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John Quiggin 
“Near genocidal”? It was genocidal. The Sunni population of Iraq fell by approx 50% after 2003.
Much of this work was performed by Shiite death squads posing as the Iraqi army or police forces. These death squads were trained, armed and funded by the “Coalition of the Willing”, i.e., amongst others, Australian taxpayers, of which I am one, but at least I protested against this atrocity.
@Ikonoclast
I’m in no position to say. Of these things I am sure: all of us humans have an equal claim to do what we can to avoid death and the multifarious life-altering harms attending life; such rights and privileges as I deem apt for me to claim; I am bound to defend in others; none of us can demand others bear burdens that we regard as unfit for us without agreeing to bear a burden seen by another as equivalent in return. That’s what all humans are equal means, IMO.
It follows then that we have no ethical basis for insisting that others live in misery so that we can live in comfort for even a minute longer than they do. We in the first world have been getting away with an awful lot for a long time. One of the things we’ve been getting away with for a long time is trashing the biosphere so as to momentarily enrich ourselves. Not only have we done it, but we’ve held ourselves out as a model for the far less well served folk of the developing world to follow. Now that we face a crisis of our own design, some say we should pull up the drawbridge and say — sorry chaps, it turns out we were wrong. I hope this won’t inconvenience you terribly but I’d sooner you remained in the mess we made and left us to gaze at the fairy wrens and nature that’s left before it all goes down the toilet. I can think of few things worse than us starting to have to live like you have, and having Mahmoud and his 40 burqa-clad wives for scenery.
Try as I might, I can’t fit that into any ethical paradigm in which I’d feel comfortable. That’s a recipe for barbarism on a grand scale. The internet is a heterogenous place, but I refuse to believe anyone identifying as a Green who makes such claims is telling the truth. If they are, then personally, I’d prefer they stopped stinking up my party and instead joined up with the Katterites or One Nation or similar.
Mel wrote:
The death toll from wars started illegally in that region by the US, the UK, Australia and their allies since 1991 is in the many hundreds of thousands.
You should inform yourself better more about those wars started on such fraudulent pretexts as the “incubator babies”, WMDs, the Houla massacre (in Syria) committed by the NATO-proxy SNC killers and blamed on the Syrian Government. A good place to start is Global Research, for example, their articles about Syria.
Umm, Fran, you’ve admitted involvement in a variety of wacko Marxist Leninist and Maoist groups and you’ve excused the concentration camps run by the Marxists in Vietnam after the VN War had finished in which something like 200,000 people were killed according to the expat VN community. I’ve also seen you excuse the atrocities of VI Lenin. You are a stock standard life long committed Marxist and given the right historical circumstances you would be gleefully up to your neck in revolutionary blood. I take your conspicuous keyboard compassion with a grain of salt.
@Malthusista
“You should inform yourself better …. A good place to start is Global Research, for example, their articles about Syria.”
Strewth. Putin good, Gadaffi better and Assad the greatest of them all. On the other hand vaccines and fluoride are baaaaad! Give me break …
I can see that Mel (@4) is resolved to believe whatever is fed to her by the same corporate newsmedia that fed her the “incubator babies” lie and the Iraqi WMDs lie and not let facts and evidence stand in her way.
Mel wrote:
I have reserved my judgement on Putin, but it seems to me that he fairly won the last elections he stood for and thus has the support of his people, unlike, for example, the Greek and Spanish, Quebecois and Canadian Governments.
The YouTube broadcasts of seas of Green of hundreds of thousands of Libyans in support of Gaddafi at the time of NATO’s terror bombing of Libya provide incontrovertible proof of Gaddaffi’s popularity amongst Libyans, even if Mel, NATO, Obama, Harper, Carr, Rudd, Gillard and Western oil corporations disapproved of Gaddaffi.
The fact that a majority of Syrians defied SNC death threats to vote for Syria’s new democratic electoral constitution earlier this year shows that Syrians support Assad. Further confirmation is the failure of the SNC to make headway in their war against Assad after all these months in spite of support from NATO, Israel and Arab dictatorships.
For the truth about the Houla massacre, see this article.
If you fail to recognize that the good guys lie, have an agenda and do evil things, you can comfort yourself by assuming if it is in the mainstream media it happens to be true. If only totalitarian governments understood the scope available in a free society.
