Pro-Bernie Group: Let’s Celebrate the Bolshevik Revolution

The Bolshevik Revolution was one of the worst events in human history.

That scarcely seems debatable.

Some deluded folks try to pretend Joseph Stalin hijacked what had originally been a noble cause. This is what my professor of Russian history, Vladimir Brokvin, called the “Good Lenin, Bad Stalin myth.”

But Lenin had already laid the foundations for totalitarianism. A one-party state with suppression of dissent. A legal system in which training in the law was no longer necessary to qualify someone as a judge; a well-developed “revolutionary consciousness” — i.e., a willingness to rule in whatever way would benefit the Revolution — was sufficient.

Add to this: summary executions, concentration camps (with nearly 50,000 inmates by the time of Lenin’s death in the early 1920s), a concerted state campaign against religion, terror against the countryside — and on and on.

Not to mention a secret police sixteen times as large as anything the Tsar had ever built.

By now you may have seen the 1988 video of Bernie Sanders discussing a trip to the Soviet Union, where he was delighted to inform us that he had found prosperity and inexpensive entertainment for the masses.

Or you may have read that in the 1970s Bernie was honest enough to admit that he favored “the public ownership of the major means of production and their conversion into worker-controlled enterprises.”

You may even have heard that Bernie just added David Sirota to his campaign staff. Sirota is the guy who wrote “Hugo Chavez’s Economic Miracle” for Salon, and who flat-out said that this was socialism, and it was successful. (None of this “everyone knows Venezuela isn’t real socialism” for Sirota!)

To my mind, the most arresting item is this:

At the end of 2017, a group called The People for Bernie Sanders posted the following:

One hundred years ago today, Russian workers commenced ‘Occupy St. Petersburg’ and it spread like wildfire.

The Soviet Union wasn’t a worker’s paradise. But it’s [sic] founding revolution lit a spark of hope that swept the world. May that spark, and that hope, live on in our hearts.

Let me correct that.

It lit a “spark of hope” for destructive, envious, ignorant, evil SOBs.

I told the real history of the Russian Revolution in an episode of The Tom Woods Show drawn from the material I teach students in the Ron Paul homeschool curriculum.

Enjoy:

http://tomwoods.com/ep-399-lenin-and-the-russian-revolution-institutionalized-insanity/