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Leninthink

The New Neo Posted on by

Another great article by Gary Saul Morson has been published in New Criterion. He’s the author who wrote a piece about Solzhenitsyn that I discussed previously here.

This time Morson is writing about Lenin – or rather, about the thought process Lenin used to justify what he did, and about the way it affected Marxist, Communist, and Soviet thought. A few excerpts will suffice to give the flavor, but I can’t urge you strongly enough to read the whole thing:

By the same token, Lenin always insisted on the most violent solutions. Those who do not understand him mistake his ideas for those of radicals like the anarchist Peter Kropotkin, who argued that violence was permitted when necessary. That squishy formulation suggests that other solutions would be preferable. But for Lenin maximal violence was the default position. He was constantly rebuking subordinates for not using enough force, for restraining mobs from lynchings, and for hesitating to shoot randomly chosen hostages…

Until economic collapse forced Lenin to adopt the New Economic Policy, he demanded that grain not be purchased from peasants but requisitioned at gunpoint. Naturally, peasants—Lenin called recalcitrant peasants “kulaks”—rebelled all over Russia. In response to one such “kulak” uprising Lenin issued the following order:

“The kulak uprising in [your] 5 districts must be crushed without pity. . . . 1) Hang (and I mean hang so that the people can see) not less than 100 known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers. 2) Publish their names. 3) Take all their grain away from them. 4) Identify hostages . . . . Do this so that for hundreds of miles around the people can see, tremble, know and cry . . . . Yours, Lenin. P. S. Find tougher people.”

Dmitri Volkogonov, the first biographer with access to the secret Lenin archives, concluded that for Lenin violence was a goal in itself. He quotes Lenin in 1908 recommending “real, nationwide terror, which invigorates the country and through which the Great French Revolution achieved glory.”…

His more naïve followers imagined that rule by sheer terror would cease when Bolshevik hold on power was secure, or when the New Economic Policy relaxed restrictions on trade, but Lenin made a point of disillusioning them. “It is the biggest mistake to think that nep will put an end to the terror. We shall return to the terror, and to economic terror,” he wrote. When D. I. Kursky, People’s Commissariat of Justice, was formulating the first Soviet legal code, Lenin demanded that terror and arbitrary use of power be written into the code itself! “The law should not abolish terror,” he insisted. “It should be substantiated and legalized in principle, without evasion or embellishment.”

Here’s the article’s explanation for how a Communist (or Leninist or leftist or Marxist) can believe, truly believe, that 2 + 2 = 5 if the Party wills it, something Orwell dramatized so powerfully in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is based on Lenin’s formulation that whatever is good for the Party is what is moral and that no morality exists outside of that:

…[A] true Leninist does not decide whether to lie. He automatically says what is most useful, with no reflection necessary. That is why he can show no visible signs of mendacity, perhaps even pass a lie detector test. La Rochefoucauld famously said that “hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue,” but a true Bolshevik is not even a hypocrite.

Read the whole thing, if you can stomach it.

[NOTE: I actually think that Orwell’s O’Brien was wrong when he said this about the Communists:

The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us [the leaders in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four] in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?

I think O’Brien is describing Lenin and Leninthink as well, because Lenin did not seem to believe that they had seized power for a limited time and that the terror would come to an end.]

Comments

Leninthink — 42 Comments

  1. I didn’t realize Lenin was so Satanically evil. Evil’s a word we shouldn’t be afraid to use. I’ve always thought — led here by Trotsky, I suppose — that the worst of it got really going with Stalin. Well, now I know.

    And it looks like we’re in for an American version of this kind of thing, at this point just in prospectus, but definitely looming.

  2. miklos:

    Lenin gets a better press than Stalin, mostly (I think) because he died too early to kill anywhere near as many people as Stalin did. But Lenin set the template.

