
Turn where you will there is album
dant evidence that capitalist So
ciety, threatened in Europe, is dig
ging it's talons into exploitable At
RIGA, Asia and Australia more firm
ly than it has attempted to do in
our time (save for the Congo expert
ment). Capitalism, exhausted by
the war, is apparently hoping to re-
coup itself for it's losses among help
less communities of black, brown
and yellow men.
In such a plight the only safe
guard of these communities from
the very eXtremities of wretchedness
is to be sought in the realization on
the part of the European worker
that their cause is fundamentally his
own. Their only hope is that the
European worker will know that he
cannot, and will not, attain freedom
while the population of great areas
subject to his governors or the the
governors of his governors allies
are suffering from forms of exploita-
ton differing from slavery only in
name, or are deprived of national
and political rights-in short, to the
freedom to which they are entitled.
And yet there is another side to
the problem now in operation very
near home. Less than a days steam
and rail journey in normal times
from our shores-a few hours dis
tant by aerial locomotion-tens of
thousands of armed African levies
are spread over a whole European
countryside, encamped in towns and
villages with which many of us are
familiar; men from Mediterranean
Africa, men from the forests and
swamps of western Africa, who until
yesterday were living the primitive
life of our distant forbears, men who
are even now represented to us in
books of travel and in missionary
tracts-often with manifest exag-
geration-as indulging in strange
and fearful rites in their primeval
forest homes.
They have been imported into Eu-
rope by compulsion-clothed in
French uniform, trained in all the
devilish arts of civilized warfare.
Upon their natural barbarism
which conveys no reproach has been |
grated the scientific barbarism in
volved in the twentiety century cul-
ture of legalized murder.
They have been practising disci-
pies of this culture for the past four
years. under the tuition of their mas
ters, and among the people they |
have slaughtered and been slaugh-
tered by, they are now quartered in
lime of peace.
They are without their women
kind. Brothels must necessarily be
provided for them. They cannot be
confined to barracks. They move as
in subjugated land.
They belong to peoples in whom
noture has implanted strong sexual
impulses, which again conveys no re-
proach to them.>- Many of them
come from regions where mans ex-
stence is one continual fight against
the destructive natural phenomena
by which he is surrounded, and
where, lacking that virility with
which nature has endowed him, he