100 years of failure and there are still naive Marxists

On this day, one hundred years ago, the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin overthrew the Russian provisional government of Alexander Kerensky, thus ushering in the most brutal political system the modern world has known. Many left-wing commentators continue to laud this as the day the Russians overthrew the repressive Czar, but that event actually happened in March 1917. Lenin and his cohorts seized power in a coup and imposed a totalitarian dictatorship that would last for three quarters of a century and that would kill at least 20 million people of its own people.

Leftists of all persuasions defend Communism on the basis that the political philosophy has never been truly implemented. They also claim that Lenin had noble intentions and that he was innocent of the slaughter that followed. Let us deal with the second of these claims first. Lenin was not a good guy. He overthrew a democratically-elected government and quickly imposed the totalitarianism that would characterise the Soviet regime until its demise. He established the Cheka secret police, the Gulags, secret arrest and detention without trial, summary executions and the mass killings of recalcitrant peasants, workers and soldiers. He also began the mass starvations of the Kulaks (the so-called 'rich' peasants) that was to reach its nadir under Stalin, particularly in the Ukraine.

The first line of defence of Communism for today's leftists - that it has never really been tried - is equally false. Every form of Communism, or even staunch socialism - Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, Juche, and the latest, Chavism - has caused widespread misery for its subjects. Genocide is not an aberration of Communism, it is a characteristic of it. Communism and socialism are based on the philosophical concepts of idealism and materialism, which support the Marxist belief in determinism - that is, that human beings are not individually responsible for their actions and are merely components of the collective species-being. This justifies the sacrifice of any individual to the collective will (that will, of course, being determined by a small leadership elite). Is it any wonder that people who believe this end up killing anyone who stands in their way?

Today's left-wingers believe that their political system is better than any that went before because they control it, but what makes them think they are better than all the fellow travellers who went before them? It is naive arrogance, that is all. Were they ever to find themselves in a position to make good on their beliefs, they wouldn't last five minutes - because there will always be a Stalin or a Mao standing behind them, only too ready and willing to put a bullet in the backs of their heads as they contemplate their benevolent revolution!