Today -100: December 8, 1924: Of German elections and negligible cranks

In the German Reichstag elections, the center parties do all right and the two extremes quite badly. Don’t get used to it. The moderate bourgeois DDP, DVP, Zentrum and BVP gain a few seats, but the Social Democrats (SPD) increase their vote from 20.5% to 26%. The Communist (KPD) vote drops from 12.9% to 9% and the coalition of Nazi & anti-Semitic Völkisch parties drop from 6.5 to 3%. The results could also be read as a strong victory for the Dawes Plan.

Izvestia asks George Bernard Shaw for his opinions on Russia. They may have asked the wrong dude. In his response, which he also sent to the Daily Herald, almost as if he thinks Izvestia might not print it, he suggests abolishing the Communist International since “the proposition that the world should take its orders from a handful of Russian novices who seem to have gained their knowledge of modern socialism by sitting over a drawing room stove and reading of the pamphlets of liberal revolutionists of 1848-70 makes even Lord Curzon and Mr. Winston Churchill seem extreme modernists in comparison.” Ouch. Until Socialism is treated as a living force “there will be nothing but misunderstandings in which the dozen most negligible cranks in Russia will correspond solemnly with the dozen most negligible cranks in England, both of them convinced that they are the proletariat and the revolution and the future and the International and God knows what else.”

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