E. Belfort Bax, Otto Rühle, Justice, 6th June 1918, p.8. (letter)
Transcribed by Ted Crawford.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Dear Comrade. – In the foreign intelligence columns of a recent number of Justice appeared a paragraph to the effect that Otto Rühle, the Socialist “Minority” Reichstag member for Pirna, in Saxony, had resolved not to seek re-election for the reason that he despaired of the situation in Germany from a revolutionary point of view. Many readers of Justice will probably have passed over the little piece of information without much notice. But for those who have followed the course of Socialist Party events in Germany during the war the item of news will have been one of peculiar sadness. Otto Rühle, a close friend of Karl Liebknecht, is a man of single-hearted honesty who opposed the Imperial Government and Prussian militarism with unswerving consistency throughout his whole career. He has voted “straight” for Socialist principles on every occasion in the Reichstag. Unlike Liebknecht and others with whom he was associated in his Parliamentary career, Otto Rühle was not specially well known to the outside world. But for sheer dogged integrity and fidelity to his duty to the principles he professed and to the cause of the proletariat he has never had a superior. We shall all hope, I am sure, that this brave and honest Saxon, temporarily disheartened though he well may be by the current of events in his native country, will not be permanently lost to the movement he has so faithfully served. – Yours fraternally,
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E. Belfort Bax |
Last updated on 4.2.2005