@Malthusista
“The YouTube broadcasts of seas of Green of hundreds of thousands of Libyans in support of Gaddafi at the time of NATO’s terror bombing of Libya provide incontrovertible proof of Gaddaffi’s popularity amongst Libyans …”
I think you’ve just provided incontrovertible proof of having soiled yourself. Every dictator including the Shah of Iran and the Romanian Marxist dictator Ceausescu had no trouble summoning large cheering crowds in the weeks before their popular overthrow. Why? Because participation is compulsory and defiance usually means death or prison.
That’s why they love compulsory voting. They love the guaranteed show of support for them and their type of democracy.
(Second draft with eronneous leading ‘strong’ changed to a ‘blockquote’)
Mel (@7) wrote:
At the rally that Ceausecsu addressed on the day of his downfall, the crowd demonstrably turned on him (see youtube -dot- com -slash- watch?v=GU53qv5aA1M).
Where had anything like this occurred at any of the mass rallies in Libya? Given that Gaddafi was a hated tyrant faced with a popular insurgency, according to NATO propagandists, why wouldn’t those crowds of hundreds of thousands of Libyans turned on Gaddafi?
As for the Shah of Iran, I was unable to find any resources about the mass public demonstrations apparently in support of the Shah to which Mel referred. Had they occurred, I would think they would have occurred at a time when the Shah’s hold on power was still strong and not in the midst of the subsequent popular uprising against his regime.
Feel welcome to produce any evidence you have to the contrary.
Mel continued:
As I have shown the threat of death did not prevent Romanians from defying Ceausescu at his final public appearance.
So, how can you insist that fear of Gaddaffi alone would have driven hundreds of thousands of Libyans to attend these mass demonstrations giving apparent vocal support to the man they hated in the middle of a supposed popular uprising against him?
For more about Libya, see these articles on Global Research.
Mel (@3) wrote:
I am still waiting for someone to show me why I am wrong in my own expressed opinion about Lenin which flies completely in the face of the accepted supposed wisdom about him. Perhaps, you would care to do so?
It is interesting when, in the one thread, someone manages to turn their own head inside-out in order to try to make a point.
“…I hope you don’t seriously believe that instant premature death is really the issue in most asylum seeker claims. …”
Of course, the victims of the evil dictators forcing their populace to pretend support should just suck it up so I don’t have to look upon their miserable ugly sad and desperate faces. I’ve had to deal with foreign destruction of my life and land by a military super-power and so should they.
Or maybe I’ve chosen to live in a nice country and they chose to live in a crappy country, even if it wasn’t a crappy country before but it is now, it still boils down to “us” versus “them” and “they” want to come and do their evil fornication right outside my window where I’m forced to look at it all day long.
Why don’t they just do it outside their own windows in their own countries? I’m fairly positive that only around 2% of weaponry in the world used in the last few years actually has any connection to harm unintended by the US or any of its allies. I’m better than anyone I can think of, and don’t make me go and search SpringHillVoice again so that I have to misrepresent an article clearly produced by someone else as being authored by that site.
I’m with Fran on this one, having had first hand experience of “mel” before.
Malthusista,
As you form incontrovertible opinions based on propaganda rallies shown on Youtube and regard a nutty anti-vaccine website as an authoritative source of information, I’m afraid I’m unable to take you even slightly seriously.
In some ways, instant premature death is preferable to slow premature death, especially if enhanced interrogation is involved ..
Megan,
you reproduce articles that appeal to you on your website. Some of this includes anti-fluoride propaganda including the gibberish spouted by the dill pickle himself, Robert F. Kennedy Jr (Poor Little Rich Boy Esq.). Obviously you reproduce this trash because you endorse it.
I’ve deleted a personal attack – nothing more like this please. JQ
China keen to enter UK energy market
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jul/20/china-uk-nuclear-power-plants
Colorado
President Obama said “What made it just unacceptable was that he wasn’t employed by the US government and the act was not carried out in a foreign country.”
Looks like insurers are forming an opinion on fracking
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb/2012/07/13/nationwide-insurance-fracking_n_1669775.html too risky to insure against resulting damage.
Malthusista @11, it is unfortunate that Mel chose to attack you personally rather than engage with your argument.
