jan 3, 1921 - Program: De Zachte Krachten

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"In 1921, Roland Holst went to Soviet Russia as an honored guest and important speaker at the Third Congress of the Comintern. Soon after this trip, however, she privately began to voice her misgivings about what she had witnessed there. She deplored the lack of freedom she had found within the Communist Party and the revolution's high cost to ordinary people; she also believed that the Soviet Union appeared to be evolving rapidly into a brutal bureaucratic dictatorship distorted by ceaseless warfare against enemies of the state. In this, she became one of the first to perceive the brutal excesses that would characterize the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. The hope she had expressed in 1918, that the revolutionary forces of the day could somehow achieve social justice with minimal use of violence, was now beginning to seem a bit naive. Her book Sunken Borders, predicting that "the gentle forces will win in the end," contained clear signs that this militant Socialist and revolutionary was experiencing a growing sense of spirituality very much at odds with the leadership in the Soviet Union:

De Zachte Krachten
by Henriëtte Roland Holst (1869–1952)

The gentle forces, they will surely vanquish
at last – I hear this as a sincere whispering;
if I kept silent, all light would be darkening;
all warmth in me would certainly extinguish.

The powers that enslave love will be overcome;
they will extrude all evils successively;
the great salvation may begin then surely,
if the hearts' attentive listening is well done.

We'll hear the rustling in all tenderness,
like we do hear in small shells the great sea.
Love is the meaning of the life on planets:

life of men, and animals nothing can oppress
rising to her. This is the certain knowledge: Perfect Love always transcends entirely.

(https://www.encyclopedia.com/women/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/roland-holst-henriette-1869-1952)

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