Lenin's "useful idiots"

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov was born on this date in 1870. On November 8, 1917. He became the first leader of the first communist state when he was elected as the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars by the Russian Soviet Congress.

I've known plenty of starry-eyed communists in South Africa, London and San Francisco who believe that Lenin was a great and good "liberator of the proletariat." These same idealists claim that Russia under Lenin was a true "democratic socialist" state dedicated to justice and the upliftment of the workers and that it was Stalin who destroyed the peoples' democratic revolution by becoming a tyrannical dictator. Lenin, in the eyes of these starry-eyed communists, was a real "democratic socialist." It was Stalin who crushed democratic communism. These poor deluded souls claim that "pure communism" was never really given a chance because Stalin destroyed Lenin's "democratic socialism." The "true believers" claim that it was Stalin's tyranny that besmirched the ideals of pure socialism and that it was Stalin's excesses which destroyed all hope of "real democratic communism" spreading around the world and liberating the masses.

Many times starry-eyed commies have told me: "You say you despise communism but you don't even know what real communism is. Real communism hasn't even really been tried. Now if only Stalin had not crushed true democratic socialism and if only pure Marxism/Leninism had been given a real chance then you would see what a wonderful communist proletarian Utopia really looked like."

Not so.

From Wiki:

From early 1918, Lenin campaigned for a single, democratically accountable individual to be put in charge of each enterprise, contrary to most conceptions of workers' self-management, but absolutely essential for efficiency and expertise. As S.A. Smith wrote: "By the end of the civil war, not much was left of the democratic forms of industrial administration promoted by the factory committees in 1917, but the government argued that this did not matter since industry had passed into the ownership of a workers' state."

[...]

To protect the newly-established Bolshevik government from counterrevolutionaries and other political opponents, the Bolsheviks created a secret police, the Cheka.

Censorship was quickly imposed, and it was up to the Cheka to confiscate the literature of dissident workers: "[O]n 17 November the Central Executive Committee passed a decree giving the bolsheviks control over all newsprint and wide powers of closing down newspapers critical of the regime..." (Leonard Shapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union). Workers were re-forming independent soviets; the Cheka broke them up. Independent newspapers criticized Lenin's government; the Cheka closed them down, until the Bolshevik-controlled Pravda and Izvestia had a monopoly on the supply of news. As Shapiro notes, "The refusal to come to terms with the socialists and the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly led to the logical result that revolutionary terror would now be directed not only against traditional enemies, such as the bourgeoisie or right-wing opponents, but against anyone, be he socialist, worker or peasant, who opposed bolshevik rule."

[...]

On August 30, 1918, Fanya Kaplan, a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, approached Lenin after he had spoken at a meeting and was on the way to his car. He had his foot on the running board. She called out to Lenin, who turned to answer. She immediately fired three shots: one, relatively harmless, lodged in the arm; the second, potentially fatal, at the juncture of the jaw and neck, the third striking a woman who was talking with Lenin when the shots were fired.

Following the assassination attempt on Lenin, and the successful assassination of Petrograd chief of secret police Moisei Uritsky, Stalin, in a telegram to Lenin, argued that a policy of "open and systematic mass terror" be instigated against "those responsible". Lenin and the other Bolsheviks agreed, and instructed Felix Dzerzhinsky, whom Lenin had appointed to head the Cheka in 1917, to commence a "Red Terror", which was officially announced to the public on September 1, 1918, by the Bolshevik newspaper, Krasnaya Gazeta. Scholars estimate that between 1918-21 up to 200,000 were executed.

[...]

According to the Black Book of Communism, in May 1919 there were 16,000 people in labor camps based on the old Tsarist katorga labor camps, and in September 1921 there were more than 70,000. This system was later transformed into the Gulags.

Lenin's Hanging Order documents that Lenin himself ordered terror:[24] The text is as follows:

Send to Penza To Comrades Kuraev, Send to Penza To Comrades Kuraev, Bosh, Minkin and other Penza communists Comrades! The revolt by the five kulak volost's must be suppressed without mercy. The interest of the entire revolution demands this, because we have now before us our final decisive battle "with the kulaks." We need to set an example. 1) You need to hang (hang without fail, so that the public sees) at least 100 notorious kulaks, the rich, and the bloodsuckers. 2) Publish their names. 3) Take away all of their grain. 4) Execute the hostages - in accordance with yesterday's telegram. This needs to be accomplished in such a way, that people for hundreds of miles around will see, tremble, know and scream out: let's choke and strangle those blood-sucking kulaks. Telegraph us acknowledging receipt and execution of this. Yours, Lenin P.S. Use your toughest people for this.

Of course most of our current crop of starry-eyed communists don't know (or chose not to know) this about Lenin and seem to think that Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov was a dreamer like John Lennon.

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say that
I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

Lenin of course would have thought of Lennon as a "useful idiot." Lenin did not coin that actual phrase and never used it in his writings but it is clear that he thought of western liberals who endorsed the Soviet Union and its policies as "useful idiots" or "deaf-mutes." (The actual phrase "useful idiots" was first used in 1948 by western anti-communists.)

In a February 10, 1922 letter to the Soviet Foreign Affairs Commissar Chicherin in relation to the Genoa Conference, Lenin wrote: Henderson [the British Socialist] is as stupid as Kerensky,[the Russian revolutionary whom Lenin and the Bolsheviks overthrew] and for this reason he is helping us....

From Lenin's book, Left-Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder:

The so-called cultural element of Western Europe and America are incapable of comprehending the present state of affairs and the actual balance of forces; these elements must be regarded as deaf-mutes and treated accordingly.

[...]

We must:
(a) In order to placate the deaf-mutes, proclaim the fictional separation of our government ... from the Comintern, declaring this agency to be an independent political group. The deaf-mutes will believe it.

(b) Express a desire for the immediate resumption of diplomatic relations with capitalist countries on the basis of complete non-interference in their internal affairs. Again, the deaf-mutes will believe it. They will even be delighted and fling wide-open their doors through which the emissaries of the Comintern and Party Intelligence agencies will quickly infiltrate into these countries disguised as our diplomatic, cultural, and trade representatives.

Capitalists the world over and their governments will, in their desire to win Soviet market, shut their eyes to the above-mentioned activities and thus be turned into blind deaf-mutes. They will furnish credits, which will serve as a means of supporting the Communist parties in their countries, and, by supplying us, will rebuild our war industry, which is essential for our future attacks on our suppliers. In other words, they will be laboring to prepare their own suicide.

[...]

The Communists must exert every effort to direct the working-class movement and social development in general along the straightest and shortest road to the victory of Soviet power and the dictatorship of the proletariat on a world-wide scale.

[...]

World revolution has been powerfully stimulated and accelerated by the horrors, vileness and abominations of the world imperialist war and the hopelessness of the situation created by it, this revolution is developing in width and depth with such rapidity, with such a wonderful wealth of changing forms, with such an edifying refutation of all doctrinairism, that there is every reason to hope for a rapid and complete recovery of the international communist movement from the infantile disorder of "left-wing" communism.

John Lennon would have ended up in Gulag if he'd lived in Lenin's workers paradise. So would most of today's communists. That's why I call most of our starry-eyed western commies Marxist/Lennonists. Sure there are a few real communists but the Cindy Sheehans and Peace Moonbeams of this world are "useful idiots" to them.

Talking about fruits, nuts and vegetables reminds me that I'm going to do some gardening today.