That said, if you look at a reputable history of 20th century Russia/USSR and/or the Russian Revolution (try Robert Service or Orlando Figes for starters) you’ll find that Lenin (and Trotsky) resorted to repression of their political opponents (including other socialists) before the outbreak of the Civil War. The forcible dissolution of the Constituent Assembly after a non-Bolshevik majority was elected to the assembly is a case in point.
@Mel
Most of what you claim above about me is factually wrong. I’ve never excused concentration camps in Vietnam. I haven’t “excused” atrocities that took place in the USSR either, though I have explained their etiology. I’ve added that I believe that the Bolsheviks should have taken a sharply different course, based on what they ought to have foreseen at the time, their own analysis and the then available knowledge, but added that even tgis might not have avoided wide-scale atrocities because the facts on the ground ensured that there were only poor prospects for non-authoritarian society in Russia of 1917. That remains true in July of 2012, 95 years later.
That’s no kind of apology for Putin. That’s simple accounting.
What you don’t want to acknowledge is that the question we in Australia of 2012 need to ask is what sort of people ought we be? Should we see our fellow humans as our ethical equals or not? If we do, what constraints and mandates on our behaviour does that paradigm impose? If we don’t see other humans as our equals — as you seem to be saying — then on what basis does one rank humans and accord privileges?
Bring back Birdy at Catallaxy (@19),
I’ve reserved “A people’s tragedy : the Russian Revolution, 1891-1924” by Orlando Figes at the local library.
Upon glancing through Robert Service’s biography of Trotsky a few months ago, I found it to be seriously flawed in comparison to Isaac Deutscher’s biographical trilogy of Trotsky.
The fact that so many ‘historians’ and supposed authorities on communism omit any mention of how in 1923, the mortally ill Lenin instructed Trotsky to remove Stalin from his post of Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union shows they are frightened that their whole edifice of lies about communism and the history of the 20th Century would collapse if this were widely known.
As I wrote in the above-linked post (@ 11), it is instructive that those ‘authorities’ on Communism have condemned Lenin for having adopted harsh and ruthless measures to preserve the Communist Party’s grip on power after 1917 whilst they are silent about the incomparably more vast crimes committed by opponents of Lenin throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries:
The First World War in which 10 million needlessly died, the bloody defeat of Chinese Communism in 1927, Nazi triumph in Germany in 1933, the triumph of Franco in Spain, the Second World War in which 60 million died, The Korean War in which 3 million North Koreans died, The Vietnam War in which as many as 5 million may have died, the murder of half a million communists by Suharto in 1965, the invasion of East Timor, the invasion of Yugoslavia, the invasions of Iraq in 1991 which may have killed as many as 2 million, the invasion on Libya in 2011, the current proxy terrorist war against Syria, …
Fran @20, let me congratulate you on a composed and dignified response to Mel’s reckless comment.
Malthusista @21
“The fact that so many ‘historians’ and supposed authorities on communism omit any mention of how in 1923, the mortally ill Lenin instructed Trotsky to remove Stalin from his post of Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union…”
The instruction to find a way to remove Stalin from the post of General Secretary was not directed to Trotsky (who was not in a position himself to take such a step) but to the Communist Party as a whole, which had the authority to decide whether there should be a position of General Secretary and who should fill out.
Further reading can be found here.:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/dec/testamnt/index.htm
@Fran Barlow
“What you don’t want to acknowledge is that the question we in Australia of 2012 need to ask is what sort of people ought we be? Should we see our fellow humans as our ethical equals or not?”
Australia already has 22 million people, most of whom live on a thin strip on the SEA seaboard. 90% of the Australian landmass is arid or semiarid, unfertile and unproductive. We are full. Period.
If a lifeboat in the sea has its full quota of people it has no ethical obligation to take on board someone who is drowning nearby. Indeed, as taking on the drowning person will sink the lifeboat, the only truly ethical thing to do is NOT take them onboard.
@Malthusista
Only some of what you say is accurate and many of your instances of slaughter result, at least in part, from Lenin’s own conduct of affairs after seizing power. The deeper problem with your analysis is that precisely by adopting repression Lenin ensured the failure of his own programme. Repression practised both within and outside the Bolshevik party made Stalin inevitable.
@Mel Logically we should be also turning away tourists and migrants, close the airports to incoming traffic. Of course that won’t happen as they have economic value. Asylum seekers are of no immediate benefit so are to be discarded, pushed back out to sea.
