On January 21, we commemorated the hundredth anniversary of the death of Lenin, the central figure of the Russian Revolution in 1917.
• Read also: One hundred years after his death, Lenin forgotten by Russians and despised by Putin
For a long time, in the 20the century, we wanted to make him a hero. Lenin would have made the communist utopia a reality in Russia – it would then spread over a large part of the globe.
We know today that he was not a hero.
- Listen to the news review commented by Alexandre Dubé and Mathieu Bock-Côté via QUB :
Communism
He was a rabid ideologue, a merciless tyrant. Stalin had nothing to envy of Lenin.
The death toll of communism is counted in tens of millions of deaths.
An essential question arises. We have certainly learned the lesson of Nazism, of racist totalitarianism. But have we learned the lesson of communism? Obviously not.
Communism was, however, based on an initial philosophical error: man in himself was good, and would only be corrupted by an evil society. It would be enough to abolish toxic social institutions and build new ones, morally irreproachable, for the new man to be born, free from evil. This is obviously false.
Above all, communism divided humanity into two categories: those who had seen its light, and those who refused to see it. He treated the latter as an old reactionary remnant, like the dead wood of humanity, which it was legitimate to liquidate. The gulag was there for that.
Photo from Wikicommons
Lessons
Communism presented itself as paradise on earth: for this, it wanted to completely control society and everyone’s speech, to prevent them from deviating from perfection. The slightest slip-up could result in you being ostracized from society by the political commissioners.
Unfortunately, we still find people today who think that communism was only poorly applied, that it was not bad in itself, but only poorly served by events.
And today, we see our societies reconnecting with a totalitarian structure of thought without realizing it, as if ultimately, we had retained nothing and learned nothing.