Markin comment:
The slogans featured in the headline to the article also posted here today and that is also the subject here, open diplomacy, are simply the beginning of wisdom for leftists- Free Pvt. Manning! Hands Off Julian Assange! We anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist leftists have not interest, no interest whatsoever, in letting the bourgeois state keep its state secrets secret. Although reading some of the material leaked one can understand why they would want to keep this stuff secret. More to the point is that some of the documentation of sophomoric antics of the “august” international diplomatic community should be placed in books sealed with seven seals-in the interest of human progress-now that we have had our “look-see.”
The key point though, as noted in the article, is our commitment to open diplomacy under the same principles as we have on opening the company books during trade union negotiations. The more we know about the conditions the other side operates under the better we can fight them.
I would also underscore here the point made in the article about the distinction between today’s Wikileaks’ basically ultra-liberal journalistic approach to “shaming” the international bourgeoisie to be less imperialistic and the policy of the Bolsheviks in Russia in the early revolutionary period of the 1917 revolution to give ammunition to the international working class to order to help them rise up against their oppressors. That “open diplomacy, openly arrived at,” my friends, should be the norm, under conditions of a world federation of workers republics, in our struggle for an international socialist order.
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Workers Vanguard No. 971
7 January 2011
Soviet Publication of Secret Treaties
(Quote of the Week)
Two weeks after the Bolshevik-led Russian Revolution of 1917, Leon Trotsky, then the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, announced the Soviet government’s publication of secret treaties, exposing the machinations of the prior tsarist and Provisional Government regimes and their imperialist allies. Published after the Soviet government had declared Russia’s withdrawal from the carnage of World War I, a war of competing imperialist powers for redivision of the world, the revelations helped foment a wave of struggle by the imperialists’ colonial victims. Most importantly, the Bolsheviks advanced the fight to end the war through proletarian revolutions in the advanced capitalist countries.
In publishing the secret diplomatic documents from the foreign policy archives of Tsarism and of the bourgeois coalition Governments of the first seven months of the revolution, we are carrying out the undertaking which we made when our party was in opposition. Secret diplomacy is a necessary tool for a propertied minority which is compelled to deceive the majority in order to subject it to its interests. Imperialism, with its dark plans of conquest and its robber alliances and deals, developed the system of secret diplomacy to the highest level. The struggle against the imperialism which is exhausting and destroying the peoples of Europe is at the same time a struggle against capitalist diplomacy, which has cause enough to fear the light of day. The Russian people, and the peoples of Europe and the whole world, should learn the documentary truth about the plans forged in secret by the financiers and industrialists together with their parliamentary and diplomatic agents. The peoples of Europe have paid for the right to this truth with countless sacrifices and universal economic desolation.
The abolition of secret diplomacy is the primary condition for an honest, popular, truly democratic foreign policy. The Soviet Government regards it as its duty to carry out such a policy in practice. That is precisely why, while openly proposing an immediate armistice to all the belligerent peoples and their Governments, we are at the same time publishing these treaties and agreements, which have lost all binding force for the Russian workers, soldiers, and peasants who have taken power into their own hands.
The bourgeois politicians and journalists of Germany and Austria-Hungary may try to make use of the documents published in order to present the diplomacy of the Central Empires in a more advantageous light. But any such attempt would be doomed to pitiful failure, and that for two reasons. In the first place, we intend quickly to place before the tribunal of public opinion secret documents which treat sufficiently clearly of the diplomacy of the Central Empires. Secondly, and more important, the methods of secret diplomacy are as universal as imperialist robbery. When the German proletariat enters the revolutionary path leading to the secrets of their chancelleries, they will extract documents no whit inferior to those which we are about to publish. It only remains to hope that this will take place quickly.
The workers’ and peasants’ Government abolishes secret diplomacy and its intrigues, codes, and lies. We have nothing to hide. Our programme expresses the ardent wishes of millions of workers, soldiers, and peasants. We want peace as soon as possible on the basis of decent coexistence and collaboration of the peoples. We want the rule of capital to be overthrown as soon as possible. In exposing to the entire world the work of the ruling classes, as expressed in the secret diplomatic documents, we address the workers with the call which forms the unchangeable foundation of our foreign policy: “Proletarians of all countries, unite.”
—“Statement by Trotsky on the Publication of the Secret Treaties,” 22 November 1917,
reprinted in Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, Vol. 1 (1917-1924), edited by Jane Degras (1951)
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