As I’ve been misrepresented, again, it’s only fair that I spell out my view on Qld’s fluoridation of its water:
1. The decision was made without any consultation as one of Qld’s famous “done deals” – and of course it is all commercial-in-confidence. I object to being governed in that way.
2. The benefits of fluoride when included as a supplement in the diet of growing children is that it undoubtedly reduces tooth decay. That benefit does not apply to adults. In adults with long exposure to fluoride it seems that a side-effect is weaker teeth leading to an increase in incidence of breakage.
3. The Qld government spends about $35million p.a. on fluoridation. You could provide free fluoride tablets to everyone who wanted them for a fraction of that amount.
In summary: undemocratic, arrogant and dubious value for money.
I do not subscribe to any of the conspiracy theories about fluoride.
Those are MY views, for the record.
@Megan : “In adults with long exposure to fluoride it seems that a side-effect is weaker teeth leading to an increase in incidence of breakage.”
Your claim is untrue. See here:
“To date, no systematic reviews have found fluoride to be effective in preventing dental caries in adults. The objective of this meta-analysis was to examine the effectiveness of self- and professionally applied fluoride and water fluoridation among adults. We used a random-effects model to estimate the effect size of fluoride (absolute difference in annual caries increment or relative risk ratio) for all adults aged 20+ years and for adults aged 40+ years. Twenty studies were included in the final body of evidence. Among studies published after/during 1980, any fluoride (self- and professionally applied or water fluoridation) annually averted 0.29 (95%CI: 0.16–0.42) carious coronal and 0.22 (95%CI: 0.08–0.37) carious root surfaces. The prevented fraction for water fluoridation was 27% (95%CI: 19%–34%). These findings suggest that fluoride prevents caries among adults of all ages.”
http://jdr.sagepub.com/content/86/5/410.abstract
Your claim that fluoride is enfeebling the teeth of adults is nonsense and you really ought to stop spreading such irresponsible misinformation. It is precisely because of scare campaigns being run by people like you that any sought of consultation process re water fluoridation would be a counterproductive exercise; as we are now seeing with the climate change debate, public opinion is easily swayed by the lunatics and conspiracy theorists.
Thankfully the anti-fluoride oddballs who used to infest the Victorian Greens have left the party.
@Megan : “In adults with long exposure to fluoride it seems that a side-effect is weaker teeth leading to an increase in incidence of breakage.”
Your claim is absurd and untrue. See here:
“To date, no systematic reviews have found fluoride to be effective in preventing dental caries in adults. The objective of this meta-analysis was to examine the effectiveness of self- and professionally applied fluoride and water fluoridation among adults. We used a random-effects model to estimate the effect size of fluoride (absolute difference in annual caries increment or relative risk ratio) for all adults aged 20+ years and for adults aged 40+ years. Twenty studies were included in the final body of evidence. Among studies published after/during 1980, any fluoride (self- and professionally applied or water fluoridation) annually averted 0.29 (95%CI: 0.16–0.42) carious coronal and 0.22 (95%CI: 0.08–0.37) carious root surfaces. The prevented fraction for water fluoridation was 27% (95%CI: 19%–34%). These findings suggest that fluoride prevents caries among adults of all ages.”
http://jdr.sagepub.com/content/86/5/410.abstract
Megan, your claim that fluoride is enfeebling the teeth of adults is nonsense and you really ought to stop spreading such irresponsible misinformation. It is precisely because of scare campaigns being run by people like you that any sought of consultation process re water fluoridation would be a counterproductive exercise; as we are now seeing with the climate change debate, public opinion is easily swayed by the lunatics and conspiracy theorists.
Thankfully the anti-fluoride oddballs who used to infest the Victorian Greens have left the party.
In the wake of yet another mass shooting in Colorado, it occurs to me that one way to make people think twice before buying guns would be to have a compulsory third party personal insurance policy requirement for each gun. The benefit being that the victims of these evil devices would then have their medical and full recovery costs paid for by the gun owners.
I was wondering how many people in the theatre were gun owners all of whom would argue that their gun was for their protection. Not a single person used a gun for their defence. The second ammendment is a crock.
Even with a gun, which would be a pistol in this case, only a brave and foolish person, or an excellent shot, would face down an assault rifle. Also, he was wearing body armour. They could have taken him out if they had rememberef to bring along their rocket propelled grenade launcher, but that is the type of weapon one can easily forget to take with you on a night out at the movies.
