this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2024
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Lenin wasn't a socialist. He was a transparently dishonest fraud who built a cult of personality. The best thing you can say is that he failed because if the results were a success, Lenin was a monster.
While Lenin was a flawed leader, and did some shady shit in the name of revolution, I don't think it's fair or honest to call him a fraud. Man was literally imprisoned because of his beliefs. Not saying we should follow him religiously like some people do, he definitely made mistakes. Now if this was Stalin we were talking about I could understand.
He was imprisoned for what he wrote about. His actions tell me that he was not a socialist, and that's what matters. He held an election, immediately enacted violence to change the outcome, immediately dismantled the socialist power structures that were in place, purged people who didn't agree with him, and acted as an autocrat.
Anyone who thinks Lenin was a socialist is ignorant of history.
Edit: I can't actually see who replied to me because I blocked them 😂 tells me what I need to know about the people arguing with me.
That's insanely ahistorical. The socialist power structures that were in place, existed precisely BECAUSE of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. And soviets had a very high degree of government control all the way up until the death of Lenin. You're seriously mistaken about this
Showing to us all you haven't studied the figure of Lenin in an honest way in your life.
Lenin dedicated most of his life (in exile from the tsarist regime for doing so) to study, write on, and agitate against, the issues of the masses. He was openly against becoming a personality cult, he maintained his democratic ideals until the moment a civil war broke and terrorist attacks started to kill members of the party and attempted to kill him, and if you read any of his writings it's patently obvious that he's obsessed with the well-being of the working class.
Both Napoleon and Hitler ~~wrote~~ had other people write of them that they had the best intentions for true respective populaces. However in practice it turned out they used them as cannon fodder.
Hitler had famous writings detailing his ragingly racist and antisemitic views, and committed holocaust against specific ethnicities and nationalities out of Aryan-supremacism.
Napoleon was a militarist nationalist whose life was purely a militarist endeavour. He pursued violent expansionism out of patriotic fervor.
Comparing Lenin, a lawyer who escaped the autocratic regime of his homeland and spent a life in exile examining Marxist texts on how to improve the life conditions of people, to either Napoleon or Hitler, shows you have absolutely no idea of the values Lenin valued and promoted, you haven't read one single of his texts, and you're speaking purely out of anti-communist sentiment that's been ingrained in your brain.
I'm not comparing their politics, but making the point that the self proclaimed ideologies of leaders may be embellished or different from the practice.
Saying that Lenin in theory had the week being of people in mind is rather moot if I'm practice he didn't give many shits about the people and only tried clinging to power regardless of the suffering his people went through.
And now you're proving you don't know anything of the history of the russian revolution. The only event you can point of "authoritarianism" during the Russian Revolution and Lenin's life, is the red terror. By any reasonably account, the red terror was very measured and not arbitrarily applied, and it happened in the context of a civil war against monarchists in which 14 nations including England, France, and Italy, sent troops and agitators to the Russian Socialist Federation of Soviet Republics, with numbers comparable to that of the oppression by the republicans towards fascists in the Spanish civil war.
Do you know why you've never heard (unless you're Spanish) condemnation of the repression against fascists during the Spanish civil war? Because the reds lost. The only good leftist for you anticommunists is the leftist who dies to fascism, like Salvador Allende. As soon as a communist revolution triumphs, you declare it a perversion and oppressive regardless of the history.
I know of the Spanish Civil War, I studied history. I'd even identify as leftist. I'm only staunchly anti-authorithorian. Hence me opposing Franco in the Spanish revolution. Just like another person whom you might hate a Eric Arthur Blair (aka George Orwell).
I mean I respect Stalin as a theoretician, but actions speak louder than theory. And like my main point; people's own writings are only maybe proof of intention, but practice shows the commitment to those and most autocrats tend to be quite loose with them.
Now moving the goalposts to Stalin. The great terror was unnecessary, harmful, excessively cruel and unjustified, and overall a disaster that should never have happened.
Ok, now, why did Franco win the war? What if the republicans, instead of "ohhh evil Franco! We got you! Don't try to plot a coup again, ok? Please!", they had actually organized before the coup and repressed the fascists that needed repressing? What if Salvador Allende instead of being just the best democrat, had imprisoned or murdered the fascist opposition? What if we could have avoided decades of fascism as the USSR managed to do? Assuming you support the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, do you realize that you're only supporting the leftists that lose, and that as soon as leftists take control, you categorize it as authoritarian?
That's not how he was described by anyone who was alive at the time except for business men who lost their investments in tsarist Russia, but keep believing in spooky ghost stories.
To the people downvoting this: please ask yourselves whether you've read anything Lenin wrote, or read any non-anticommunist article or book on the Russian Revolution and Lenin
Tankie Detected.
What are you? A Trotskyist? A Liberal?
A NATO-Anarchist, anti-Marxist, at least from what I gathered before they blocked me for defending Marx. Someone who stans Western Hegemony and constantly decries Marxists.
Even Trotskyists like Lenin.
Wow, you think those are the only options?
Tankie Detected.
It was a serious question, but it seems you are unable to abstain from childish retorts.
Not a tankie btw, not even a communist of any tendency
I don't belive you; I think you're a liar, because you didn't ask a neutral question; you gave notoriously terrible options.
Too cowardly to be upfront about your own politics huh? Doesn't matter, you've already been identified as a liberal by someone you blocked for defending Marxism.
That's the most stereotypically tankie accusation I've ever read! 😂
Or maybe they're just lying. Tankies do that literally all the time.