  4. Only a sociopath could think like Lenin. Power through terror. Terror to preserve one’s power. Putting the power of the state before blood kin, before friends, before any sort of kindness or human decency. Truly evil at its core. And now we have it spreading among the Communist True Believers in our midst. The USSR and Mao’s China failed economically. Venzuela and Zimbabwe did too, but the urge to power remains in spite of those lessons. Some power mad sociopaths only start cults. The Communists want the ultimate power – the power of the state.

    The use of Leninthink is quite obvious among the Democrats. People like AOC state complete falsehoods with such conviction that you can’t believe it. How can she tell such whoppers? Leninthink, that’s how. Whatever serves the cause. Many others follow the pattern. The “whistleblower” for another instance. The FBI/DOJ worthies that vouched for the Steele Dossier as evidence for a FISA warrant. And it goes on.

    I liken what we are seeing to an old time western. A bunch of evil people are seeking to control a town. The citizens see what is happening but don’t know what to do. Then an outsider rides in and stands up to the bad guys. In most western movies (High Noon excepted) the citizens band together behind the stranger and put things right again. That’s what needs to be done now. We need to stand behind Trump and other leaders like him. It’s our only way forward.

  6. Unthink, one might say characterizes Leninthink. Awful as the horror show that period produced, however, I find Mr. Morson’s summation here —

    The real questions are: Is there such a spectrum now, and how do we locate people on it? And if there is such a spectrum, what do we do about it?

    — right nearly as disturbing. We should have to do this all again?

  7. Thanks, neo. Another great post.
    Over the last several days (at least) you have posted a bunch of great articles, with links, summarizing what is being perpetrated upon us by our Leftist/Swamp government workers (including diplomatic officers and intelligence community employees) and politicians.
    Thanks, again.

  8. Here’s my quote/comment on Lenin from the “Conveniently Changing” topic:
    ______________________________________________________

    I know of nothing better than [Beethoven’s] Appassionata and could listen to it every day. What astonishing, superhuman music! It always makes me proud, perhaps with a childish naiveté, to think that people can work such miracles! … But I can’t listen to music very often, it affects my nerves. I want to say sweet, silly things, and pat the little heads of people who, living in a filthy hell, can create such beauty. These days, one can’t pat anyone on the head nowadays, they might bite your hand off. Hence, you have to beat people’s little heads, beat mercilessly, although ideally we are against doing any violence to people. Hm — what a devillishly difficult job!

    –V.I. Lenin

    Oh. Lenin didn’t really want “to beat people’s little heads,” so it’s OK. They made him do it.
    __________________________________________________

    My main takeaway from LeninThink is that terror was intentional policy, not just an over-reaction to threats to Lenin’s power. Terror is a feature, not a bug. From the article:

    Dmitri Volkogonov, the first biographer with access to the secret Lenin archives, concluded that for Lenin violence was a goal in itself. He quotes Lenin in 1908 recommending “real, nationwide terror, which invigorates the country and through which the Great French Revolution achieved glory.”

  10. A very interesting article, but I disagree with this one piece.

    “Imagine someone saying: “my detractors claim I have no morals, but that is sheer slander. On the contrary, I have a very strict moral code, from which I never deviate: look out for number 1.” We might reply: the whole point of a moral code is to restrain you from acting only out of self-interest. Morality begins with number 2. A moral code that says you must do what you regard as your self-interest is no moral code at all. The same is true for a code that says the Communist Party is morally bound to do whatever it regards as in its interest.”

    Morality stems from man’s nature. Man’s nature is in essence that of a rational being. His rationality is the weapon which enables him to survive. It enables him to create tools, to build, and to cooperate with others to build even larger or to exchange for something he needs or wants. In order for this to occur he must recognize that what he builds is his property and not something that should be taken by others. If one does not have the right to his own property then one is a slave. Thus this is the basis of morality. To say morality begins with 2 is then immoral.

  11. James Madison, 29 March, 1792: Property

    . . . and which leaves to every one else the like advantage.

