There is surely one general prohibition which we can make. I mean a prohibition against what is called "frightfulness." What I mean by frightfulness is the inflicting of great slaughter or massacre upon a particular crowd of people, with the intention of terrorising not merely the rest of the crowd, but the whole district or the whole country.
I yield to no one in my detestation of Bolshevism, and of the revolutionary violence which precedes it.* But my hatred of Bolshevism and Bolsheviks is not founded on their silly system of economics, or their absurd doctrine of an impossible equality.* It arises from the bloody and devastating terrorism which they practise in every land into which they have broken, and by which alone their criminal regime can be maintained. Governments who have seized upon power by violence and by usurpation have often resorted to terrorism in their desperate efforts to keep what they have stolen, but the august and venerable structure of the British Empire, where lawful authority descends from hand to hand and generation after generation, does not need such aid. Such ideas are absolutely foreign to the British way of doing things.
Intelligence reports that German and Russian agents were abroad in the Punjab, and the possibility that they might try to use the festival to spark ‘revolutionary violence’ were cited as General Dyer’s justification for taking action against the crowd. Another factor was said to be that just two days earlier, Marcella Sherwood, a teacher, had been assaulted, stripped, and dumped in a back-street. But as Churchill was at pains to remind us, neither of these could possibly justify what subsequently happened, not simply because they were not bad enough, but because terrorism is never justifiable, whatever fears, doubts or resentments may be upon us.
As Churchill would say in the House on 22nd October, 1945, “the inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries”. No politics can make all men equally prosperous, healthy, talented or happy. Of course, all human lives are of equal value however unproductive, feeble or hopeless they may seem to be; yet that is one equality that Communism, Fascism and Socialism all utterly disregard.