I found this fascinating take on the Soviet red terror, and our present-day political culture, seen in the most extreme form in the US, but replicated in our Covid world here too. It gives a chilling portrayal of where the elites intend to take this, having failed in Russia, are undertaking to plant total communism in the West, or destroy everything trying. Talk about criminal psychopaths! But, they are the new masters of the Universe.
https://www.revolver.news/2021/04/woke-cancel-culture-lenin-bolshevik-red-terror/
“Thursday marked the 151st birthday of the most successful revolutionary of all time, Vladimir Lenin. With only a tiny cabal of diehard followers, Lenin seized control of the world’s largest country and inaugurated a reign of darkness and terror that lasted seventy years.
There are many lessons to draw from the blood-soaked life of Lenin. But one of the most important is this takeaway for the terrifying “woke” moment America is living through right now. Things are not going to naturally get better. Things will not organically “calm down.” Until there is a fundamental reset of America’s treasonous leadership class, today’s unthinkable witch hunt is merely a prelude of an even darker globalist terror to come.
The Bolsheviks were indisputably more murderous than today’s left (if only because they lived in a more violent age), but even they had to ramp up how much terror they engaged in.
At the beginning of their rule, in fact, the Bolsheviks were even willing to run a fair election. Just days after the October Revolution, they held the preplanned elections for Russia’s Constituent Assembly, anticipating an easy win. To their surprise, they were easily defeated by the Socialist Revolutionaries. And so, like any good leftists, they simply nullified the election and dissolved the Constituent Assembly. Since it was 100 years ago and the Bolsheviks were well-armed, it was enough to simply announce that the Constituent Assembly was closed. Today, they might concoct a more elaborate narrative, perhaps that the Socialist Revolutionaries engaged in “collusion” with a foreign power.
Once they had taken power, the Bolsheviks didn’t immediately launch Stalin-style mass purges. Instead, the Bolsheviks started off in a way modern Americans would find disturbingly familiar: By legitimizing criminal anarchy and co-opting the justice system.
In their earliest days, the Bolsheviks framed their political abuses as a “war on privilege.” In a tactic eerily reminiscent of 2020’s riots, the Bolsheviks of 1918 encouraged a decentralized campaign by the masses to plunder and crush class enemies.
In January 1918, at a meeting of party agitators on their way to the provinces, Lenin explained that the plunder of bourgeois property was to be encouraged as a form of social justice by revenge. It was a question of ‘looting the looters’. Under this slogan, which the Bolsheviks soon made their own, there was an orgy of robbery and violence in the next few months. Gorky described it as a mass pogrom. Armed gangs robbed the propertied — and then robbed each other. Swindlers, thieves and bandits grew rich, as law and order finally vanished. [Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 525-526]
This class-based economic warfare was coupled with a revolution in criminal justice. First, the mob replaced the old system of law and order, and then the Bolsheviks came in to lend it a gloss of structure. Crime became a class issue, where mundane criminals went free while class enemies were targeted for the most brutal repression on the flimsiest grounds:
Since the police and the old criminal courts had virtually disappeared, there was a common feeling that the only way to deal with the problem of crime was by mob trials in the street.
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As the socioeconomic crisis deepened, and the popular belief developed that the burzhoois were responsible for it, so these mob trials began to assume an overtly class nature. They became a weapon in the war against privilege, focusing less on petty thieves from the urban poor and much more on merchants and shopkeepers, factory owners and employers, army officers, former tsarist officials and other figures of superordinate authority.
The Bolsheviks gave institutional form to the mob trials through the new People’s Courts, where ‘revolutionary justice’ was summarily administered in all criminal cases. The old criminal justice system, with its formal rules of law, was abolished as a relic of the ‘bourgeois order’.
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The sessions of the People’s Courts were little more than formalized mob trials.
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[R]obbers — and sometimes even murderers — of the rich were often given only a very light sentence, or even acquitted altogether, if they pleaded poverty as the cause of their crime. The looting of the looters had been legalized and, in the process, law as such abolished: there was only lawlessness.
Lenin had always been insistent that the legal system should be used as a weapon of mass terror against the bourgeoisie. The system of mob law which evolved through the Peoples Courts gave him that weapon of terror. [Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 533-4]
Reading about the Bolshevik system, it becomes much easier to understand events in our own time. In South Carolina, Army sergeant Jonathan Pentland has been charged with assault for shoving a black man on the sidewalk. The facts of the case overwhelmingly favor Pentland. The man he shoved had a history of harassing the women of the neighborhood, and Pentland was stepping in to stop just such a case of harassment.”
History is repeating itself, because, good men, if not doing exactly nothing, do not do enough for the sake of freedom.