And yet, Sam does bring up a valid point. Your sources do seem a tad one sided. I mean of the ones you noted:
A couple of them are obvious gimmies while, Tony Cliff and John Rees, are member of the Socialist Workers Party in Britain. Cliff being the founding member.
I mean it’s clear you have an agenda (which is fine) but then you reproached my sources as being biased in their views. Where is the impartiality of your sources?
If you expect anybody to take your evidence seriously you’ll have to do better than to come across as some old communist/socialist party line hack (for lack of a better adjective). <Consistancy. That’s all I ask for. Consistancy.>
I think my last comment was within the rules of debate. All your sources seem to start with the pre-supposition that Lenin was a good guy, and then seek evidence to prove it.
For example, most historical sources claim that ‘War Communism’ was an artificial construct used by Lenin to weasel out of having to remove many of the decrees that had proven to be disastrous, and to explain them away as a temporary but necessary thing.
Your sources, on the other hand, simply repeat Lenin’s claim that ‘War Communism’ WAS something that was intended to be temporary all along.
Similarly, your sources regurgitate the old Pravda that the atrocities under Lenin were basically the result of a civil war being fought against internal organized armies and foreign agressors. Conventional history sees Lenin’s actions as simply being the typical brutal crackdown of a dictator designed to suppress dissent and make the population do his bidding.
I never claimed they were. My point here is to defend Lenin and the Russian Revolution, so I’m going to use sources that not only do so, but which I believe to be farily well-researched and argued. I have never yet seen a document on the Russian Revolution that has taken anything close to a neutral approach or been impartial, simply because it is not possible to do so. The Russian Revolution is an event that needs to be explained and understood, and every source on the subject has a point to make about it.
I am a Socialist - as a matter of fact, I belong to the American organization that allies itself with Cliff’s thought. Why would I not use the arguments I’ve read about and come to understand?
I did not attack you, I attacked your choice of sources.
Leninist ‘history’ should be questioned, for the simple reason that Marxists believe that it’s okay to make up history if it suits the cause of bringing about a Marxist society. That’s why the Soviets re-wrote their own history and controlled the press.
The fact that the history you are quoting from your sources is so at odds with conventional history of the time supports this.
You argue that socialism is a suprior socio-political system and yet in the hundred years since it’s inception you concede that it’s never been actually implemented and any attempt to do so has ended in disaster.
You claim that Lenin was a great revolutionary but was victim of circumstance. Evidence (in his own hand writing) of his barbarism is presented to you and you dismiss it as resonable behaviour if taken in the context only you will accept.
Various people (of various political persuasions) in this debate have suggested that your sources are quite one sided and biased. But you continue to insist that only the interpretation of history you support is the correct one.
Frankly, I have to ask, what is the point of having this debate if you continue to “witness” your socio-political views without stopping to consider other rational possibilities?
Please, to repeat… Just because a source does not agree with your views does not mean it is not neutral or factual. You just stubbornly fail to acknowledge that your views may not be incorrect.
Because your unfaltering belief in the virtue of your sources makes any other conclusion automatically false. (I never thought I’d hear myself say this…) We fight ignorance here. We genarally try to avoid axiomatic reasoning when possible.
But not because of some inherent defect in the theory of socialism.
“Men make history, but often not in the conditions of their own choosing.” - Marx
Lenin was not a “victim of circumstance”. The Bolsheviks tried to hang on to the gains of the revolution as best they could. Everything they did was in response to the situation they found themselves in - and while with hindsight they admit that not everything went perfectly or correctly, they strove to examine their mistakes and correct them. Unlike Stalinism.
When is war ever reasonable? Were the Whites and the foreign armies acting reasonably? By attempting to lay out the conditions under which Lenin took a paticular action, I am trying to provide a clearer picture of it, rather than dismissing it as “reasonable”.
Exaggeration. I argue from the point of view that makes the most sense to me. It may not be the correct one, but so far nobody has pointed to anything that would fundamentally show my sources to be in error. Except that they’re socialist and somehow therefore automatically suspect.
What was that line from Dogma? “I don’t have a belief… but I have an idea.” The ideas I’m arguing make sense to me. I’ve really tried not to take what I’ve read on faith - “it’s Socialist, therefore it must be true” - and I’ve come to accept the political philosophies I espouse after a lot of hard thinking and discussion with others. Simply asserting that Bolshevism is wrong and that Lenin is a monster because your professor said so or because you know a couple people that lived in the Soviet Union is, to me, not really a rigid enough argument for me to reconsider my position.
You want to convince me that my ideas are wrong? Start working up some real arguments. One letter out of literally thousands that Lenin wrote is not a good case. It’s like showing you a blue brick on a house and claiming that because this one brick is blue, the whole house is therefore painted blue. Perhaps someone painted that particular brick blue as a joke, or with some meaning in mind. But the only way you’re going to determine whether the house is made of blue bricks is to look at the house in its entirety.
I do not claim to have studied the whole Russian Revolution in its entirety. But I believe I’ve studied enough about it to be able to answer many assertions about it that I believe to be ill-founded or outright false. It’s not as if any of these arguments you all put forth are new to me. I’ve argued with them before. In that light, it shouldn’t be surprising that they’re not going to convince me otherwise this time.
Yet, people who actually lived in the Soviet Union are biased because they were under the “Stalinist” system?
For someone who is such a communist, you haven’t absorbed the fact that after Stalin, much of HIS legacy was denounced by Kchrushchev.
I offered my professor as a source because he is from Russia and possesses a large amount of insite into the whole thing. But, according to you, he seems to be biased?
