American Exceptionalism, Democrat PaRTY, History, How Things Work, Religion, Socialism

Bolsheviks vs Mensheviks; Who Should we Root for? Are They Really Any Different?

With his speech Donald Trump seems to have lit the fuse for not only a cultural Awakening in America, but a “two-front war”, lighting the fuse of liberty among the people of those peoples belonging to the nations most hellbent on bringing us down to their level.

So instead of another four-years, it can become a 30-Year endeavor, which means I won’t live to see it won, but it will have a much greater possibility of surviving another hundred years, and America can finally get about it’s original purpose, which always was to serve as a model for others seeking to be free to follow.

 

The title is a question, but instead of offering my opinion as to an answer, I’m going to offer certain natural laws that will allow you choose the better path, for in reality, there are at least two ways to skin this cat. To me, what matters is not whether they will win (Answer: Long term, they can’t as decreed by Natural Law and proven by history) but 1) how will America as a free society fare in the end, 2) how long does it take in Nature for that end to come, and therefore, 3) can we/should we try to actually pre-select a winner with the knowledge that while they are both foresworn to destroy human liberty (by conquering us), the timing of their destruction would be outcome determinative to human liberty.

Both Mensheviks and Bolsheviks were Marxist. Like the Nazis in Germany, who began in 1920 and then took 13 years to be elected to power, (proving just how gullible and hate-filled the German people were and having little to do with Hitlerian genius), the Marxist parties also started out small in1905. It also took them around 13 years to seize power…only by force. But their acquisition of power was not the same as the Germans. There were far fewer people in Russia they had to persuade or convince, or for that matter, subjugate by force. Russia was history’s last feudal state, roughly twice the size of the United States and twice the population, only the vast majority were peasants, with a very, very small government, private business and educated intellectual class. When WWI began in 1914 and they mass-conscripted their army, for most of those men it was the first set of manufactured clothing they’d ever worn.

As I mentioned earlier, in a different context, Leo Tolstoi, a devout Christian, wrote “What Is to be Done?” in 1886, while V I Lenin, a devout anti-religion Marxist, wrote a volume by the same name in 1901. Both asked questions about where Russia should go, only in two opposite directions. In 1905, the ruling Tsar Nicholas II, after a failed revolution, decided to give the Russians a legislature, the Duma, which could in theory give “the people” a greater voice and make Russia appear less medieval and easier on the eyes to the Europeans, most of whom, if you didn’t know, believed Russians not to be European. (Don’t ever say “Scratch a Russian and you’ll find a Tartar” in Moscow  today. Just saying.) If you like seeing how politics is played where you have no dog in the fight other than moral biases based on the fact that you’re an American (and forgetting that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, also American-by-birth, would have exactly opposite biases), this Russian history, 1903-to-1914, leading up to the October Revolution would be a good teaching tool, because how you read it will depend entirely on which side of the moral line of history you would stand. In my view you’re comparing two forms of evil in Russia, one “lite” and the other “hard”. And it is from that position you should be able to distinguish the differences between Bolshevism (manic-hard) and Menshevism (civil-lite), but both carrying torch for the same evil of the few subjugating the many.

In short, if you can’t distinguish between the shades of Evil as measured against a universally understood range of Goods, which today is absent in every media “fact” we’ve seen reported for at least twelve years, you’re lost, and you wouldn’t understand a thing I will say here going forward.

By 1900, Marxism was just one version of several versions of socialism. Even Hitler’s vision was “socialist” which modern Marxists don’t like to admit. He was a totalitarian competitor. The Mensheviks and Bolsheviks disagreed on a few fundamentals of Marxism, especially as to how they defined how a new Russia should be built. In 1903 Lenin was still just a 33 years old intellectual and youthfully impatient, a type we’d all recognize today, and his right hand man, Leon Trotsky, was only 24. They (think of Curley Bill Brocius and Johnny Ringo, the leaders of the Cowboys of Tombstone, one just mean and the other psychopathically mean) believed the old Russian world should be burned to the ground, which they eventually did. And by the death of Lenin in ’24, the exile of Trotsky in ’29, and rise of their party secretary, Josef Stalin in the mid-20s, the civil war over, and the death of 3 million Ukrainians by famine securing their breadbasket to feed the Russian people in those early lean years, their pathway to dying a natural death of bureaucratic corruption was secure, which according to certain generational laws, it did in January, 1992. Roughly seventy (70) years. I suspect some Westerners saw this as a new kind of evil occurring in the USSR as early as the Soviet purge trials, only one journalist, New York Times Pulitzer Prize winner Walter Duranty, from an amoral cynical platform not unlike the modern press, neglected to cover, then denied that the famine in Ukraine had even occurred, which another journalist, Malcomb Muggeridge, a pro-communism socialist, reporting for the Manchester Guardian, witnessed the famine first-hand and brought it to the world’s attention…and in the process turning against communism and toward a morality-based ethos, having known Mahatma Gandhi in India in the 20s, and finally turning to Christianity in the 1960s, to become one of the great  Christian writers until he died in 1990. (See how Transcendence works?)

