Communists across the globe, loyal to Lenin and the ideology of Marx, have ruled by propaganda, indoctrination, ruthless violence, and armed, well-organized groups. The explosion of communism started with the revolution in Russia.
After the
Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, Lenin formed the Cheka (Extraordinary
Commission for Combating Counterrevolutionary and Sabotage), under the Sovnarkom
(Council of People’s Commissars). Cheka’s role was to crush all opposition to
the Bolsheviks.
For over seventy
years in the former USSR, Cheka was the symbol of terror and had the power to
arrest, imprison, and execute anybody at will. By February 1918, Cheka agents could
shoot “counterrevolutionary agitators” on the spot.
When Lenin spoke
at a factory in Moscow in August 1918, he was shot twice by Fanya Kaplan, a member
of the Social Revolutionary party. Lenin was wounded but survived. Because of
this assassination attempt, Cheka rounded up many non-communists and executed them.
After Cheka became
the terrorizing arm of the Soviet regime, the Russians feared its power and trembled
at the mere mention of its agents.
Even though
the Communists were defeated in the first election of 1917 under the Bolshevik
regime, it did not stop them from eventually consolidating power over a large
country that was in great confusion during the overthrow of the czarist regime
and its replacement with the Provisional Government.
The first
election was scheduled for November 25, 1917. But the Bolsheviks took power on
November 7, 1917. The Bolsheviks were ruling at the time of the election, but
they were defeated when they received only 25 percent of the vote and had 175 of
the 700 deputies. The Russian people did not want the Bolsheviks, but the
Bolsheviks wanted power and control at all costs.
Lenin’s will
to establish a dictatorship had to overcome the will of the people. When the
Constituent Assembly was scheduled to meet on January 18, 1918, Lenin was
prepared. He packed the meeting hall with heavily armed soldiers and sailors.
When the meeting opened, the 175 Bolshevik deputies began pounding their desks and
interrupted other speakers non-stop. Appeals to order were met with more
disruptions. When other deputies tried to speak, the soldiers and the sailors
pointed loaded rifles and pistols at them. But despite all the disruptions, the
Constituent Assembly rejected the Bolsheviks and their political platform. The
Bolshevik deputies walked out in protest.
The scheduled
next-day meeting of the Constituent Assembly never took place. Lenin and his
Bolsheviks issued a decree that abolished the Constituent Assembly. The new and
democratically elected government of the Russian people ended after one day.
But the
Russian people did not like the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power. By the summer of
1918 military resistance to the Bolshevik rule emerged and turned into a civil
war which lasted through 1920. Lenin went into hiding.
After his
return from New York City where he worked as a journalist, Leon Trotsky stepped
in to become the “elected” Chairman of the Petrograd soviet and “organizer of
the actual insurrection.” As commissar of war, Trotsky reorganized the Red
Army.
Finland,
Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia proclaimed independence from Russia at the time but
Ukrainian, Georgian, Armenian, and Azerbaijanian nationalities were unable to
establish independent states and were suppressed.
The economic
collapse that followed under the Bolshevik rule gave rise to many rebellions,
the most notable being the sailors at the naval fortress in Kronstadt. The
rebellion failed and all those participating were killed in battle, executed afterwards
by the Cheka, or imprisoned.
While this
revolt was taking place, Lenin’s communists stopped the practice of requisitioning
grain from peasants and authorized a “limited return to private enterprise” as
a New Economic Policy. A partial economic recovery took place in 1921. But the
Bolsheviks’ unrealistic policies destroyed agriculture and caused a terrible
famine which took the lives of 5 million Russians by 1922.
By the time
Lenin died in 1924, the dictatorship of the proletariat had absolute
power and control over everything, including strict censorship of all means of
communication. Labor, with its trade unions in which membership was forced of
anyone in the labor force, became an arm of the state.
“Even though
Lenin was dead, Marxism-Leninism, the merger of his practical action with the
theory of Marx and Engels, still lived to guide the world Communist movement.”
(J.E. Hoover, p.89)
European Communism
went underground after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to re-organize and
re-emerge in a new form with help from the media, western academia, and NGOs.
One
individual, who jumped from perestroika to the green movement, is the man
credited with “dismantling” the Berlin Wall, the former president of the Soviet
Union, Mikhail S. Gorbachev. In 1993 he became the founding president of the
newly organized NGO, the International Green Cross, “the world’s first all-encompassing
global environmental group.” Communism became green and the conscience of a new
and frightened generation of Marxists beholden to the environmental agenda. Environment
: The Greening of Gorbachev : The former Soviet leader now heads a new
environmental group, the International Green Cross. And he has his critics. -
Los Angeles Times (latimes.com)
Other
well-funded non-governmental organizations (NGOs) sprouted around the globe in
no time, all promoting a form of green collectivism that is in urgent need to
save the planet from an imaginary anthropogenic Armageddon called global
warming. And western academia resonated even louder the same mantra of
environmentalism, “the sky is falling fearmongering,” in their indoctrination
of students.
Even though communism
is now green on the outside, it is still red on the inside and adheres to the
creed of force and ruthless violence and oppression, the hallmark of communist
power and control. Technology and the Internet make it all possible.
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