And that, Freelander, would be very much the case for every aspect of normal life. No guns required, so why have them at all….is my argument.
But what do you think of the third party personal compulsory insurance policy requirement. We all have them to protect the livelihoods of the general public for the other lethal weapons that we use regularly, why not guns?
Third party would be better than nothing. Anything to push up the cost of owning a gun. If the cost were prohibitive it would work as a partial ban.
Nup, at this stage the only logical thing for Americans to do is to arm bears.
It is reported that one of the victims of the Denver shooting had been a survivor of a previous shooting incident.
Gosh …
@Katz
More seriously, they could require that all seeking to bear arms be part of “a well-regulated militia” accredited for the purpose of protecting their state or the commonwealth from tyranny, by the state and the commonwealth.
Either that or they have a good reason, both to own any firearm, and for each extra one.
That doesn’t seem an outlandish violation of the intent of the “founding fathers” as expressed in the Second Amendment.
oops … there’s that word again: tyr@nny
@Katz
[More seriously, they could require that all seeking to bear arms be part of “a well-regulated militia” accredited for the purpose of protecting their state or the commonwealth from tyr@nny, by the state and the commonwealth.
Either that or they have a good reason, both to own any firearm, and for each extra one.
That doesn’t seem an outlandish violation of the intent of the “founding fathers” as expressed in the Second Amendment.]
@Katz
Arm bears, I like it! That would give them a fighting chance during hunting season.
Who knows. Bears may then even campaign, successfully, to reclaim the wilderness.
Isn’t this surprising? Maybe not?
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-07-18/study-finds-pregnancy-and-marijuana-a-dangerous-mix/4137666
That Aurora victim had previously survived a mass shooting … IN CANADA.
It appears that the 49th parallel affords little sanctuary from the fatal attentions of disgruntled armed men.
The text of the Second Amendment appears to have defeated all attempts to read it for meaning. But then again, it is easy enough to subvert meaning if any text is read in bad faith.
Alan (@ 25) wrote:
Lenin, unlike his domestic and international opponents, had opposed the criminal international slaughter now known as the First World War from the outset. After the political movement he led became the government in Russia, the same criminals responsible for the slaughter of ten million combatants in the previous 3 and a half years resorted to means no less ruthless to oust Lenin’s government. The fate of Gadaffi’s government in Libya last year gives some indication of what fate awaited the Bolshevik government had it not employed its own ruthless measures to hold on to power.
To again put this in context and show how the terror attributed to Lenin in the midst of a civil war in which his Government also had to fight an invasion from 15 foreign countries compares with the death tolls in other conflicts of the 20th and 21st centuries committed by anti-communist forces, many claiming to be democratic:
A total of 9 million people died in the Russian Civil war according to one of many rough estimates. Of these, The Soviet Government is variously accused of having executed between 50,000 and 100,000 opponents whilst at least “tens of thousands” were killed in acts of terror committed by the domestic White forces, other supporters of the Soviet Government were murdered by the 15 invading countries and tens of thousands of Red Army soldiers killed in combat. Millions died of famine and disease only made possible by the war inflicted upon the new Soviet Government.
The numbers killed in the 20th and 21st centuries by anti-communist political forces, many claiming to be democratic make the deaths attributed to Lenin to hold on to power during the Civil War seem trivial by comparison. The death toll includes: 60 million killed in the Second World War in addition to the 10 million already killed in the First World War, 3 million North Koreans killed in the Korean War, possibly 5 million Vietnamese killed in the Vietnam War, the death toll in the Algerian War of Independence, the Gulf Wars and starvation and disease in Iraq due to economic sanctions imposed since 1991, the invasions of Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq,…
Of course the horrific toll attributed to Stalin and is somewhat more comparable to the death tolls listed above. However, I have already shown that Lenin foresaw the danger and tried to remove Stalin from power before he died. The death destruction and poverty caused by the intervention against the Soviet Government by imperialist powers created the material circumstances that enabled Stalin to seize power. That historians, who hold Lenin morally culpable for Stalin’s crimes, withhold this information from their readers is deceit.
Lenin objected to Russian workers fighting in WWI not because he was horrified by mass slaughter but because the wrong people were dying for the wrong reasons in that mass slaughter.