From this Bolshevik scheme, and the living memory of the same path being chosen by Mao Tse Tung (I like using the old Chinese spellings as it annoys PC people today), Chinese communist state also past their 70th year, give or take, and witnessing the total collapse of smaller Marxist regimes and economies in far less time; Cuba and Venezuela come to mind, we have a pretty good picture of how, when and why the Bolshevik vision will collapse…and where their tearing down of all our institutions; religion, free market-small business class, re-education camps, and the rise of an even bureaucratic broader state class over-seeing every aspect of private life would take America. By barricading themselves behind gated communities, or rich “dacha‘s” in the forests, living entirely in a world of reports provided the bureaucratic “apparatus”, they will never see that last act play out.

America’s liberty-lovers problem is, having no idea what our grand-children and great grandchildren will know or even be allowed to know 70 years from now, we can’t know how well equipped those children will be to pick up the old blue-print of America and rebuild it. But I do know that after 30 years, and, I repeat, I was there on D-Day 1992, and revisited often for 15 years, the Soviet peoples in general are still walking around without almost every aspect of their lives as unfree as they were under the Soviets, only today it’s a kind of fascist state rule by oligarchs.

In brief, the Bolshevik road is quick and violent, and its road forward clearly defined, until it hits that 70th year, at which time it either sinks under a violent counter-revolution (Romania) or a morphing into a corporate fascism not unlike Hitler’s romance with Germany’s 1930’s version of the corporate sector, only leaving half a billion people facing a gap of from 70 years to 45 years (East Europe) with their past, including any faith-based ideals of morality, either missing or lost.

By contrast, the Menshevik path, never tried in Russia, politically appears to have been little more than what we have seen in social-democracies in Europe since WWII and the formation of the United Nations, and a favorite model for almost all European governments of Europe since the fall of the royal houses after World War I. The Mensheviks believed they could gain power slowly thru attrition, not unlike the American Democrats, or at least the communist wing inside the Democratic Party, since at least 1965, but arguably since 1933 and FDR, or even 1896 when then Democrats became the party of Labor, for the Marxist element with the Party had found a home. A generational approach was has Saul Alinsky defined in the 1960s/

Now they own it, and much like the social-democrats of Europe, who have already been able to build another tier of into governmental oversight with the EU, giving the concept of “redundancy and inefficiency and indifference” new meaning, it’s not hard to see what the purposes of a Menshevik government would be, for  instead of lining up priests and shooting them, modern Europe proves that in the same 75 years, you can breed your Dietrich Bonhoeffers or Malcolm Muggeridge’s out of existence. Just noting the fall of church attendance and annual polling about belief on God in England from say 1946, when they fired Churchill after he’d got them through the War, to our day, you can see Alinsky was right. Just bureaucratically breed them out.

 

I ask in the title “who should we root for?” in the sense that such wars are inevitable within any organization as it move from its revolutionary first generation to consolidating it’s power thru bureaucracy (which is the key element of its self-destruction) in succeeding generation. These are always marked by the natural laws of corruption, petty in-fighting, waste, and the eventual (usually generational) surrender to a younger, more vigorous competitor “with a better idea”, as we witnessed the replacement of the Kresge retail chain K-Mart by Walmart, who in turn, in its third generation, by Amazon.com and the entire on-line, home delivery business boom.

From the view at the top floor, the front office, this is really no different than the “better idea” of government Bonaparte had with his involvement with the French Revolution, instead creating an itch he could never quite fully scratch, and who only lasted fifteen years, or Adolph Hitler, who made it only twelve. Josef Stalin stole the USSR from the Bolsheviks in 1924, and created an organization that collapsed in on itself within 68 years. Mao tried to keep his revolution going and nearly destroyed China with his Cultural Revolution, but was saved by the more pragmatic business mind of Deng Xiaoping, who brought China into the 20th Century, but instead of condemn Mao, as Khrushchev did Stalin, Deng deified Mao instead of condemning him, his “Little Red Book” sort of like a pocket New Testament for years. This is why I date the modern Chinese Communist Party from 1979, new edition

You can see how mass advertising helps, particularly once it can brook no competition, as the new tech revolution wishes to impose on the modern world, and I’m unsure who predated who, the USSR or Madison Avenue. Saul Alinsky would have done very well there had he been so inclined.

So, forget ideology, even if it causes a “cause” to gain power. Power is its own ideology.

What we know is that once power is gained, ideology gives way to a far deeper desire that goes to the very nature of Man that transcends every belief system. If you think I am talking about political Marxism or Fascism or any of the other ism’s that have come down the pike, you’d only be half right, for once the Emperor Constantine be-knighted the Christian Church to become the state religion of his eastern Empire in the 4th Century, or the Roman Pope Leo III signed an exclusive contract with the kings of western Europe, creating the Holy Roman Empire at the end of the 8th Century, the same powers-of-self-destruction fell on them. And just as hard.

