Like Rabid Dogs (or Communists)

 

Like rabid dogs the Democrats circle, each trying to outdo one another in their punishment of Conservatives and Trump supporters.  They are about as rational as rabid dogs.  (see for example my recent post on why there actually are no grounds for impeachment, but rational minds could and should agree on censure and be done with it.  LINK ) 

The scene in the capital and wherever the Left gathers (including on social media) reminds me of some old black and white movie where the mob, with pitchforks and torches, goes after the innocent that they perceive as evil.

But we don’t have to go to movies or other fiction to see what is going on.  History gives us a perfect picture. 

The Library of Congress in its Russian Archives has a number of documents that reveal the inner workings of the Soviet Union, including during and immediately after the revolution.  Here are some quotations from the Library's exhibition of those documents:

In the years immediately following their accession to power in 1917, the Bolsheviks took measures to prevent challenges to their new regime, beginning with eliminating political opposition. When the freely-elected Constituent Assembly did not acknowledge the primacy of the Bolshevik government, Vladimir Lenin dissolved it in January 1918. The Left Socialist Revolutionary Party, which protested the action, withdrew from the Bolshevik coalition in March, and its members were automatically branded enemies of the people. Numerous opposition groups posed military threats from various parts of the country, placing the survival of the revolution in jeopardy. Between 1918 and 1921, a state of civil war existed.

 

Bolshevik policy toward its detractors, and particularly toward articulate, intellectual criticism, hardened considerably. Suppression of newspapers, initially described as a temporary measure, became a permanent policy. Lenin considered the Constitutional Democrats (Kadets) the center of a conspiracy against Bolshevik rule. In 1919, he began mass arrests of professors and scientists who had been Kadets, and deported Kadets, Socialist Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, and Nationalists. The Bolshevik leadership sought rapidly to purge Russia of past leaders in order to build the future on a clean slate.

Having come to power in October 1917 . . . Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks spent the next few years struggling to maintain their rule against widespread popular opposition. They had overthrown the provisional democratic government and were inherently hostile to any form of popular participation in politics. In the name of the revolutionary cause, they employed ruthless methods to suppress real or perceived political enemies. The small, elite group of Bolshevik revolutionaries which formed the core of the newly established Communist Party dictatorship ruled by decree, enforced with terror.

 

This tradition of tight centralization, with decision-making concentrated at the highest party levels, reached new dimensions under Joseph Stalin. As many of these archival documents show, there was little input from below. The party elite determined the goals of the state and the means of achieving them in almost complete isolation from the people. They believed that the interests of the individual were to be sacrificed to those of the state, which was advancing a sacred social task. Stalin's “revolution from above” sought to build socialism by means of forced collectivization and industrialization, programs that entailed tremendous human suffering and loss of life.

 

Although this tragic episode in Soviet history at least had some economic purpose, the police terror inflicted upon the party and the population in the 1930s, in which millions of innocent people perished, had no rationale beyond assuring Stalin's absolute dominance. By the time the Great Terror ended, Stalin had subjected all aspects of Soviet society to strict party-state control, not tolerating even the slightest expression of local initiative, let alone political unorthodoxy.

 

These harsh measures alienated a large number of the intellectuals who had supported the overthrow of the tsarist order. The suppression of democratic institutions evoked strong protests from academics and artists, who felt betrayed in their idealistic belief that revolution would bring a free society. Writers who had emigrated shortly after the revolution published stinging attacks on the new government from abroad. As a result, further exit permits for artists were generally denied.

 

The disenchantment of the majority of intellectuals did not surprise Lenin, who saw the old Russian intelligentsia as a kind of rival to his “party of a new type,” which alone could bring revolutionary consciousness to the working class.

I think the above speaks for itself, or at least it does to anyone with a clear mind.  What we are seeing in the current days is an extreme, concerted, devoted, and fanatical effort by the Left to silence the voices of any opposition to them or their causes.  This has to remind anyone with even the smallest familiarity with history of not only the Russian revolution, but similar Leftist takeovers elsewhere. 

The above gives one an idea of the sort of progression that such silencing can take – towards complete suppression of the people by a power-hungry ruling class.  Do not think that it cannot happen in America.  The question is, will we let it?

"Have you volunteered?"