    Already thinking of the other man, Madison here. Even if only in recognition that this is a safeguard against being abused himself. That’s something like the meaning of man’s nature as a social animal, if not in Aristotle’s sense denied by Hobbes that man is by nature a political animal. The thing is, we long for one another, come what may. That’s not the business of reason, but the business of eros.

  12. I audited one of Morson’s classes 25+ years ago when I was chemistry graduate student at Northwestern (I have had a long term interest in Russian literature). I thought he was an outstanding lecturer- pretty much the best I ever saw in or out of my actual field of study.

  13. Yancey Ward: If you ever want to say more about Morson or Russian Lit, I’m your man.
    ____________________________
    Hey, Edit is back! For the moment.

  14. Well, reading some of that article and another in the current issue of the New Criterion has finally induced me to subscribe to it. Their current special discount helped, too.

  15. Les: Indeed. As I too learned well over half a century ago.

    Yet my own conception of the foundation of morality is that it is health, the ideal health of each individual, which demands that he acknowledge and act upon reason in order to further his own health, and which also demands that he acknowledge and act in concordance with the point that sdferr makes:

    “The thing is, we long for one another, come what may.”

    We need each other not only as partners in achieving goals and in trade, but simply as other human beings. (Of course this need is stronger in some, less strong in others, and when it’s lacking or nearly lacking in someone he is a sociopath, not in good health.) Even those of us who are to some extent loners need to experience the company of other people sometimes. We are indeed social animals, in that sense.

    So in a nutshell, what is moral is what is most healthy for the individual, given his individual nature and his circumstances. But this concept of health is of ideal health, not the unhealthy taking from others by force what one sees as the route to the advancement of his own health. That route requires him to be untrue to his own nature as a human, and so in fact it undermines his own health and thus his own ability to function and to take care of himself by himself at need.

    > . .

    OMG, may the saints preserve us! EDIT has looked in upon me!

    It’s really overkill, I suppose, but while “no man is an island” in some respects, in others every man is an island, and needs the experience of not being alone. We need to know we are not individual freaks of nature but rather that there are others out there who are “just like us” in the important sense that there are others who are human, just like us…even if we rarely associate with them.

  16. I read that entire long essay and learned more about Lenin and Russia then I could stomach; and, yes, it did sound an awful lot like the more unhinged portions of the Left, and now of the Right.

    https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/no-trump-is-not-facing-the-death-penalty-over-ukraine/

    For former Governor Weld, though, grounds for Trump’s impeachment are so matter-of-factly to be assumed that he’s moved beyond them. Way beyond them.

    Trump, he asserts (and I’m not kidding, though I wish I were), may need to be put to death.

    It’s rather frightening how many people acquiesced in Lenin’s psychopathological regime rather than taking him out when it could have been done.
    What’s frightening now is that the Democrats/NeverTrumpers are trying to use that insight as an excuse to take out President Trump, rather than admitting/recognizing that they are the Leninists.

  17. J.J. : Lenin was not just a sociopath, he was bat shit crazy maniac suffering from cerebral syphilis.

  18. I subscribed as well. Great and truthful writing. I thought “The Spectrum of Awareness “ was the most important section in Leninthink. We need to start making lists in our respective regions/areas.

  19. He is not right… he is right for the public… but he is not right and i can easily show it… been trying to..

    i recently wrote an article for a more receptive audience on Lenin and this..
    and of course… i have MORE information that is LESS opinion

    By the same token, Lenin always insisted on the most violent solutions. Those who do not understand him mistake his ideas for those of radicals like the anarchist Peter Kropotkin, who argued that violence was permitted when necessary.

