G.K. Chesterton was famous English journalist, poet, biographer, historian, debater, radio personality, novelist and Catholic apologist.
"Russia has a policy which she pursues, if you will, through evil and good; but at least so as to produce good as well as evil.
Let it be granted that the policy has made her oppressive to the Finns and the Poles - though the Russian Poles feel far less oppressed than do the Prussian Poles.
But it is a mere historical fact, that if Russia has been a despot to some small nations, she has been a deliverer to others. She did, so far as in her lay, emancipate the Servians and the Montenegrins. But whom did Prussia ever emancipate - even by accident?...
Russia is pursuing certain intelligible and sincere ends, which to her at least are ideals, and for which, therefore, she will make sacrifices and will protect the weak.
But the North German soldier is a sort of abstract tyrant, everywhere and always on the side of materialistic tyranny.
This Teuton in uniform has been found in strange places: shooting farmers before Saratoga and flogging soldiers in Surrey, hanging niggers in Africa and raping girls in Wicklow; but never, by some mysterious fatality, lending a hand to the freeing of a single city or the independence of one solitary flag.
Wherever scorn and prosperous oppression are, there is the Prussian; unconsciously consistent, instinctively restrictive, innocently evil; 'following darkness like a dream."
"Russia has a policy which she pursues, if you will, through evil and good; but at least so as to produce good as well as evil.
Let it be granted that the policy has made her oppressive to the Finns and the Poles - though the Russian Poles feel far less oppressed than do the Prussian Poles.
But it is a mere historical fact, that if Russia has been a despot to some small nations, she has been a deliverer to others. She did, so far as in her lay, emancipate the Servians and the Montenegrins. But whom did Prussia ever emancipate - even by accident?...
Russia is pursuing certain intelligible and sincere ends, which to her at least are ideals, and for which, therefore, she will make sacrifices and will protect the weak.
But the North German soldier is a sort of abstract tyrant, everywhere and always on the side of materialistic tyranny.
This Teuton in uniform has been found in strange places: shooting farmers before Saratoga and flogging soldiers in Surrey, hanging niggers in Africa and raping girls in Wicklow; but never, by some mysterious fatality, lending a hand to the freeing of a single city or the independence of one solitary flag.
Wherever scorn and prosperous oppression are, there is the Prussian; unconsciously consistent, instinctively restrictive, innocently evil; 'following darkness like a dream."