What gives?
And no, this isn’t a personal attack-it’s me questioning your debating techniques.
Insofar as they grew up being told that what they lived under was Bolshevism/socialism/communism, yes. Because then they are more inclined to trash the whole idea of revolutionary socialism without trying to understand if there was any actual difference between Leninism and Stalinism, and why.
And nothing much really changed under Khrushchev, either. Maybe a little thaw, but the nature and function of the Party and all its appendages didn’t change from what Stalin constructed. The whole system in Russia from Stalin onwards until 1991 was Stalinist and I categorically do not defend it.
I’m biased. I’ve said several times I am. I do not believe anyone is neutral or impartial on the Russian Revolution or the Soviet Union, nor do I believe they can be. At the same time I believe the analysis that Stalinism=socialism is fundamentally wrong for material reasons. People who grew up in Russia grew up believing that Stalin was continuing Lenin’s tradition - which he was NOT - and therefore when the Soviet Union collapsed it disproved the validity of Bolshevism forever. Thus they’re going to argue from that standpoint. I’m arguing from the standpoint that Stalinism was not socialism, that Bolshevism is revolutionary socialism, and some very definite things happened in the 1920s that prove Stalinism is a completely fundamental break from socialism, period.
Now’s who’s making an ad hominem attack? Let me rephrase my question: “how are you going to convince anyone when you keep arguing out of books that everyone else mistrusts because they’re obviously biased?”
I might ask the same of them. I have yet to find a work that is completely unbiased - and by that I mean neither for nor against - on the subject of the Russian Revolution. I’m not going for convincing anyone. Of course, if other people who read this thread say to themselves “Well, that Commie bastard does have a point,” so much the better. But I know there’s no way in hell I’m going to win over any of the actual contributors to this thread.
I really think you’re missing the point, here. If we could actually find mutually agreeable sources, then there wouldn’t be this debate in the first place because we’d be in fundamental agreement about the nature of the subject. Obviously we’re not.
This has a remarkably striking similarity to many of the fundamentalist witnessing posts we get here on a regular basis. In fact it’s verbatim if you simply replace “Commie Bastard” with “Born again Christian”. (FriendOfGod being the most recent that comes to mind.)
In fact, even your argument style shows similarity. I hate to sound like a broken record, but isn’t what you are doing simply add up to witnessing to us about the merrits of socialism and it’s idols? D’ya think?
Also, the fact that you refuse to accept our sources of information as biased, and then admit that your sources are equally biased does not contribute to the debate in the least. It just adds up to a huge pissing contest about who can pile up more sources without the slimmest chance of the opposing side accepting them. History is not an exact science. We do not have the luxury of repeating experiments in a lab. Much of the interpretation is subjective but it is based on available gathered evidence. Unfrotunately, you are looking to interpret data within some context of days past. The rest of us look at the data and say:
1)Lenin and the Bolsheviks murdered thousands of innocent people to accomplish their fundamentally flawd goals.
2)Lenin’s political system paved the way for Stalin and his attocities.
3)Replacing the cruel monarchy of Nikolai with the cruel tyrrany of communism was not the lesser of the two evils.
It may be an interesting intellectual exercise to imagine the context from which Lenin and his cronies worked but at the end of the day he was a murdering opressing bastard with a single minded objective to crush those who opposed him by any means necessary. At the end of the day, it’s just mental masturbation. History has judged him. You need to find a better role model if you are going to sell your political ideals.
<Jack Nicholson voice>
Sell your brand of crazy somewhere else. We’re all stocked up here.
</Jack Nicholson voice>
Perhaps, perhaps not. Having read most of the thread, it seems that there’s little agreement over the basic facts, which means that arguments over the interpretation of those facts is completely irrelevent.
I agree that your acceptance of their sources is important, too. Not necessarily for their interpretation, but at least for a commonly accepted set of points about what actually happened. Until some common ground is established, then you’re just trading polemics.
One difference is that every time he’s asked for a fact to be substantiated from my sources, I’ve provided corroboration, including plenty of corroboration from Lenin himself, in his own handwriting.
When confronted with it, Olentzero just starts talking about context, that catch-all concept that allows you to excuse any behaviour.
When I asked him to describe a context in which is it morally correct to round up hundreds of innocent people at random and hang them just to instill fear in the population (as Lenin did, in his own handwriting, as presented in this thread), Olentzero did not have an answer.
When Olentzero challenged my claim that Lenin ordered the executions of thousands of members of the clergy, I provided several corroborating sources. He did not have an answer.
The main question remains: Under what conditions does mass murder become acceptable? Hell, even in wartime we recognize that there are certain acts that are morally reprehensible, and we prosecute those people. Even accepting the claim that Lenin was engaged in a civil war between the Whites and Reds, does that excuse forcibly starving the peasantry, executing all ‘enemies of the revolution’, and butchering civilians at random in order to keep the population in line?
It’s also ironic that Lenin’s revolution was supposedly to improve the lot of the workers, but it was the workers that bore the brunt of his terror. From starving the peasantry to rounding up hundreds of thousands of workers and forcing them into labor battalions, Lenin in power proved that the only thing that was really important was holding onto that power, no matter what the cost. And even his policies that were enacted to improve the lot of the workers backfired because of his terrible understanding of economics. By 1920, industrial output in Russia was about 16% of what it had been in 1913.
If anyone is interested in continuing this debate, I have in my possession a copy of Alexander Kerensky’s The Crucifiction of Liberty and Russia and History’s Turning Point.
