Genuine persecutions were inflicted on worker Esperantists in other countries, primarily those where workers' parties were illegal. In Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Latvia and Poland, receipt of SAT publications was forbidden.[224] On occasion, a high percentage of work- ers in an Esperanto club was enough to attract the suspicions of a police chief, as happened in 1924 to the Esperantists in Split, Yugoslavia[225]; in that country, the police in several villages simply outlawed Esperanto.[226]In 1926 a SAT member from Yugoslavia complained bitterly that in his 'putrujo' (in Esperantopatrujo means fatherland, while putrujo translates as 'rotten place') the general discrimination against workers extended also to his own desire to learn Esperanto.[227] In Estonia, workers' Esperanto groups founded in 1925 were unable to begin operations—'because of the imprisonment of most of the members'.[228]
Such bans and embargoes were directed specifically at the political activities of worker Esperantists. At first they did not touch the affairs of the neutral movement, for whose leaders the wisest tactic seemed to be to maintain silence or to content themselves by declaring that Esperanto could be used by all and belonged to no one. In this way they could deny the responsibility of the movement as a whole when the language was used for some specific and questionable purpose.
Perhaps the least excitable were the Japanese Esperantists. In May 1921, the blind Russian-Ukrainian poet Vasili Eroshenko, who enjoyed great popularity among Japanese leftists, was expelled from Japan for his participation in a May 1 demonstration and his attendance at the Second Congress of the Japanese Socialist Union.[229] In late September 1922 a speech on 'Cosmopolitanism and Esperanto' was interrupted by a police officer who believed that it contained 'dangerous ideas'.[230] But the Japanese Esperanto Institute (JEI), which always avoided involvement in political and ideological conflicts, was unperturbed. On the contrary, it happily noted that the publicity surrounding Eroshenko's deportation had awakened popular curiosity about Esperanto. If not against popular prejudices ('Esperantists resemble watermelons: green on the outside, red on the inside'), at least JEI succeeded in shielding itself against government harassment. Somewhat different was the situation in Taiwan and Korea, both under the rule of Japan at the time. For Japanese citizens resident in those ter- ritories there were no obstacles to learning Esperanto, as long as they steered clear of political activities. But if local residents were interested in learning it the authorities tended to judge such activities as the first step on a slippery slope to 'dangerous thinking'. A report that has come down to us, written by Yamaguchi Koshizu, a Japanese woman who publicized Esperanto among the Taiwanese, provides insight into the motives behind the denigration of Esperanto in Taiwan. She cites the following explanation from a high-ranking functionary in the Japanese police:
In general it is important to understand that the meaning is different when a Japanese does something from when a Taiwanese does it. [...] There is no doubt that Japanese people choose Esperanto only because they believe it to be a common international language for the world, a language symbol- izing future peace for humankind, or a way of respecting one's own national language. But the situation changes completely if it has to do with
Taiwanese. They are interested in this world language not simply as one people in the world: their learning Esperanto implies complete rejection of the Japanese language. Language and thought are intimately related, so rejection of the Japanese language signifies total repudiation of Japan. Japan's colonial policy is completely unable to tolerate such traitors.[231]
What makes this statement particularly notable is its lack of any attempt to hide the evident effort to treat non-Japanese as inferior and to apply different metrics even to the simple act of learning Esperanto.
In Eastern Europe, on more than one occasion the authorities declared that their actions against worker Esperantists were not directed at the Esperanto movement in general. In Poland, the minister of internal affairs announced in 1923 that the harassment of SAT members was occurring only because of their 'actions against the state', not because of Esperanto.[232]When in 1922 in the Romanian city of Cluj a group of young workers was arrested because over-enthusiastic police officers mistook the Esperantist green star for the communist insignia, the president of the military tri- bunal, before absolving the accused, declared that Esperanto was 'a very beautiful cultural movement' and that only the use of the language 'for unauthorized purposes' needed to be punished.[233] And when in 1926 the South Slav Esperantist League complained to the minister of education that district heads and gendarmes in various locations had forbidden the found- ing of Esperanto clubs or the organization of courses, the minister Stjepan Radic declared that he himself was an adept of Esperanto and had recently introduced the language into the curriculum of the University of Zagreb.[234]At the same time, this incident did not put an end to local obstacles in Yugoslavia. The situation was similar in Hungary. The neutral movement in semi-feudal Hungary had a generally more progressive character than that in the more developed countries of Western Europe. The president of the Esperanto Society of Hungary (Hungarlanda Esperanto-Societo, HES) from 1912 to 1923 was Sandor Giesswein, a Catholic prelate who before the war had been one of the leaders of the Christian Socialist Party.
During the war he secretly permitted the use of the archbishops palace, and even churches themselves, for pacifist meetings, and after the war as leader of the Reform Party he argued for democratization.i 48 As early as 1911 the HES constitution emphasized the interconnection of Esperanto, the peace movement, women's emancipation and the protection of children and workers—a vision statement that survived every regime change until 1950.[235]
During the Hungarian Republic of Councils of 1919, Esperantists were among those infected by revolutionary enthusiasm.[236] Following its fall, a few of them fled the country. The Esperanto poet, Rezso Rajczy, suspected of being a communist, died after being arrested and tortured; he was 'the only known martyr for Esperanto in Hungary'.i [237] Because the regime of Miklos Horthy remembered that Esperanto had been politically 'misused' in the 1920s, it was sometimes an act of courage for Hungarians living in the provinces even to wear the green star. In 1925 the founding of a group in Mezokovesd was not authorized because, among other grounds, it was alleged that the local inhabitants had such a primitive level of development that even elementary education had not or would not have the desired result, and that the hours devoted to learning Esperanto might be misused to disseminate activities against the state.[238]While the neutral society had plenty of room to operate, the workers' Esperanto movement in Hungary suffered from frequent embargoes by local authorities. To teach the language to workers without charge, spe- cial permission had to be sought from the police; it was often declined, sometimes because (allegedly) the neutralist Esperantists had already set up courses and the workers could study there, sometimes because Hungarian workers should first master their native language, sometimes because an Esperanto course in a city with so many illiterates was simply superfluous.[239] Worker Esperantists in Bulgaria had to deal with even greater obstacles: in 1924 the Bulgarian minister of internal affairs labeled Esperanto a Bolshevik language. As a result, non-Esperantist workers' journals, which had earlier considered Esperanto a 'bourgeois, purpose- less and useless affair', began to change their opinion.[240]