Vladimir Lenin Quotes
Where and when have riots and anarchy been provoked by wise measures? If the government had acted wisely, and if their measures had met the needs of the poor peasants, would there have been unrest among the peasant masses?
Vladimir Lenin
Nikolai Lenin, 1870-1924, Russian Communist Premier Report on Land, November 8, 1917
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Lincoln had instituted the first draft in American History and it was terribly resented by many Americans. The draft laws allowed the wealthy and upper middle class to avoid service by paying a $300 fee of hiring a substitute just like in the Vietnam War the upper classes could get College Draft deferments. The mob led mostly by poor Irish, began by protesting the draft; then they attacked the mansions and houses of the wealthy; and then they went after Blacks. The Irish poor feared large numbers of Negroes coming out of slavery and competing for their jobs and lowering the prevailing wages. Blacks were beaten and lynched and 5,000 almost half of the then Negro population were driven to Brooklyn, New Jersey and the New York suburbs. It was the worst riot in United States History.
Louis Napoleon had seized control of France and had very little popular support amongst the aristocracy and middle class. However, the Socialists leading the uprisings frightened them more than Louis Napoleon as the Socialists had the support of the peasants who resented the abuses of the aristocracy and many of the middle class. This was true class warfare and not at all what was possible in the United States when American conservatives would claim “class warfare” when there was a move for more progressive taxation. In Europe, class warfare really meant death and destruction, so for many who knew the history, the claim of “class warfare” was frightening and a large part of the “Red Scare” in the United States.
Vladimir Lenin. The two American leftists had been deported from America. Lenin and the Russian leadership was delighted to have these two famous radicals, and they thought they would find Russia wonderful. But soon the Americans discovered that the freedoms that they found so critical did not, and would not, exist in Communist Russia. After two years, they left Russia for Canada and Europe where they wrote and castigated Communist Russia to the delight of their old American enemies and the shock of many of their old American friends. Lenin was glad to be rid of them. They were as much of a threat to his regime as they were to the United States of the time.
This is an excellent example of a rhetorical technique of taking programs that the candidate opposed but seemed to be popular and instead of giving reasons for his opposition to the programs, he associated them with the demonstrations and riots that were ongoing as if the programs caused the violence.
This is also true in modern politics where almost all petitions and demonstrations are also the apprehension of loss of rights. This is true even when parties contest as in 2011 where the Tea Party and the Occupy Movement both were outraged that they were losing their rights, and in a different ways, both were.
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known by his alias Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia, and later the Soviet Union, became a one-party socialist state governed by the Soviet Communist Party. A Marxist, he developed a variant of this communist ideology known as Leninism.