On the other hand, the Social Revolutionaries, who were the electoral victors in the 1918 Russian Constituent Assembly elections maintained not one, but TWO terrorist cadres. Since 1900 the SRs claimed responsibility for more than 20,000 kills in terrorist and insurgent activities in the Russian Empire. The SRs were far more enthusiastic and violent terrorists than Lenin’s Bolsheviks.
But the voters of Russia — millions of them — plumped for the Social Revolutionaries. Seems that the good folks of Russia were less delicate than 21st-century Australians about the alleged evils of revolutionary terror.
Go figure.
Katz (@43) wrote:
Whatever motives you attribute to Lenin, at least he tried to stop the slaughter.
So, how do you know that Lenin was not horrified by the slaughter? Where is your evidence? Nothing I have read about Lenin has shown him not to have been a deeply humane person, unlike his domestic and international enemies.
The fact about individual terror, which Lenin tireless argued against, is that it does nothing to help the oppressed against powerful vested interests. Time and time again, from Lenin’s time until the present day, acts of terror, blamed on opponents of the international oligarchs have, in fact, been carried out by the police, the military and the spy agencies of the governments serving those oligarchs and used as a pretexts for political repression and war.
Here ya go Malthusista, all of Lenin’s published works:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/index.htm
Find me a single reference where he objects to the Great War because he laments the deaths of aristocrats or generals, or for that matter, commissioned officers of any rank, from Lieutenants up.
As you are possibly aware, your challenge to me necessitated my producing proof of a negative — an impossible task. All you need to do is to find one piece of positive evidence of Lenin’s horror of the suffering of anyone above the rank of Lieutenant. If you do I’ll admit that you are correct about Lenin.
The attempt to remove Stalin is not exculpatory. The attempt was utterly and completely ineffectual and the system Lenin had established had already made the Stalin ascendancy inevitable.
For the rest of your argument, merely toting up various conflicts and declaring them the responsibility of anti-Communists is frankly a ridiculous enterprise. Did the Soviet Union count as Communist or anti-Communist when it was allied to Germany in the Pact of Steel?
@Katz
Of course, if there was to be mass slaughter, on the scale of WW1, it’s inevitable that “the wrong people” (i.e working people, conscripted peasants) were going to be the main victims and would end up fighting for the wrong cause.
[On the other hand, the Social Revolutionaries, who were the electoral victors in the 1918 Russian Constituent Assembly elections maintained not one, but TWO terror|st cadres. Since 1900 the SRs claimed responsibility for more than 20,000 kills in terror|st and insurgent activities in the Russian Empire. The SRs were far more enthusiastic and violent terror|sts than Lenin’s Bolsheviks. ]
That’s true. The SR’s roots were in the violent peasant-focused populist movements of the mid-19th century (cf: Narodniks, Narodnaya Volya). The issues are murky because while the Narodniks (a largely urban intellectual movement) asserted the idea of an agrarian socialist society, the peasants themselves saw the Tsar as a kind of friend and father figure perhaps possessed of supernatural power and feared that land reform might end in them becomins wage slaves of landowners rather than participants in village communes. The Narodnik movement saw itself as socially progressive and iniitally sought to convince the peasantry of its moral imperative to revolt. The Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, responded with brutal repression and this was largely successful.
This prompted sections of the movement to resort sought to provoke repression through, inter alia, terror|sm and force the mass of the peasants onto their side against the aristocracy. They also wanted to show that the Tsar could in fact be killed and was not supernatural. A faction of Narodnaya Volya (the 1st of March Movement) assassinated Tsar Alexander II and their leaders were hanged. In a second (botched) attempt at revolutionary violence on 1 March 1887, Aleksandr Ulyanov (Lenin’s elder brother) was arrested and subsequently executed by the regime of Alexander III.
Fanya Kaplan, an SR, took responsibility for an assassination attempt on Lenin on August 30 1918 and was summarily executed 4 days later. There’s some controversy over whether she actually fired the three shots as she was sight impaired. In any event she had been a longstanding SR member and had been protesting the supporession of both the Constituent Assembly and the Left-SRs (the Bolsheviks’ bloc partners) who had come out against signing the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty with the Germans. Uritzky (head of the Cheka — the Bolshevik secret police) was assassinated on the same day and these two acts were seen as part of a terror|st campaign against the regime. This was largely credited with provoking the Red Terror, which then resulted in serious atrocities. As with Alexander III, the Bolsheviks responded much as Narodnaya Volya would have hoped. Lenin subsequently suffered a series of strokes from complications associated with the non-effective treatment of the wounds, dropped out of effective politics in 1922 and then died in January of 1924.