In fact, it didn’t take long, just over a century, once arrived in North America, for some of the Protestant faiths that came to America to escape Catholic dominion to likewise re-order the doctrine of their own faiths in order to justify one man owning another man and to be able to exercise total power of him and his family, up to issues of life and death, and to the point of their being able, much like their Catholic tormenters in Europe, to use special interpretations of their Holy Scriptures to justify their actions.

And finally, once the Catholics kings had made their peace with their Protestant usurpers by simply erecting invisible territorial boundaries around each nation, they could then join together to focus their attention on the Jews, who, they all agreed, had hung Christ, and then, the Christians who had been taught to use a knife and fork to slice through a nice tenderloin, by the Moors in Spain, or to appreciate fine silks and linens, introduced by the Chinese, (thanks to Marco Polo), they then needed to add another expense column to their cash books, which before, had only been kept for making war. They then needed almost as much additional money to keep their castles well appointed than their neighbors, including their wives, and their mistresses, and even the sweet young things they enjoyed by cheating on both, and then the extra petty cash expense of buying forgiveness from priests.

Their outgoing suddenly far exceeded their incoming from the sale of potatoes farmed by their serfs, especially with the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Crusade it seemed that the only people who had that sort of cash laying around were the Jews, who, since by law were not allowed to own land, instead became shop-keepers, and eventually manufacturers, who kept their money buried in a hole, and they became money lenders.

Like rich, spoiled children today, whose parents often are still told that they are special and the rules of the rest of the world don’t apply to them, while the nobility had to (in their own eyes) belittle themselves by even having ask a Christ-killer for money, they doubly hated having to pay it back, especially with interest. ONly the Jews didn’t have any Vinnie’s and Augie’s to send around an collect, so every time a black plague struck Europe, it was the Jews fault, and people ran out and killed them. Pogroms were common into World War II

 

The purpose of this opening exegesis is to point out the rule, not the exception, but the RULE, that every time Man or Woman opens their mouth about something he wants to accomplish that is “moral and good”, whether Christian-Good, Patriot-Good, or Socialist-Good, he/she will screw it up…only not because of a flaw that is in the design or the plan, or even in the sincerity by which they designed it, but rather in several natural laws that are immutable, all of which state that the best laid plans, designs or schemes will eventually be corroded, and within a fairly predictable period of time…at the outside, three generations…due to the creeping in of the seeds of destruction against the original honest good intentions of the plan, even Karl Marx’s plan, due to these seven things that are part of every person’s nature; Pride, Greed, Wrath, Envy, Lust, Gluttony and Sloth.

Yes, you’ve seen this list before, and many of you reject it because you were also taught that this is just one-half of the package, each “sin” or weakness matching corresponding virtues; Humility, Charity, Patience, Kindness, Chastity, Temperance and Diligence. Even the most doctrinaire political regime teaches and often punishes transgressions of the vices. It is in extolling the virtues that the political regime remains largely silent, for it is difficult for a political regime to define, much less reward any demonstrated virtue, for they cannot find their origins in the State.

For a little “recent” history, these lists were published in the Church in the early 5th Century, but Aristotle and Plato noted them in the 4th Century  BC, a thousand years earlier. It begs the question as to which came first; Good or Bad?…since all the original great civilizations; Bronze Age Egyptian, Sumerian, and Crete, were all marked by their great advancement in technology, food production and political organization, but those magnificent edifices they built with slave labor, and a very top down political structure as we’ve known to rule the earth more less ever since. The silent argument has always been that a society of commoners could never have built anything like that…at least until the United States was born. And the United States was built from the bottom up, without benefit of kings, or even strong-man gangs, but even more remarkably, with benefit of clergy. (As part of a book project at UnwashedPhilosophy.comI’ve made a much longer argument about this and the ability of the type of societies that can renew themselves every two-or-three generations.

The true battle then is between a type of Good and at type of Evil, both of which relies on this sort of born-again transcendence, only one from the top-down, the upper 20%, and the other, from the bottom-up, which the Top-Down crowd would very much like to destroy.

Evil, I call him by a name, was able to design a kind of human-management plan, which, once he was able to implant it into the human design, was indestructible so long as the vast majority of people were made powerless, while America’s Constitution was designed for the exclusive use of the owners of the government, and by the rules they first established, that power would be vested in the majority rule.

We’ve been here 245 years now and while until recently (30 years) we had done a good job of regenerating the fundamental sense of what it means to be American, the natural enemies of the American design have found ways to cut off that process of regeneration, in schools, scholarship, popular culture with the end purpose of turning us into a society just as soulless as their own….and therefore far more easy to herd.

 

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