Here’s an interesting little article, originally published in the September 1934 issue of Soviet Russia Today by Roger Nash Baldwin, founding member and first director of the American Civil Liberties Union. Keep it in mind if you encounter anyone who suggests that it’d be a good idea to elect as president someone who espouses Socialism.
When that power of the working class is once achieved, as it has been only in the Soviet Union, I am for maintaining it by any means whatever. Dictatorship is the obvious means in a world of enemies at home and abroad.
I saw in the Soviet Union many opponents of the regime. I visited a dozen prisons — the political sections among them. I saw considerable of the work of the OGPU. I heard a good many stories of severity, even of brutality, and many of them from the victims. While I sympathized with personal distress I just could not bring myself to get excited over the suppression of opposition when I stacked it up against what I saw of fresh, vigorous expressions of free living by workers and peasants all over the land. And further, no champion of a socialist society could fail to see that some suppression was necessary to achieve it. It could not all be done by persuasion.
It seems in later years Baldwin came to understand that that Soviet system sucked. But for a while, while he was in a position of historic importance, he held the view that dictatorship and suppression of the opinions, property and lives of countless individuals was perfectly acceptable so long as these individuals were being oppressed by socialists.
