“I am Yahweh; that is My Name! I will not give My glory to anyone else, nor share My praise with carved idols.” (Isaiah 42: 8)
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Ishaan Tharoor—A century after the Bolshevik Revolution, Russia has its tsar:
November 7 is the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, in which a faction of Marxist revolutionaries led by Vladimir Lenin toppled the weak provisional government put in place after Tsar Nicholas II was ousted months earlier. The heady events of 1917 soon gave way to the consolidation of a vast totalitarian state, built on the bones of millions caught up in sweeping purges, which for the better part of a century challenged American hegemony across the globe under the red banner of communism.
“Within two decades of October 1917, the Revolution had devoured not only its children, but also its founders — the men and women who had been motivated by such passion for destruction,” my colleague Anne Applebaum wrote in a lengthy essay on Bolshevism. “It created not a beautiful new civilization but an angry, unhappy, and embittered society, one that squandered its resources, built ugly, inhuman cities, and broke new ground in atrocity and mass murder.”
For that reason and others, this seismic moment in history is not something Russia’s rulers are keen to celebrate. In Soviet times, Nov. 7 was an annual national holiday. But Russian President Vladimir Putin, the longest-serving Russian leader since Stalin, is not publicly commemorating the centennial. Instead, the former KGB agent unveiled a monument last week to the victims of the Great Terror of 1937-38, during which hundreds of thousands of falsely accused “enemies of the people” were rounded up and executed or sent to prison camps.
“The meaning of the day is diminished,” noted Washington Post Moscow bureau chief David Filipov. “Its post-Soviet name, Day of Accord and Reconciliation, refers to something that people thought would happen in the newly democratic Russia, but never truly did. Russia never really faced the worst of its Soviet past, nor experienced a full reconciliation with it.”
Putin speaks of the communist past with profound ambiguity. “When we look at the lessons from a century ago, we see how ambiguous the results were, and how there were both negative and positive consequences of those events,” he said last month. “We have to ask the question: Was it really not possible to develop not through revolution but through evolution, without destroying statehood and mercilessly ruining the fate of millions, but through gradual, step-by-step progress?”
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SnyderTalk Comment:
The evidence speaks volumes about socialism and communism. They don’t work.
The reason is simple. The theories that socialism and communism rest upon are contrary to human nature and common sense.
For either governing framework to succeed, people must embrace the idea that the fruit of their labor will be shared equally, even with able bodied men and women who choose to contribute nothing. Ordinary men and women may be willing to accept that outcome for awhile, but in time, they reject it and the system falls apart.
That’s what happened in the Soviet Union. After about 70 years of the Soviet experiment, competition in the USSR was more about seeing how little you could do and still survive than it was about working hard to create a better life. As the Soviet Union was coming unglued, this joke was repeated again and again until it became a slogan: “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.”
As the Soviet Union was fading away, the US had to feed the Russian army to prevent pandemonium from breaking out. We feared that the Soviet military would see the chaos as an opportunity to abscond with nuclear weapons and sell them on the open market for illegal weapons.
As a group, millennials in the US have been brought up to believe in socialist and communist ideals even though there is no example of either having worked anywhere. We did it to ourselves by electing ignorant and evil people who understood that promising to give away “free stuff” is the way to win elections.
They won elections, and they frittered away our hard-earned tax dollars while they piled on a mountain of debt. They left us with coddled masses who think they are entitled to everything and who turn violent if they don’t get what they want when they want it.
Socialism and communism won’t work in the US for the same reason that they didn’t work in the Soviet Union. They run contrary to human nature.
Nothing is free including freedom. We are going to learn that lesson soon enough.
Establishment politicians are responsible for the mess we are in, Democrats and Republicans alike. The status quo is unsustainable. Either we will change our ways or we will suffer the same fate as the Soviet Union.
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“The glory which You have given Me I have given to them, that they may be one, just as We are one; I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that You sent Me, and loved them, even as You have loved Me. Father, I desire that they also, whom You have given Me, be with Me where I am, so that they may see My glory which You have given Me, for You loved Me before the foundation of the world.” (John 17: 22-24)
See “His Name is Yahweh”.