    This is not right… [i wont have enough space here i get censored for physical reasons]

    the reason i know this isnt true is that i have read ALL of the marxist stuff
    just as i have read more than one cannon…

    And of course… one of the 350 Latvian riflemen that guarded Lenin…..
    were Latvian family

    you have to read this to get the details and knowing.
    The Tasks of the Russian Social-Democrats
    Written in exile at the end of 1897 – [BEFORE the Latvian Riflemen, WWI, etc…]
    First published in pamphlet form in Geneva, 1898.
    https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1897/dec/31b.htm

    The appearance of a new revolutionary party, Narodnoye Pravo, the growing influence and successes of the Social Democrats, the evolution within Narodnaya Volya—all this has evoked a lively discussion on questions of programme both in study circles of socialist intellectuals and workers and in illegal literature.

    the revolution is a constantly refined process..
    the opposition is a constantly made ignorant victim…

    you wont find anything on Narodnoye Pravo (the peoples right)
    but you will find that Lenin is a social democrat like Bernie.. and Warren… and Stalin

    the key here is Narodnaya Volya

    Think of the The League for Industrial Democracy (LID)….
    and how we think they had splinter groups… they didnt..
    that was information for consumption, the cover story, the manipulative words.
    the LID became the SDS in its educational part…

    Their Narodnaya Volya was “The weather underground” and other groups..

    Narodnaya Volya (Russian: ????????? ?????, IPA: [n??rodn?j? ?vol??], lit. ‘People’s Will’) was a 19th-century revolutionary political organization in the Russian Empire which conducted assassinations of government officials in an attempt to overthrow the autocratic system and stop the Government reforms of Alexander II of Russia.

    The organization declared itself to be a populist movement that succeeded Narodniks.

    Composed primarily of young revolutionary socialist intellectuals believing in the efficacy of terrorism, Narodnaya Volya emerged in Autumn 1879 from the split of an earlier revolutionary organization called Zemlya i Volya (“Land and Liberty”).

    you will understand whats happening to TRUMP if you knew!!

    [hoping not to be censored]

  20. So what were these Government reforms of Alexander II that were so EVIL they had to be stopped? What were the people fulfilling the prophecies of Engels alarmed at and had to act?

    a series of major social, political, legal and governmental reforms in the Russian Empire carried out in the 1860s. By far the most important was the Emancipation reform of 1861 which freed the 23 million serfs from an inferior legal and social status, and helped them buy a farm. Many other reforms took place, including the:

    relaxation of censorship of the media
    Judicial reform of Alexander II
    modernization of the army and navy
    zemstva and other innovations in local government
    educational innovations including the expansion and reform
    of universities, elementary schools and secondary schools
    reform of the Russian Orthodox Church
    economic modernization impacting banking, railways, mining, manufacturing
    emancipation of the peasants in Poland
    upgrading the status of Jews.

    The communists had to stop him before he made people happy and did the right thing and that they would lose their misery and he, lenin and others, would lose the revolution..

    sound familiar? i told you guys almost 15 years ago, i had the script they are following
    and no one, wanted to read it..

    Trump is doing the same thing in their minds…

    Lenin continues [i have to cut it down sorry]:
    At the present time (the end of 1897), the most urgent question, in our opinion, is that of the practical activities of the Social-Democrats. Now the main and basic features of the theoretical views of the Social-Democrats have been sufficiently clarified. The same cannot be said about the practical side of Social-Democracy, about its political programme, its methods, its tactics.

    why would you guys want to know that?
    only people who actually want to stop it would HAVE to know THAT…

    in the next sentence, he basically points out that the public idea is that they are not part of each other
    but…

    It is in this sphere, we think, that misapprehension and mutual misunderstanding mostly prevail, preventing a complete rapprochement between Social-Democracy and those revolutionaries who in theory have completely renounced the principles of the Narodnaya Volya and in practice are either led by the very force of circumstances to carry on propaganda and agitation among the workers—nay, more: to conduct their activities among the workers on the basis of the class struggle—or else strive to base their whole programme and revolutionary activities on democratic tasks.

