Posted on 01/21/2024 8:29:42 AM PST by Rummyfan
The damaging effects of his coup continue to this day
Around the corner from me is a barber’s shop decorated with black-and-white photographs of icons of the 20th century. James Dean is there with the usual cigarette hanging out of his mouth; Marilyn Monroe is perching on the edge of a pool table. A poster for the film Taxi Driver is alongside a photo of Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack — and also a photo of Lenin.
I guess the aim is to appear edgy, alternative and rebellious. But obviously there is no image of Hitler. That would be unacceptable:....
It is a curious phenomenon that Lenin is acceptable and even approved of whereas Hitler is beyond the pale. It is not exactly a secret that Lenin started off seventy years of communist rule in Russia which included two major famines, the Red Terror, the Great Terror and continuing poverty. The death toll of Soviet communism was in the order of twenty million. So how do people manage to think favorably of him?
I discovered from our SOAS conversations that the first thing admirers of Lenin do is kid themselves that he led a popular revolution removing a corrupt, tyrannical Tsarist regime. This is just not true. The February revolution could indeed be considered a popular revolution and the Tsar was indeed removed from power. But Lenin took no part in it. He was in Zurich and had to read about it in the Swiss newspapers. He did lead the so-called October Revolution, later the same year, but that was not a revolution. The fact that it is referred to as that in Britain is one of several ways in which Soviet propaganda has entered British textbooks. In reality it was a coup. In a rather chaotic series of events, some 10,000 Red Guards took control of Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) and arrested the provisional government.
Then there is the idea that the coup somehow represented the “will of the people.” We have clear proof that it did not.
The Bolsheviks got only 24 percent of the vote in the elections to the constituent assembly. The more moderate socialist revolutionaries received 39 percent. To put it bluntly, the Bolsheviks lost. But Lenin did not care. Rather like Hitler, whose party incidentally got a higher percentage of the vote in Germany than the Bolsheviks did in Russia, he closed the constituent assembly and deployed armed soldiers to prevent anyone reopening it. The lie Lenin fans choose to believe is that if only Lenin had lived, communist rule would have succeeded. Lenin’s replacement by Stalin ruined it all.
But Lenin did all the things that Stalin did. Lenin began government control of agriculture, setting a fixed price that the government would pay for corn and other grains. The price was absurdly low because of the high rate of inflation. A shortage of food ensued. Lenin then requisitioned grain from peasants at gunpoint. These disastrous policies contributed heavily to death by starvation of at least three million people in 1920-21. Lenin implicitly recognized the part his policies had played by reversing them in 1921.
Meanwhile, he took advantage of the famine to steal from the church, seizing half a ton of gold along with a vast quantity of silver and precious stones in November 1921 alone. He stated that this was an opportunity to kill members of the bourgeoisie who resisted this expropriation. “The confiscations must be conducted with merciless determination… the greater the number of clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in executing for this reason… [i.e. resisting church looting], the better.’ In two years, more than thirty bishops and 1,200 priests were killed.
Lenin created the Cheka, the Soviet secret police. His on-the-record instructions to kill include this written order following a revolt in Penza province: “Hang (absolutely hang, in full view of the people) no fewer than 100 known kulaks [peasants owning a little land], filthy rich men, bloodsuckers.” Lenin did not engage in class war. He engaged in class murder.
Lenin set up the concentration camps which eventually became the Gulag. He issued a decree in 1918 stating that it was “imperative to safeguard the Soviet Republic from class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps.” Every provincial city was ordered to create one and by the end of 1920 there were 107 of them. Lenin authorized the use of poison gas in 1921 to kill peasants in the Tambov uprising. Vyacheslav Molotov, a senior Soviet politician under both Lenin and Stalin, remarked that both leaders were “hard men… harsh and stern. But without a doubt Lenin was harsher.”
BTTT
Because the pseudo-intellectual imbeciles who think Marx was a brilliant person, and who have always wanted to force the entire world into socialist servitude, would and will do ANYTHING to accomplish their stupidity-driven agenda.
Because winners write the history?
Then there are those kids in Che Guevara t-shirts, glorifying Fidel Castro’s executioner.
Nazis lost and the Marxist won
Instapundit had a thread on this.
One of the commenter there, Greg Hlatky, posted this:
“Comrades! The insurrection of five kulak districts should be pitilessly suppressed. The interests of the whole revolution require this because ‘the last decisive battle’ with the kulaks is now underway everywhere. An example must be made.
“Hang (absolutely hang, in full view of the people) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, fatcats, bloodsuckers.
“Publish their names.
“Seize all grain from them.
“Designate hostages - in accordance with yesterday’s telegram.
“Do it in such a fashion, that for hundreds of verst around the people see, tremble, know, shout: ‘the bloodsucking kulaks are being strangled and will be strangled’
“Telegraph receipt and implementation. Yours, Lenin.
P.S. Find tougher people.”
Telegram to the Penza Soviet, 11 August 1918
Link to his post:
Lenin began government control of agriculture.
Biden has that page in the manual dog eared.
This.
If the Communists didn’t kill all those people in the Soviet Union, there should be 355 to 455 million people in Russia today.
Germans don’t control the media.
In his leftist mind intention is everything,and outcome almost unimportant..secondary for sure.
So many leftist programs are like this: reduce cash bail, stop arresting people for crimes, pay people to drive electric cars..... the important thing is the intention is good. The fact that the outcome and unintended consequences are terrible, is not really important to many leftists.
That being said, it's beyond silly to think Russia is still a communist nation or that we are fighting communism by fighting the proxy war in Ukraine with Russia.
We, under Biden, far more resemble the old Soviet Union.
And Stalin killed even more than Hitler
... including more of his own “countrymen” than the Nazis ever did
Stalin and Mao were worse but I suppose you could claim that hitler killed more in a shorter period of time. (?)
Among other things:
Hitler lost. Lenin won.
Speaking of losers, but I never quite understood the widespread admiration there is for Napoleon. Napoleon pulled his country out of chaos. But then again, so did Hitler.
Then like Hitler, Napoleon wildly overreached and brought misery to all of Europe. And to this day, a “Waterloo” means a great and final disaster. Yet people admire Napoleon. Puzzling.
Make that “the national Socialists lost, and the international socialists won”.
More descriptive and more accurate.
What you posted is very true, and describes the so-called Progressives quite well.
Because the far leftist element in the Democratic Party today clearly favors a Marxist oriented type socialism than a Nationalist one.
It’s been that way since WW2, Roosevelts admin was rife with communist sympathizers and downright agents.
Joe McArthy recognized it and nearly won the battle for our great Republic until he was smeared by the media/military-industrial complex. Marshall joined the leftist cause when McArthy started pointed fingers at the military (and rightly so).
What amazes me to this day is how many still believe that “witch hunt” rot, pure comedy when one considers proof that has surfaced with documents ie Venona Project.
I think I’ve shared this before:
https://theobjectivestandard.com/2016/11/vindication-joseph-mccarthy/
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