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Real Communism
Tsar Nicholas II and his family.
Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the massacre of the Tsar and his family. A sad day, but as Lenin once said: you can’t make an omelette without shooting terrified little girls, then stabbing them repeatedly before shooting them again in the head, to make sure. For the sake of The People.
We’re always told that the Soviet Union wasn’t really Communism, that it was corrupted by Stalin. Communism is a pure thing, idealistic, with only the best interests of everyone at heart. Well, the murder of the Royal Family seems to have occurred before the “corruption” set in, and I doubt you’d find Communists more pure of heart than the Ural Regional Soviet of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government.
But we can’t disparage Communism, lest the wonderful idea of the enlightened collective –– gently directed, at first, until the wisdom of the people achieves its own consciousness — cease to be a shining goal. So here’s quartz.com‘s description of the event:
Russia’s last tsar, his wife, and their five children were murdered amid the tumult of the Bolshevik revolution 100 years ago today (July 17).
Amid the tumult.
One of those things that just … happened in the chaos of the times. When you have a lot of tumult, well, stuff happens. Somehow.
It would be inconvenient to note that Communism is born in killing, thrives in killing, exceeds at killing, and depends on killing. But that wasn’t real Communism! Really? In 1919, newborn and pure, not even that was Communism?
By all means, make the argument: tell me that a system of human and economic relations cooked up by some hairy unemployed guy with goat-strength BO scribbling in the public library got it right, and everyone who saw in his words the means to power got it wrong.
Published in General
Great comment. However, I don’t think that was James’s point. I think his point was that the Communists are barbaric, depraved, and indifferent to human suffering while they describe themselves as goodness personified. Young people today are not hearing these stories. They do not understand how horribly a country can descend into madness when socialism strikes.
Sigh. In 1917-1921 or so there were lots of other paths – none of which involved Romanovs – that Russia could have taken but the Bolsheviks were slightly less incompetent than their opponents. It was an inflection point in Russian history. I’m not denying the corpses. It wasn’t a choice of either Romanovs or Bolsheviks. There were other choices that could have been made.
I think part of the confusion about the way socialism and communism are related is the way world history is taught. Historians tend to segment the eras of the communist revolutions to bring about socialism on a timeline that is apart from the timelines for World War I and World War II. That’s unfortunate and inaccurate. It is important to list the communists’ uprisings and revolts in Europe and Asia as actual reasons, among others, for World Wars I and II.
I guess when historians study those periods, it is all so confusing and there are so many events that happened simultaneously that they create separate historical timelines for them.
That’s a misrepresentation. If they would fix that one thing, teach the world wars events in conjunction with the rise of socialism, young people would understand the role of the communists in bringing about the two world wars.
Skyler,
Let’s compare the Bolshevik’s slaughter of the entire family plus servants to the English Revolution some 300 years earlier. Had the King’s Army defeated Cromwell, Cromwell and many others would have been hanged. However, Cromwell won. The King was given an elaborate trial for treason for which there was some real evidence. The King was then executed. The King’s wife and children were not harmed much less his servants.
No, there is an obvious depravity unleashed by the modern madness of soulless Communism. This isn’t progress this is regress. Genocide is the next step. Why not, they might be an existential threat. The slaughter of the Tsar’s family and entourage warns us of things to come.
Regards,
Jim
Agreed. I wasn’t intending to defend the Tsar.
I think most thoughtful people understand that, James. Funny how some minds work.
Some of us just find the savage murder of a little girl very sad. I don’t think I can answer your question why we do. We just do. If you had been the father, you would mourn, and perhaps wouldn’t be able to say exactly why. It’s the same thing, but with us it extends to little girls we didn’t know personally.
@TRibbey,
Those Uncommon Knowledge videos are outstanding. Thank you for putting them in the comments.
Still need to view the 4th one.
People enamored of communism at most have read the Manifesto, it’s about the right length and depth for that sort of adolescent whatever their age. All socialism comes from Marx except the French which evolved from mercantilism/christianity, but they end up marxists because it’s a better cover for the narrow exercise of self serving economic and political power. The utopians Marx dismisses aren’t to be taken seriously. Osorio may be one of them.
Stalin is Lenin’s best friend in the historical sense. The atrocities he committed were so jaw dropping that people could get away with ignoring Lenin’s crimes.
I’m completely fine accepting that argument.
It shows that the system is so unstable that an attempt to implement it results in 25 million dead.
I am almost exactly in the middle of Kotkin’s second book on Stalin and it is chilling, terrifying, weird, unbelievable, makes you feel real sympathy for evil Communist men, makes Stalin haunt my dreams, and finally gives me a clearer picture of what Hell must be like. Amazing.
I wish that Jordan Peterson had become famous in time to debate Christopher Hitchens.
Hitchens was brilliant and charming, but just horribly wrong about communism and socialism.
I think that Peterson has the best articulation about the “not real communism” thing. It’s something like this: “When you say ‘that wasn’t real communism,’ here’s what you mean. You mean that if you had been the Supreme Leader, you would have ushered in the Millenium.”
It is really hard to think of anything more arrogant, hubristic, and pathological than that.
I didn’t think you were.
But saying that communists were bad because they killed the Tsar’s children is like saying the electric chair is bad because it could inflame your hemorrhoids if you have to sit there too long. Yes, it’s true, but hardly the real problem.