    the assasination squads cant be connected as you need the political squads to do their dirty work in the senate and other places… they claim not to be a part of it, but alas… you can see how they protect the BRUTAL CLASS as they did in latvia

    you dont know why they give prisoners the vote.. do you… i told you 12 years ago..
    the people in prisons are the brutal class the revolution uses to control the population
    THATS why so much horror, pain and terror.. they let the sociopaths murderers out
    and let them be police chiefs… prison wardens… etc..

    you neer want to learn the process they keep repeating

    the social dems are their sort of secret army in the poltical positions and schools and such all over

    The object of the practical activities of the Social-Democrats is, as is well known, to lead the class struggle of the proletariat and to organise that struggle in both its manifestations:

    socialist (the fight against the capitalist class aimed at destroying the class system and organising socialist society),and democratic (the fight against absolutism aimed at winning political liberty in Russia and democratising the political and social system of Russia).

    We said as is well known.

    And indeed, from the very moment they appeared as a separate social-revolutionary trend, the Russian Social-Democrats have always quite definitely indicated this object of their activities, have always emphasised the dual manifestation and content of the class struggle of the proletariat and have always insisted on the inseparable connection between their socialist and democratic tasks—a connection clearly expressed in the name they have adopted.

    Nevertheless, to this day you often meet socialists who have the most distorted notions about the Social-Democrats and accuse them of ignoring the political struggle, etc. Let us, therefore, dwell a little on a description of both aspects of the practical activities of Russian Social-Democracy.

    the fact they can openly run on the same party ticket as lenin and stalin should have you guys shivering in your seats, and regretting not acting at all…

    Just as an army has sappers, and grunts, and marines…and special forces..
    didnt you realize they have the same?

    but you didnt learn to see them… they are camouflaged by mental ideas and ego force

  21. here is the job of Warren, Bernie, AOC, Harris, etc.

    To organise study circles among workers, to establish proper and secret connections between them and the central group of Social-Democrats, to publish and distribute working-class literature, to organise the receipt of correspondence from all centres of the working-class movement, to publish agitational leaflets and manifestos and to distribute them, and to train a body of experienced agitators—such, in broad outline, are the manifestations of the socialist activities of Russian Social-Democracy.

    Our work is primarily and mainly directed to the factory, urban workers .

    [removing the factories, the sources of wealth for the people, made them miserable and move to the coasts and cities where the social dems do their work as the cities keep them away from reality]

    Russian Social-Democracy must not dissipate its forces; it must concentrate its activities on the industrial proletariat, who are most susceptible to Social-Democratic ideas, most developed intellectually and politically, and most important by virtue of their numbers and concentration in the country’s large political centres.

    they have an invading army and our army cant fight them…
    they have opened up the white house so that russia and china know all policy by the leaks
    they have social dems lying and coordinating this on their side
    they are favoring the brutal class for when they let them out

    they are doing everything they did before, right in front of europe, right in front of you, and you have no idea that the reason they are going wacko is that they are almost finished and you have no way to stop them.

    last part so i dont get too censored.
    dont worry, when it changes. we can discuss this in the gulag
    because there is enough evidence on all these boards to have every one of us killed (and our familiies as they do that to insure no bad blood grows up in vendetta)

    Convinced that the doctrine of scientific socialism and the class struggle is the only revolutionary theory that can today serve as the banner of the revolutionary movement, the Russian Social-Democrats will exert every effort to spread this doctrine, to guard it against false interpretation and to combat every attempt to impose vaguer doctrines on the still young working-class movement in Russia.

