“Hey, people with too much money and power tend to become anti-human psychopaths. We should probably re-arrange society to avoid this problem.”
“Yeah, a dictatorship sounds like exactly the solution to that!”
All because Lenin betrayed the revolution, then wrote extensively about how betraying the revolution is actually good and how there needed to be a dictator to somehow make everyone equal.
And then he used famine as a weapon against the Ukrainian farmers, setting a precedent that Stalin would use just a decade later.
He mostly did that because he created a moneyless society that took everyone’s money and resources in hopes of preventing anyone from hoarding anything… And then… whoops we’re having a civil war and we need other countries to back us in the fight and we can’t pay them. Time to tax the people who we just told wouldn’t need money anymore…
I think he could have pulled it off, but he moved too quickly. Absolute fucking clown show
I doubt he was ever going to follow through on the whole communism thing.
Because he started the civil war when he disbanded the National Assembly after it’s first day. All because his party lost the election.
The simple history of 1917 Russia. WW1 is going poorly and in February the people rise up and force the Tsar to abdicate.
This is a major victory, but not a complete one. There’s an interim government that isn’t widely popular and a promised National Constituent Assembly to write a constitution.
Lenin then comes back from exile and starts table rousing. Saying that there doesn’t need to be an assembly, that he should just be in charge so he can make the country communist.
Now, there was quite a bit of socialist frevor among the people, but the majority of people in the country side didn’t exactly trust the Bolsheviks.
There’s a whole dual power thing going on for most of the summer as the people form small councils to rule themselves while the interim government has mostly control over the military and such. Because they’re paying.
In November Lenin launches his own revolution and casts down the interim government. But he still has to allow the promised National Assembly election even if he thinks it a waste of his time.
And his party loses badly to the rural socialists. So Lenin spends the next month complaining like the little bitch that he was, demanding that the assembly give up all power to Lenin’s unelected jackboots.
And come January, the Assembly meets for the first and last time because Lenin is still butthurt for losing the election.
Lenin then went on to ban all other political parties.
This and other shit he pulled sparked the civil war, giving him the excuse to use famine as a weapon against Ukraine, which was not a happy part of the Soviet empire.
Our best hope for a good future is an all powerful benevolent dictator.
Imagine Superman if he decided that he didnt wanted to fit in and just wanted everyone to be as happy as possible.
They write stories like that, but then it all goes horribly wrong and then becomes a “The status quo is good, making the world better just makes things worse” soapbox
Half because “Lib Shit”, and half because if you build a perfect world there’s no conflict.
I know Marvel did a storyline where Tony Stark fixed everyone’s problems and then went full villain on a level that made the Civil War look like a couple arguing on what they’re doing for dinner tonight in order to get back to the status quo of “Sci-Fi Technology exists and is abundant, but normal people don’t have it.”
See also: Why Reed Richards can cure an alien disease that kills in a matter of minutes and is unlike anything ever seen by man before by the end of the issue, but is absolutely useless if someone gets cancer.
This makes more sense than Horseshoe Theory, since I’ve yet to see someone go so far right that they wind up on the left.
The political spectrum is a 3D one. You’ve got left wing and right wing then you’ve got dictatorial and liberal, but the third dimension is the important one. The Z axis is intelligence. The right seem to move both to the right but also down into the realm of deeply stupid, after a while they hit the edge of the graph in the x-axis but the z-axis seems to extend infinitely into the stupid.
You could draw a similar diagram in other contexts. Antivaxxers coming from the left-leaning hippy crowd and converging with the religious crowd on the right. Etc.
Yeah like Richard Dawkins pushing anti-trans conspiracy theories and platforming anti-science religous bigots.
The more one’s political thinking is made up of slogans from pre-packaged ideologies, the less it is anchored in actual Principles.
Tankies, same as Fascists, don’t really do the “what are my values” part in determining their own political posture and the “does this fit my values” part of judging a situation and instead just follow a “good people”/“bad people” “logic” were it’s somebody else who tells them who are the “good people” and who are the “bad people”, hence why it makes absolute sense for them to defend an agressor (in their view “good people”) against a victim (either not “good people” or even “bad people”).
Mind you, this is not just Tankies and Fascists: look for example at how the situation in Gaza is politically interpreted in Germany and what you find is almost always a “This <entire etnicity> are good people who can do no wrong hence we support those who claim to represent them even when mass murdering people for being of another etnicity” kind of “logic”.
I would even go as far as saying that most of modern politics is anchored on such ultra-reductive pre-packaged ideologic takes separate from Principle: that “center” is a bit further up and closer to Tankies and Fascists, IMHO.
Saddest political compass ever.