The broader context of course is that murderous feuding, blood debt and payback had been very much traditional in rural Russia. The overlay of expressly political conflict over this pattern in the aftermath of a massively violent war and upheaval, terrible privation in the major cities, semi literacy, superstition, the intervention of foreign powers etc made for very poor prospects for respect for civil rights by any of the contending parties, still less inclusive government.
Whom does one hold responsible for all of this? Mostly, in my view, the aristocracy, which had control of Russia for about 3 centuries and took Russia into war. The Bolsheviks should certainly have known better to become entrapped in this cycle. They needed to focus quite narrowly on restoring something like normalcy in Russia ASAP, and that meant signing any deal that would have permitted rapid demobilisation and resumption of agriculture. They needed to parry famine (by setting up the infrastracture to acquitre and distribute emergency food aid from abroad). They needed to give as many people as possible a perceived stake in the regime even if that meant delaying the land reform briefly (there was no unity on which model should be adopted) while that was done. They also needed to keep repression and abuse by public officials to a minimum.
These minimal things were always going to be a big ask, even if the regime had all been on the same page, because the basic human and material infrastructre (not to mention the culture) was simply lacking. Time was too short for Russia to accomplish these things before people started devising their own solutions. In Petrograd for example, the “people’s” factories were cannibalised for components which were traded for food. By 1919 people went scavenging for food rather than working and that in turn made offering the peasantry the tools to undertake food production impossible. Instead, the food would have to be extracted forcibly. Needless to say, that neither went down well nor was very effective.
So even if the Bolsheviks had been a lot more clear eyed about what was needed and had made every conceivable move to facilitate it, there was a very high chance that the whole country would have descended into an orgy of bloodletting. I’d argue that the chances of avoiding that would have been a lot better. The CA might have bought them some political cover. Compromise might have been an outside chance. Yet all choices were poor.
So called “War Commun|sm” was a poor choice IMO, but even now, I’m not certain anything else would have worked out better in practice. Had the Whites won, we may well wonder how WW2 might have played out. The dreadful cost of that might have been greater still.
We can’t change the past, but we can learn from it. The appalling cost of this learning should be acknowledged, but we dare not cast insight aside. Building soc|al|st societies is not an easy thing — especially in countries lacking a skilled and disciplined workforce, and usages around respect for our fellow human beings. War is corrosive of civilised conduct and should never be entertained while a less corrosive set of options is available. On needs infrastructure — especially in power, transport, and communication to manage effective governance. Talk of soc|al|sm that isn’t connected with building that is doomed to fail. One must do what one reasonably can with the resources one has (time, humans, ideas, materials) trying to avoid closing off the possibility of doing better in the future. Above all, one must maintain a firm ethical paradigm in which human rights hold a place of absolute priority and if that is not possible in practice one must attack the constraints as the most urgent priority.
I am not going to rise to your pointless challenge, thank you, Katz (@45).
If you wished, you could produce evidence of Lenin celebrating the deaths of Tsarist Army officers, but it seems unlikely to me that you can. Whilst ordinary Russian footsoldiers were amongst the greatest victims of the criminal folly of the First World War, it hardly follows that Lenin would have wished the same for most officers.
One of Lenin’s most able military commanders, Mikhael Tukhachevsky, who was murdered by Stalin 1937, began his career as a Tsarist army officer. The moral integrity of the Russian revolution so moved Tukhachevsky that he offered his services to Lenin’s Government after he arrived back in Russia in October 1917 following his fifth and finally successful attempt at escape from German captivity.
Thank you for enlightening me me about pre-Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary Russian history, Fran (@47).
Fran:
“Building soc|al|st societies is not an easy thing … ”
And we are further away from socialism now than at any time in the past 200 years, unless you are unfortunate enough to be a resident of North Korea.
@Mel
[And we are further away from socialism now than at any time in the past 200 years, unless you are unfortunate enough to be a resident of North Korea.]
Laughable, but not unexpected. Socialism and dynastic quasi-religious autarky are radically different things.