    Theoretical reasoning proves and the practical activities of the Social-Democrats show that all socialists in Russia should become Social-Democrats.

    given that the rest is a freaking library…
    and your waiting for someone famous to tell you
    (who doesnt mind being killed in the change) your not going to find out..

    if HANSON said all he knew that i can tell by his wording, you would never get to read hanson – just as you dont get to read all the stuff i put up that would fill in that

  22. Only a sociopath could think like Lenin. Power through terror. Terror to preserve one’s power. Putting the power of the state before blood kin, before friends, before any sort of kindness or human decency. Truly evil at its core.
    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

    and THATS why those with experience have problems teaching you nice people about how they think…

    socialism is rule by subclinical sociopaths that build an army of grateful clinical sociopaths that are their force against the (soft) decent people that predators see as their ‘food’.

    the wolfs lair were subclinical… if the war did not happen, they probably would have been beuracrats with small power areas or gone into capitalism to abuse it… you can see in marxs comment about teaching a man blowing a deal that THEY are the evil in capitalism.. as they dont follow the rules, cheat… only sociopaths would make the saying cheating is a more efficient way to win

    until normal people take off their limits, they wont understand them at all..
    not all are evil though.. the lead reasearcher in sociopathy discovered he was..

    the leftists are idealists..
    idealists are the easy victims of group sociopathy mob manipulation
    they WANT to be lied to…

    this is why feminism is the way it is, uplifting idealism, and calling it socialism and liberation

    ALL marx did if you read enough was figure out how the upper elite of man, with enough power, can permanently domesticate and breed humans by manipulation to be their working cattle…
    and all the cows without their bulls see liberation…

    sadly… there is no way this will turn out good..
    with necheyeves chatechism you can even identify their roles

    From 1869 the EVIL men realized they could bribe women away from family, and make them destroy their own civilization as it was their Nature to be tempted as that is what dating and romance is in an open field…

    If it was otherwise they would not have this as a core ideal from so long ago…

    The sixth category is especially important: Women.

    They can be divided into three main groups. First, those frivolous, thoughtless, and vapid women, whom we shall use as we use the third and fourth category of men.

    Second, women who are ardent, capable, and devoted, but whom do not belong to us because they have not yet achieved a passionless and austere revolutionary understanding; these must be used like the men of the fifth category.

    Finally, there are the women who are completely on our side – i.e., those who are wholly dedicated and who have accepted our program in its entirety. We should regard these women as the most valuable or our treasures; without their help, we would never succeed.

    Without the feminists, none of this could ever gotten farther than a fringe fetish..
    but they were needed in the idea to domesticate man..

    [Science fiction plot! too crazy to believe – Like mash up of 1984 and animal farm]

    What if Marx theory was an analysis of the Egyptian and other slave systems and why they failed…
    and he realized because… they had males in the herds… and so, the slaves were not truly domesticated
    and women retained the ability to birth an army too.. had to make sure that this ability was taken away…

    So to domesticate mankinds underclass::
    1) Convince them that being in a cage prison with three squares and safety is better than the dangerous deadly all gonna die reality too scary to face..
    2) Get rid of the middle class who have enough resources that they sometimes climb and in doing knock out current dynasties (families)
    3) if your power is your family dynasty, suppress the creation of family dynasties in the public [hate family units]
    4) IF men are the problem (to slavery’s failure at a global level), you must get the women to want to take up the jobs and tasks men do
    5) If men are not around, the female population would not be healthy without some way to get release and intimacy, so what kind of relationships would you need more of? [and artificial ensemination]
    6) of course all cattle will have free veterinary, i mean doctor services
    7) and all cattle will get college education to make them better workers for the hive
    8) if women are to be economy replacements of men, you have to make sure they want to give their children to others so they can go back to work as fast as possible.
    9) war or selective abortion, either way, the women are critical to insuring which life goes into the future, up to the day of birth.. and now, post birth? without limits, how hard would this be to change (see China)?

    you can think of the rest… put them on ration cards… lower the medical requirements for treatment… move doctor jobs to nurses and nurses to nurses assistants… by the way… technology with robots and things means you dont have to keep the pesky men around for defense any more either.. which is why despite everyone saying Judgment day wont ever happen, it has to.
    [Science fiction plot over / sanity returns]

    see how the creepiest stuff is not something a normal person can entertain but for entertainment

  23. Artfldgr—I think I agree with some of what you write, but, I understand little of what you write. By the way, is the phrase “the leftists are idealists” something that you are expressing or are you quoting someone else?

