We had an election today and nobody came.
Sorry, I just wanted to use that line for no particular reason. That’s what you can do when you have your own blog.
Actually, what happened, of course, is that we elected a lame-duck minority Conservative government that will have to battle every step of the way to get what it wants … and can be outvoted at any particular time by a combination of the Liberals and any one of the other two parties.
However, that’s not what this blog post is about.
When I voted today, there was a guy from the Marxist-Leninist party, David S. MacKay, who I had never heard of before, on the ballot. More astonishly, he actually managed to convince 85 wackos to vote for him.
I don’t say this because I’m particularly prejudiced again Communism. Or even against Marxism. (I do think they’re very foolish answers for humanity’s problems.)
But Leninism?
Who on earth in their right mind (and having any knowledge of history whatsoever) would found a party (in Canada!) with the name Marxist-Leninist Party … and actually have the gall to run in an election?
Leninism, if it stands for anything, stands for a betrayal of Communism/Marxism. A betrayal because he called for and began the practice of creating essentially a ruling class over ordinary people (proletariat in Marxist terminology). This ruling class, of course, was the Communist Party, and the organs of state control: police, secret police, and army.
And this ruling class that Lenin created and fostered was eventually to consume Russia, causing the deaths of millions during Lenin’s own lifetime, and tens of millions during the lifetime of the ruler whose path Lenin paved: Stalin.
Coming back to the point of this post – it does have a point, you can see that, right? – how could anyone in their right mind call their party Leninist, knowing, as we know now, that Lenin was in effect a mass murderer, a turncoat, and a betrayer of all he ostensibly originally believed.
We know this, because know history, but also because Lenin himself knew this.
Near of the end of his life he had several strokes, and lived in de facto retirement, slowly but surely getting divorced from the reins of power, as his successor, the brutal Georgian, gathered them into his own hands.
And, as I mentioned in my mini-review of a history of Lenin’s life, he awkwardly apologized to the proletariate he had betrayed.
Lenin ushered in a century of Russian suffering. And it has not yet ended.
Which is why no party that understands history in any realistic sense should title itself Leninist.