Posted on 11/23/2001 12:21:27 AM PST by Askel5
THE ROOTS OF SOVIET TERRORAccording to Professor Richard Pipes, former Director of the Russian Research Center at Harvard University, "the roots of Soviet terrorism, indeed of modern terrorism, date back to 1879"(6), when a Congress of an organization called Narodnaya Volya (The People's Will) met in the small Russian town of Lipetsk. On 1st March 1881, this group succeeded, after a succession of failures, in murdering Tzar Alexander II, even though he was known as the Tzar Liberator, because he had freed the Russian serfs in 1861.The philosophical underpinnings of the group, and of Soviet-spawned terrorism, may be found in the Catechism of the Revolutionary by Sergei Nechaiev (assisted by his mentor, the former artillery officer, Michael Bakunin). The son of a priest (Stalin studied to be a priest), and one of the most evil men who ever lived, Nechaiev "passionately embraced the cause of revolution. In 1869, he organized a society in Moscow for the purpose of preparing mass insurrection. He shrank from nothing to attract followers, resorting to deceipt, terrorism and murder.(7) By studying Nechaiev's hideous writings, today's student of continuing World Revolution (and of its enhanced weapon, terrorism) can gain the necessary insight into the mentality we are confronted with. For in the Catechism, Nechaiev wrote:
The Revolutionist is a doomed man. He has no private interests, no affairs, sentiments, ties, property nor even a name of his own heart and soul, not merely by word but by deed, he has severed every link with the social order and the civilized world. [ ] after falling out with Michael Bakunin and the breakup of his organization by the Tzarist police, which led to the arrest of some 300 operatives, Nechaiev had fled to Switzerland. Bakunin left this description of his erstwhile terrorism comrade:
Nechaiev is as ruthless with himself as he is with others. He is a fanatic, but a very dangerous one, association with whom may be fatal to all concerned. His methods are abhorrent.Professor Pipes explained why "The People's Will" is the model for the modern terrorist organization, just as Nechaiev's Catechism of the Revolutionary established the mindset which infects the barbarous hordes of Muslim and Marxist terrorist who have 'graduated' from terrorism training camps modeled on those originally established under the supervision of KGB Colonel Kotchergine in 1966 [around Havana, Cuba some 10 months after the Jan. '66 Tricontinental Conference of 513 delegates representing 83 groups from the Third World]:
The People's Will was the first to consider the enemy to be the whole system capitalism, religion, law and everything which kept the body politic intact. (12)The successor, both in method and also partly in respect of ideology, to the Narodnaya Volya movement, was the party of the Social Revolutionaries (SRs), who launched attacks on the Russian Imperial Government in the early years of the 20th century with the deliberate purpose of destroying the awe in which the Russian population held the regime. [...] Professor Pipes observed:
They felt that as long as people feared the Government, and believed it to be omnipotent, there was no possibility of Revolution. So the murder of Government officials or supporters of the Government was an important step in causing the numinous glow surrounding the government to evanesce.
THE DEFENCE OF TERRORISM BY TROTSKYIt was of course Leon Trotsky (Braunstein) who followed in the footsteps of Nechaiev and Bakunin by adding to the literature of terrorism with his tome entitled The Defense of Terrorism, also called Terrorism and Communism, which appeared in the English language in 1921.(13) On page 23 of this polemical work, Trotsky proclaimed that:
The man who repudiates terrorism in principle i.e., repudiates measures of suppression and intimidation towards determined armed counter-revolution, must reject all idea of the political supremacy of the working-class and its revolutionary dictatorship. The man who repudiates the dictatorship of the proletariat repudiates the Socialist Revolution, and digs the grave of Socialism. This piece of subtle "backwards reasoning" was framed so as to imply that the Communists' 'sacred cows' would be violated by anyone who denied the necessity of terrorism to enhance the prospects for Revolution. In other words, those who did not support terrorism were not revolutionaries, and neither were they even socialists: they were scum, to be despised and destroyed. Trotsky's lust for blood evidently knew no bounds, even though he was by far the most literate and profound of the founding revolutionaries:
That the proletariat will have to pay with blood, that, in the struggle for the conquest of power and for its consolidation, the proletariat will not only have to be killed, but [will also have to] kill of this, no serious revolutionary can ever have any doubt One cannot live by phrases about the great truth that under Socialism we shall need no Red Terror.But Trotsky himself attributed the revolutionary doctrine that Communism cannot be "constructed" without terrorism to Lenin. According to David Shub, an exiled Russian revolutionary, and author of a classic short life of Lenin(14), "Lenin at every opportunity kept hammering into our heads that terror was unavoidable." In order to give physical expression to his demonic desire to embark upon state terror [ (15) ] Lenin identified and appointed the son of a rich Polish landowner named Felix Dzerzhinsky, from Poland's Vilno province. "He was fair, slightly round-shouldered, with a short pointed beard and transparent eyes with dilated pupils," wrote Shrub. "There were moments when his friendly smile gave way to icy sternness. At such times, his eyes and ascetic bloodless lips revealed a demoniac fanaticism. Rigorous self-denial, incorrigible honesty, and a frigid indifference to the opinions of others, completed his make-up. His natural modesty, unassuming air and quiet manners set him apart." "On 20th December 1917, Lenin instructed Dzherzhinsky to organize an Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-revolution and Speculation. Under the name Cheka, the Soviet secret police soon became the symbol for a system of terror such as the world has never seen.(16) The Cheka's initial headquarters was the Smolny Institute a former girls' school in Leningrad the selfsame building in which Anatoliy Sobchak presided as Mayor of St. Petersburg, and to which Vladimir Putin was posted after functioning as 'assistant' to the 'dean' of Leningrad University [immediately following] his return from Russia from East Germany [where he had] successfully directed removal of East European regimes and their replacement by 'non'-communists in 1989-1990]. (17) [ ] Thus the Soviet regime, nurtured in the hellish tradition of Nechaiev's "People's Will" aberration, bathed itself in blood from the outset. Indeed, as Trotsky proclaimed, the revolution makes no sense without terror Since we are now truly living in the era of the World Revolution, terror has been exported by the Soviets globally. The only factor preventing the West from understanding and accepting this obvious truth is the misguided belief that the Leninist Soviet revolutionaries abandoned, all of a sudden, their global revolutionary intentions and ideology and suddenly became 'like us.'
DEMYSTIFICATION AND OFFICIAL OVERREACTIONThe indiscriminate use of terror adopted with relish (even though Lenin's secretary said that Dzerzhinksy's liquidation of over 1,500 inmates in the early stages of the Red Terror was 'a mistake') also had another, more subtle effect, which should (but won't) serve as a warning to President Bush and Tony Blair in the present circumstances.As Pipes explained:
It should be noted that not only did the terror campaign demystify Russian rulers in the eyes of the people but it also caused the Government to overreact.
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=== I'm starting to think you have theological reasons for not learning the TRUTH about the founding of Israel.
Given the bent reasoning at the core of your so-called intellectual premises on the subject, comments like this are not geared to elicit anything like a serious response from me.
=== control of Eretz Israel as per their plan to create a pan-Arab regional government dominated by Communists
Is it the way the secularists call themselves "Jews" that throws you?
I know this sort of thing is a huge problem here at home where the Faithbased dutifully follow anyone who hangs out a "Pro-life" shingle.
Well, Pipes is not someone with whom I've much in common but the facts and reasoning he lays out still are valuable where -- as here -- they are on point and valid.
Found this thread on google. Ping for re-read later.
Perhaps this is a good place to start. What is your position/critique of the following article???
Oops...the above was meant for you.
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