Posted on 09/21/2020 7:27:15 AM PDT by livius
Between 1900 and 1917, waves of unprecedented terror struck Russia. Several parties professing incompatible ideologies competed (and cooperated) in causing havoc. Between 1905 and 1907, nearly 4,500 government officials and about as many private individuals were killed or injured. Between 1908 and 1910, authorities recorded 19,957 terrorist acts and revolutionary robberies, doubtless omitting many from remote areas. As the foremost historian of Russian terrorism, Anna Geifman, observes, “Robbery, extortion, and murder became more common than traffic accidents.”
.....Instead of the pendulum’s swinging back—a metaphor of inevitability that excuses people from taking a stand—the killing grew and grew, both in numbers and in cruelty. ....
How did educated, liberal society respond to such terrorism? What was the position of the Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party and its deputies in the Duma (the parliament set up in 1905)? Though Kadets advocated democratic, constitutional procedures, and did not themselves engage in terrorism, they aided the terrorists in any way they could. Kadets collected money for terrorists, turned their homes into safe houses, and called for total amnesty for arrested terrorists who pledged to continue the mayhem. Kadet Party central committee member N. N. Shchepkin declared that the party did not regard terrorists as criminals at all, but as saints and martyrs. The official Kadet paper, Herald of the Party of People’s Freedom, never published an article condemning political assassination.
(Excerpt) Read more at firstthings.com ...
Replace Kadets with Democrats and you’ll find an exact match.
A party that has openly embraced extreme Socialism, bordering on full-bore Communism, with a demented nominee who can barely remember his own name, is still within striking distance of winning the Presidency six weeks out.
Just let THAT one sink in before you start writing tombstone epitaphs for the Left.
Read the article. The point is not that they were done in politically by their stance, but that they shamelessly supported communism and anarchism, despite being ostensibly law abiding, and then eventually fell victim to the Terror themselves.
But that was after they’d taken all of Russia down with them. That could easily happen here.
This article explains their mentality in the context of the proven history of Communsim, and it’s very thought provoking when you match it up with Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden, etc.
Democrats will vote party over person. It doesn’t matter who the person is as long as it’s a democrat. To them, the natural order of things is for democrats to be in charge.
The repeat of socialism is that it always starts with naive and uneducated people who are losers in life and join forces with the over-educated and useless academia to endorse massive gov’t control over everything in order to produce a more “fair” nation.
The masters pulling the strings will be the big beneficiaries...their power and wealth increase.
The losers who were the cannon fodder are discarded and suppressed. The academics are sent away to gulags and the poor get poorer.
The nation goes into a death spiral.
This is the cycle that happens in EVERY socialist revolution.
He points out that the revolution actually starts with the intelligentsia, who then use the mob and the fear it generates as their way to take over and destroy legitimate institutions. Russia was full of the “intelligentsia” at that time...well-off young people who either didn’t have to work or took some kind of “intellectual “ job (teaching, for example) and then devoted themselves to trying to destroy society and remake it in their image.
Just like all the sorority girls and trust fund babies getting caught at our recent riots.
The article is very long, if you click on the link, but it’s very thought interesting.
One issue that is mormally forgotten in these comparisons is the 390+ million guns in the hands of American Patriots.
Yes, that’s a good thing....the Russian people were pretty defenseless.
Yeah but this year...
Fink beats the Stomach.
7
Not like the Czar’s autocratic oligarchical regime and a history of serfdom and ignorance made life an opportunity filled garden of Eden for 90% of the citizenry.
There was actually an ongoing reform movement and things had changed considerably already, and there was a fairly large middle class, both commercial and prosperous peasant farmers (kulaks). Among the first people the anarchists and Communists went after, in fact, were reformers and reforming politicians, as well as the emerging urban middle class and the kulaks.
The Kadet party, which had been the socially liberal party and was also initially dedicated to reform, was increasingly pushed to the left in supporting the radicals and then when it went full left, it was eliminated altogether by the Communists because they didn’t need the reform “front” anymore.
Naturally, the two situations (Russia of 100 years ago and the modern US) are not the identical, if only because of modern communications, the fact that the situation of the poor is nowhere near as bad and the fact that many in our population are armed. But the principle is the same: the intelligentsia (minor academics and useless people such as celebrities, community organizers, etc.) adopts radicalism because it feels good and justifies their simultaneous envy, resentment and feelings of superiority. Then the liberal party starts supporting them, partly out of hatred for conservatives and partly out of increasing fear of the monster they themselves have nourished, and finally the monster bursts out and takes over.
Fantastic article.
I just finished it and highly recommend everyone read the whole thing.
It describes a kind of madness that we can easily identify in an individual (suicidal tendencies, megalomaniacal thinking, violent outbursts, self harm) but when it takes root in a collective group of people it’s harder to diagnose because the symptoms are literally all around us.
Glad you liked it! These are all very important points and seeing the parallels between the 2 situations is, in my opinion, very frightening. People shouldn’t shrug and dismiss what’s going on around us, saying “it could never happen here.” It is happening here.
Loved it.
People with no historical perspective think of society as a platform that we stand on or a set of walls hemming us in, that we should push back against. But if everyone is pushing, then there is no society and we revert to pre-society all-against all shockingly fast.
It’s like teenagers in a stable family always testing the bounds, which they have the luxury of doing because their parents and extended family keep the family intact. But when everyone is a teenager and no one is the parent, the family disintegrates.
Agree, very well said.
What has been more upsetting than anything to me has been seeing how fast we are reverting to what you aptly call “pre-society.” I think the so-called shutdown has helped to speed it up, because it has broken a lot of social bonds and isolated people and left them vulnerable.
But it’s quite frightening to see how fast it can go.
>>> Not just lawyers, teachers, doctors, and engineers, but even industrialists and bank directors raised money for the terrorists. Doing so signaled advanced opinion and good manners. .... Revolutions never succeed without the support of wealthy, liberal, educated society. Yet revolutionaries seldom conceal that their success entails the seizure of all wealth, the suppression of dissenting opinion, and the murder of class enemies. <<<<
And repeatedly the who’s who representing “lawyers, teachers, doctors, and engineers, but even industrialists and bank directors” all think they won’t be eaten or eaten last.
Humans rarely learn from history lessons.
Especially now, since they don’t even know any real history. Everything is a tendentious, falsified narrative. No dates, no facts, no old dead white males...
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