Twilight or Dawn?

One word can practically sum up the political programme of the right wing:" Anti-Communism. But beyond that, what have they to offer? Nothing, except a philosophy of cynicism and despair. Thus General Smuts, that great spokesman of Western democracy, that champion of the British Empire and the native cattle compounds of Johannesbourg, has said that we are living "in a twilight world". After all their magnificent talk, of patriotism and freedom, of Christianity and the New Order, they can offer to the workers only hopelessness and despair and a "tightened belt"—with perhaps a better life in the world to some.

In a sense, these pessimists are right. It is twilight for them. It is twilight for all those who make profits from the toil of the workers, and from the cheap labour of coloured peoples. But for the vast majority of the human race it is not twilight, but the dawn, the lightening dawn of world Socialism, where the workers of the world will work for their own benefit, without fear of employment, of wars, of starvation, or of persecution.

Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg, speaking at the Paris Peace Congress, remarked: "There is the old legend of the two women who came to the wise judge, quarrelling over the possession of a child. And the woman who pretended to be the mother consented: 'Let the child be divided in two.' She said so because the child was not hers.

"The barbarians who are now plotting war are prepared to slay the future of mankind, because it is not their future. They are afraid of time, because time is against them. They hate life because life to with the men of labour, not with the handful of marauders. They want war, because they are doomed, because, all their philosophy, aesthetics, economics has boiled down to one thing: the atom bomb."

—H. C. E.