  24. “It’s rather frightening how many people acquiesced in Lenin’s psychopathological regime rather than taking him out when it could have been done.”

    I was not taught it in school, and even most textbooks referred merely to Lenin suffering a stoke. But one courageous woman did try to kill Lenin: Fanny Kaplan, apparently a democratic leaning socialist.

    Her bullets may have eventually contributed to shortening the monster’s life.

  25. DNW – thanks for the information.
    As with Hitler, if you aim at the king, you must kill him.
    Retribution probably would still follow, but perhaps some later developments in Russia would have been different without the six more years that Lenin was in charge, and hopefully less vicious.
    But then, maybe not.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanny_Kaplan

    As a member of the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), Kaplan viewed Lenin as a “traitor to the revolution” when the Bolsheviks banned her party. On 30 August 1918, she approached Lenin as he was leaving a Moscow factory, and fired three shots, badly injuring him. Interrogated by the Cheka, she refused to name any accomplices, and was shot on 3 September. The Kaplan attempt and the Moisei Uritsky assassination provoked the Soviet government to reinstitute the death penalty after its abolition on October 28th, 1917.
    …
    While the Cheka did not find any evidence linking the two events, their co-occurrence appeared significant in the overall context of the intensifying civil war. The Bolshevik reaction was an abrupt escalation in the persecution of their opponents.

    An official decree on Red Terror was issued only hours after the Kaplan shooting, calling for all-out struggle against enemies of the revolution. In the next few months, about 800 Right SRs and other political opponents of Bolsheviks were executed. During the first year, the scope of the Red Terror expanded significantly.

  26. Julie near Chicago:

    I think it’s not just that humans need to associate with other humans, but it’s necessary that they find others with shared values. This value can be love of opera or love of baseball or love of any other similar interests and leads to a shallower type of friendship. Or it can be a sharing of beliefs, of life views which leads to a deeper type of friendship. So it’s not only that we, as humans, need other humans, but we need humans who are in some way similar to what we are as a person.

  27. More scary than I had realized, altho I have long thought that Germans under the Nazis were far better off than Russians under the Commies.

    The commie/socialists successfully labeling Nazis, the National Socialists, as “right wing”, has been one of their greatest successes. US academy & media have helped.

    The Chinese Commies, after Mao, are far more like the Nazis, with less insane hatred of Jews but almost as much support for the superior Han Chinese. They are National Communists sort of, in name — with a fairly successful Crony Capitalist system that allows enough market to be successful, but the most accumulation of wealth capital going to the Party. Who thus become the top 1%.

    Most commies really do believe their lust for power is temporary. Interestingly, sort of like Daenerys (Game of Thrones), who wanted her benign rule all over Westeros, and then the world.

    The Germans hated the, often more successful, Jews. The Commies loved power and the ability to cause pain, problems, humiliation, to others. Today’s PC idiots/ power hungry are offended by members of different tribes being more successful — and they have a mix of hatred for the other tribe and love of power.

    Thinking about the US Deep State as international Socialists becomes ever more scary.
    (with edit!)
    In the movie Caberet, there is that achingly beautiful song, “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” — sung by a young man, far more handsome than Greta Thunberg. He’s a young Nazi. She’d be happy to join a Stalinist anti-CO2 party. Too many kids are being indoctrinated to believe that stuff.

  29. I was doing what I can. I’m not a complainer, normally. But the pain is really quite intense. I need both hips replaced. And I am looking back and laughing at every hit I ever took when I was playing rugby. Until I was in my late 40s.

    Oh, that was smart. That was a bright idea.

    Now I find I can’t get my first surgery until January. No, that is not necessarily when I can have it. That’s when I’ll have the earliest opportunity to schedule it. Happy happy fun fun. I don’t know if I’m going to have any teeth left considering how I am grinding them down.

