LENINTHINK OR THE COMMUNIST MIND OF CHINA AND CUBA # 1 OF 3

LENINTHINK OR THE COMMUNIST MIND OF CHINA AND CUBA # 1 OF 3

JUSTICE IS TRUTH IN ACTION - http://www.cinopsbegoneblogspot.com -  THURS. APR. 16/2020

LENINTHINK BY GARY SAUL MORSON: The following is an edited version of remarks delivered at "The New Criterion"s inaugurated Circle Lecture on September 25, 2019 - excerpts - Oct. 2019

Beyond Doctrine:

     An old Soviet joke poses the question: What was the most important world-historical event of the year 1875? Answer Lenin was five years old.

    The point of the joke, of course, is that the Soviets virtually deified Lenin. Criticism of him was routinely referred to as "blasphemy," while icon corners in homes and institutions were replaced by "Lenin corners." Lenin museums sprung up everywhere... In addition to Leningrad, there were cities named Leninsk, Leninkend, ... inscribed on a mountaintop: "Lenin lived! Lenin Lives! Lenin will live!"...

    As we approach the 150th anniversary of Lenin's birth, understanding him grows ever more important. Despite the fall of the Soviet Union, Leninist ways of thinking continue to spread, especially among Western radicals who have never read a word of Lenin.

    This essay is not just about Lenin, and not just Leninism, the official philosophy of the USSR, but also the very style of thought that Lenin pioneered. Call it Leninthink... And admirer of the French Jacobins, Lenin believed that state power had to be based on sheer terror, and so he also created the terrorist state....

    The Russian empire lost more people in World War I than any other country, but still more died under Lenin. His war against the peasants, for instance, took more lives than combat between Reds and Whites.... By the time of the Great Terror of 1936-38, millions of entirely innocent people were arrested, often by quota. Literally no one was safe.

    The Party itself was an especially dangerous place to be, and the NKVD was constantly arresting its own members... NKVD'S interrogators who suspected they were to be arrested often committed suicide since they had no illusions about what arrests entailed...."Members of a family of a traitor to the fatherland" was itself a criminal category, and whole camps were set for wives of "enemies of the people." Never before had such practices defined a state.

    For good reason, many have traced these practices to Lenin's doctrines, In his view, Marx's greatest contribution was not the idea of the class struggle but "the dictatorship of the proletariat," and as far back as 1906 Lenin had defined dictatorship as "nothing other than power which is totally unlimited by any laws, totally unrestricted by absolutely any rules, and based directly on force."

     He argued that a revolutionary party must be composed entirely of professional revolutionaries, drawn mainly from the intelligentsia and subject to absolute discipline, with a readiness to do literally anything the leadership demanded.

Who Whom?

Lenin's instruction to authorities Nizhnii Novgorod, August 1918

"Introduce at once mass terror, execute and deport hundreds of prostitutes, drunken soldiers, ex-officers, etc.

    Lenin's hatred of the markets, and his attempts to abolish it entirely during War Communism, derived from the opposite idea, that all buying and selling is necessarily exploitative... For us, the word "politics" means a process of give and take, but for Lenin it's we take, and you give. From this it follows that one must take maximum advantage of one's position.

    If there is one sort of person Lenin truly hated more than the other, it is to use some of his more printable adjectives - the squishy, squeamish, spineless, dull-witted liberal reformer.

    The following statement from his most famous book, What Is to be Done? "The only choice is either the bourgeois or the socialist ideology. There is no middle course... Hence to belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn away from it in the slightest degree, means to strengthen bourgeois ideology,: There is either rule by the bourgeoisie or dictatorship of the proletariat: "Every solution that offers a middle path is a deception..."  George H Kubeck