Recently, I read one of the most appalling and shameful articles I have ever seen published in the Manitoban. The article was titled “From Lenin with love.”
As the title suggests, the author encourages readers who seek to install a “dictatorship of the proletariat” to look to the example of Vladimir Lenin and his revolutionary vanguard, as well as history’s other famous Marxist ideologue, Mao Zedong, for inspiration.
The article exhorts leftists to “take a page out of Mao Zedong’s playbook and exist to ‘serve the people.’”
I wonder, is this the same “page” where Mao also instructed the systematic mass murder of between 500,000 and two million political dissenters and ethnic and religious minorities during the Cultural Revolution?
Is this also the same “page” where Mao prescribed his 1959-1962 “Great Leap Forward” program that contributed to 30 million deaths by starvation and directly led to the summary execution of 2.5 million for resisting or simply “not working hard enough?”
Is this the same “page” where we can find another famous Maoist slogan, “Those who are against Chairman Mao will have their dog skulls smashed into pieces”?
The article also looks to Lenin’s vanguard, the Bolsheviks, as a model for modern leftists in pursuit of establishing “an organized revolutionary vanguard.”
These are the same Bolsheviks who, according to lowest estimates, carried out 28,000 executions per year from 1918 to 1922 on Lenin’s instructions to “prepare the terror” against dissenters. These are also the same Bolsheviks who committed the second largest ethnic genocide in modern history against Ukrainians, killing between three and five million during the Holodomor. These are the same Bolsheviks that murdered 690,000 in two years during the Great Purge.
These are the same Bolsheviks who decimated ethnic minorities through wholesale forced deportation of groups including Cossacks, Kazakhs, Balts, Kurds, Chechens and Tartars. And these are the same Bolsheviks who shipped 18 million people to prison camps called gulags to be tortured, worked to death and starved.
Not much “love” from Lenin for these people, I guess.
As a descendant of Russian Mennonites, my ancestors immigrated to Canada from Russia in the 1870s, before Lenin’s revolution. However, many of their families were not so fortunate. Today, I have friends and family whose grandparents and great-grandparents were among the untold number of people brutally tortured and murdered by the Bolsheviks under Lenin in the 1920s because of their ethnicity and religion. It baffles me to think anyone would seek to imitate this man’s bloody revolution in Canada. Has history not taught its lesson?
I find it utterly appalling that anyone could find inspiration from men who committed such unspeakably horrific atrocities against humanity. I cannot imagine how painful it must be for students of eastern European or Asian ethnic origin who have ancestors who have suffered at the hand of Leninist and Maoist massacres and ethnic cleansings to see an article admiring the perpetrators of these crimes in their student newspaper.
The Soviet regime created under Lenin and administered by his successor, Joseph Stalin, was, without question, one of the most prolific human-rights-violating genocidal regimes in the modern era. Historians estimate that approximately 20 million people were killed by the Leninist state in the Soviet Union through summary executions, man-made hunger and famines, deportations, genocide, civil war, massacres and forced labour, while 65 million were killed by the Maoist regime in China.
Homages to some of history’s vilest dictators are not necessary to propagate the author’s ideological prescriptions for Canadian society.
I strongly suggest that the author of this article find less genocidal inspirations for his “socialist revolution.”
And out of respect for the tens of millions who were killed at the hands of these evil dictators, please do not whitewash their legacy or idolize their regimes in our student newspaper.