  30. I hope nobody thinks I’m asking for sympathy. Every ounce of pain, I brought down upon myself. And it really does help, to laugh at me.

  32. Les, when you began your criticism of Morson’s statement “. . . morality begins with number two” (which, we note, you conclude, surprisingly, is “immoral”!) you properly laid a foundation:

    Morality stems from man’s nature.

    Very good. This makes a beginning of a search, but only a beginning. Yet next, you abandon that beginning to jump to a too reductive end, formulating an “essence”:

    Man’s nature is in essence that of a rational being.

    Why too reductive, one may rightly ask? Well, what if it happens that we cannot reduce all human psychological phenomena (manifestations of soul stuff) to reason? That would throw yet another problem in our path.

    But let’s back up a moment. Ought we not return to the good beginning you’ve made to ask “what do we mean by this word ‘nature’?”. Man’s nature in particular, certainly, but what too of the “nature” of anything at all? It’s something to think about, anyhow. And, I’d note, freakishly complex once we go down that road. But I won’t take it further here.

    The meaning of Morson’s claim that morality begins with number two, I interpret to say, is taking another human being as such, as distinct from another human being to be taken as a use object to one’s personal (or “The Party’s”) utility or benefit. (I’ll note and then leave aside the peculiarly modern political “value” talk [manner of speaking]. That’s another question for another time.)

    That has long been the ordinary conception of morality, I think. And it’s in the absolute lack, nay, positive rejection of this view that we see Lenin as the monster he was.

    Other people do not exist for our sakes, but for their own sakes in themselves. This was James Madison’s ground I believe. Thus linking the bit about property with each having a property in himself, meant to be respected by any and all others.

    I’ll leave it here, as I’ve run on too long already. In my defense it’s perhaps sufficient to say these questions tend to generate long discussions: I like those, but not everyone does.

  35. Lenin was just doing what Robespierre did.
    “Terror is nothing else than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible.” Robespierre

  36. Lenin gets more of a pass because the left can defend him, they can’t defend Stalin as well.

    In university in the ’80s a lefty friend of mine commented that Lenin was “the good one”. I didn’t agree, but at the time didn’t have much of an argument otherwise.

    No doubt there are well meaning leftists who believe such to be true, but then there are those who realize Party and power are the goals and are fine with that.

  37. What turns me sick to the pit of my stomach is the French revolution. And later the Russian revolution. And, no, I’m not afraid or reluctant to name names.

    I don’t want to dwell on evil, though. I don’t even remember the evil b@st@rds I met in my life. I remember my grandmother as clear as day. I remember how I used to come back home on leave and she would tell me “[Arminius], they can’t kill me.” I never was clear on who “they” were.

    But “they” couldn’t kill her. She lived for 100 years plus one day.

  38. DonS on September 30, 2019 at 12:44 pm said:
    Lenin gets more of a pass because the left can defend him, they can’t defend Stalin as well.
    * * *
    Judging from the article, few people outside, and inside, Russia knew the truth about Lenin’s psychopathic lust for power and the way he exercised it.
    Stalin’s atrocities were more visible, despite the efforts of the Western media to suppress them.

  39. Steve57:”What turns me sick to the pit of my stomach is the French revolution. And later the Russian revolution.”

    I share the sentiment–because what followed in each case was country that was far less democratic, far more cruel, far less free than it had been prior to the prior government’s being overthrown. And then to add horrible irony, both revolutions, and particularly the French one, were long considered admirable.

  40. For Steve57:

    May G-d and heal Steve. May the Blessed Holy One be filled with compassion for Steve’s health to be restored and his strength to be revived. May G-d swiftly send Steve a complete renewal of body and spirit.

  41. Ira, I hope I didn’t come across a bad way. And I appreciate you. My friend at the VA may not be able to help out with the benefits. But I have met a lot of wonderful people along my journey. And God doesn’t give you more than you can handle.

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