ROGER KIMBALL: The looming Lenin comeback.
As we embark on what is sure to be an eventful year, it is worth pausing to remember the hideous legacy of that ice-cold totalitarian. What I have in mind is not so much Lenin’s butcher’s bill as his more general modus operandi. Estimates of the number of people Lenin had tortured, maimed and murdered vary, but are always well into the millions. But what is somehow even creepier is his model of government.
I was reminded of this in November when Miguel Cardona, Joe Biden’s secretary of education, gave a talk to explain “education department priorities.” Talking up a kinder, friendlier department, he said, “I think it was President Reagan [who] said, ‘We’re from the government and we’re here to help.’”
I think that was intended to be reassuring. What Reagan actually said, however, as was pointed out about 10,000 times, was the opposite. “The nine most terrifying words in the English language,” the Gipper said, “are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”
Lenin would have known exactly what Reagan meant — that’s what he liked about government. And if Maximilien Robespierre was a piker by comparison, he had the idea, doing his best to disfigure France in the brief time allotted. An ardent student of that supreme political narcissist Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Robespierre was always going on about “virtue,” though he conflated the emotion of virtue with what a Marxist might call “really existing” virtue. Above all, Robespierre knew achieving the utopia of his dreams would not be easy or painless, which is why he spoke frankly about “virtue and its emanation, terror.”
Related: Finally, Destruction for Destruction’s Sake. “Lenin loathed Christianity. He loathed traditional Russian society. His animus ventured well beyond a reaction to perceived systemic unfairness toward Russia’s peasantry. Unlike Scrooge, but like a good Marxist, Lenin chose not to exploit existing society but destroy it — or he began the process; Stalin eagerly continued the project. Destruction was a prerequisite to a new, bright communist society, went the rationale. In practice, Russian society became a countrywide gulag. Tens of millions died. The human spirit was trampled. Bleakness was unremitting. Lenin, an unwitting existentialist, and his spawn imposed a horrid meaning on their meaningless world: totalitarianism and the cruel iron boot that came with it. In fact, they chose evil.”