That’s a good point. I would just say that the English revolt resulted in an entity with power. Overthrowing the Tsar was not done by an entity that had any expectation that they would retain power without drastic action. That doesn’t excuse them at all, it only highlights the depravity that the Tsars had allowed to develop that there was not (and frankly still isn’t) a culture of an expectation of law and order.
Same here.
Mmmm. I think it would have been better for all concerned if it had been more unstable.
So are you blaming the murder on them?
I am standing up and clapping. Virtually. Very good, James.
Did I ever tell y’all about the friend I had who refused to work for the KGB in Bulgaria? Among the charming things they did after he refused was to follow his kindergarten aged son around, take pictures of him on the playground, on his way to school, at the icecream stand, and send those pictures, cut into pieces, to my friend. He and his family eventually fled to Vienna which is where I met him. I didn’t need any more reasons to loathe communism and its adherents with every fibre of my being, but his lifestory gave me several.
I have a pet peeve; I hate when conservatives use the term communists to describe the ruling parties of the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China. Many times I have read or heard advocates of socialism say that the governing ideology of those countries and their allies was not socialism, but communism and, therefore, true socialism has not been tried yet. Nonsense; the official name of the country in question was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
I remember skimming a book about Mao’s Great Leap Forward program that resulted in the death by starvation of millions and the impoverishment of many more; the book was written by someone who lived through it. The author quotes from Mao’s writing on those events. Mao referred to those who opposed the his latest program/movement as being “enemies of socialism”. After the disastrous consequences became evident, as a way of rationalizing, Mao wrote about “socialist adventurers” who had taken things further than he had wanted them to. Nowhere in the quoted writing was there the slightest hint of contrition for having caused the deaths of millions of his countrymen, nor were there any thoughts expressed that perhaps substituting the dictates of central government leadership for the free decisions of of hundreds of millions of market participants might not be the best way to foster economic growth.
The point is that broadly speaking, there are capitalists, who believe that most economic decisions should rest with individuals and groups of individuals. In general, modern capitalists do believe that governments should regulate where the market does not provide proper remedies; environmental and anti fraud regulations for example. Socialists believe that without guidance by government officials of most economic activity, great inequality will result and the rich will exploit and steal from the ever increasing number of poor. Soviet type socialists believe in virtually no private ownership, other socialists (fascists) believe in some private ownership with the government managing those companies by issuing orders to the “owners”.
We enable the socialist argument by not referring to people like Stalin, Mao, and Castro as socialists.
Oh My God! He must have been scared to death! What monstrous evil we had with us, before Reagan, Thatcher, the Pope, etc.
It’s still with us. Just not always as visible.
Sounds like our DOJ prosecutors (as described in Sidney Powell’s book). Maybe a bit worse.
Yes, partially. He was an oppressive hereditary dictator and he should have had every expectation that people would want to kill them. He should have refused the throne if he had an ounce of morality. He is not as guilty as the ones wielding the guns and knives, but he was partially culpable.
I’m sure he loved his children, bedecked in the finest clothes at the expense of the people he oppressed. I’m also sure that the people dying in his prisons for political crimes wanted their families intact as well.
I did not know that this Something is God.-Whittaker Chambers
As it happens, I’ve just started reading Paul Johnson’s “Modern Times.” (I’m on chapter two, and if I keep up the exercise regimen and do a bit better with the diet, I hope my life expectancy is sufficient to finishing.)
But, luckily, chapter two is about the Russian Revolution and Comrade Lenin. A couple of quotes:
“It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the decision to use terror and oppressive police power was taken very early on by Lenin…and that it was …an inescapable part of his ideological approach to the seizure and maintenance of authority.”
Lenin’s secret police, the Cheka, was made official in December, 1917, and got to business with a bang.
“Within weeks of its formation, the Cheka was operating its first concentration and labour camps.”
“The Tsar’s secret police, the Okhrana, had numbered 15,000, which made it by far the largest body of its kind in the old world. By contrast, the Cheka, within three years of its establishment, had a strength of 250,000 full-time agents.”
And this nugget:
“Leninism was not only a heresy [of Marxism], it was exactly the same heresy which created fascism.”
Judging by the number of inhabitants of St Petersburg who turned out for the funeral procession on July 17, 1998, quite a lot.
And President Putin may not be mourning their extinction, but he is sure trying to re-create the Empire over which the unfortunate Nicholas II ruled.
I agree with most of Skyler’s post. Nicholas II was, unfortunately, one of the least gifted of his dynasty, nor was the Tsarina noted for her brain-power. The Tsar could, no doubt, by abdicating earlier or by making at least a token effort to negotiate with the Bolsheviks, have saved himself and his family.
I do however take issue with the declaration that being an absolute dictator is immoral. In the case of Russia morality is not even an issue. Russia has been an absolute dictatorship since its creation by the Kievan Rus princes, and still is.
Had Nicholas II been more intelligent, he might have found a way to rule with a little less absolutism, but I cannot agree that the choice of any ‘-archy’ or ‘-cracy’ is a moral issue.
I know that Americans believe that democracy is inherently more moral than other forms of government, but there is precious little evidence to back up that idea.
Um, no, there was still a civil war going on. The Whites took Ekaterinburg shortly after the Romanovs were murdered.