Quote Of The Day #45

“[The First World War is] a struggle for the freedom to loot foreign countries… [Europe’s leaders have revealed] a desire to deceive, disunite and slaughter the proletarians of all countries by setting the wage slaves of one nation against those of another so as to benefit the bourgeoisie.”Vladimir Lenin was the leader of the Russian Bolshevik (Communist) party, the instigator of the October Revolution in 1917 and the founding prime minister of the Soviet Union. He wrote these words at the beginning of the First World War whilst in exile in Switzerland. The quote uses old-fashioned and clunky Marxist terminology but may I suggest that Lenin’s words are as relevant in 2018 as in 1914?

No doubt some readers will accuse me of hyperbole; they would probably be right. I am not a Marxist in a political sense although as a historian I see some merit in Marxist methodology and admire some Marxist historians. The society Lenin created (which was refined by Stalin, a man Lenin appointed to his first Cabinet and described as his “wonderful Georgian”) was in many ways worse than the tsarist autocracy it replaced. Few people mourn the death of the Soviet Union – except perhaps the definite heterosexual who presides today over the Third World gangster state that has replaced it. The official ideology of Marxism-Leninism (they dropped the ‘Stalinism’ bit in the 1960s after Stalin’s body was removed from Lenin’s Mausoleum in Red Square) is ignored in officially Communist countries like the ‘People’s Republic’ of China. But, hyperbole or not, Lenin’s words still say something about our own society in 2018.

Who gains from the mad rush to intervene in the multi-sided nightmare of Syria’s civil war? Who gains from the absurd demonisation of Russia and the wild accusations about events in Salisbury and Syria? (I am not suggesting for one moment that the chemical attacks did not happen. I merely question some of the reaction to these events). Who gains from turning ordinary people against each other by dividing them into ever smaller and more bizarre racial and sexual minorities? Who gains from the return of aggressive and intolerant religion to the secular West? Who gains from the absurd division of the people of the UK into antagonistic tribes of ‘Leave’ and ‘Remain’? Who gains from the UK staying part of the European Union? Who gains from the UK exiting the EU?

The only possible answer to all of the question in the previous paragraph is that the only people who gain are the super rich. The West is already a plutocracy and is rapidly turning into a plutonomy as well. The only people who gain from interfering in pointless wars in the Middle East are the shareholders of arms companies, ditto with the aggression directed at Putin’s oil refinery with a flag. All the apostles of the poisonous ideology of identity politics are minted. Religion has always been a tool of the rich, used to distract the poor from their wretched lives on Earth by promising them pie in the sky. And, as I have said elsewhere, the quarrel over Britain’s membership of the EU is nothing more than a civil war within the Establishment.

Again, I am not a Communist nor am I advocating the return of Lenin’s hateful ideology. But I cannot be the only person who feels my inner Robespierre stirring when I read about the colossal pay packet of a bank CEO, see the obscene luxury enjoyed by some vacuous celebrity, have to listen to the Eton-educated Archdruid of Canterbury criticise certain schools for being elitist or hear about an incompetent public servant getting a vast payoff followed by a new job paying well over the odds courtesy of the old boy network.