It is a terrible reality, noted by Applebaum, that most of the people who condemned Ukrainian peasants to starvation were themselves Ukrainian peasants. They “requisitioned” grain and livestock from their neighbors for many reasons, not just survival but the desire for power and also out of Marxist idealism. The striking truth is that under the Soviet system taking food from a family dying of hunger could be made to seem an act with, to use Duranty’s phrase, a “noble purpose.” This was an innovation in political science. Before the Soviet era, it was human beings who killed each other. Now, under Lenin and Stalin, history itself exterminated class enemies.
Bolshevism was a vastly simplified religion masquerading as science. Lenin said he had solved the formula of history, and so had changed the world. The crimes committed by your rulers are the work of the dialectic, and therefore no crimes at all: For a time Soviet citizens may have believed this gospel or pretended to believe it. But long before Stalin’s death, the Soviet Union had become a realm of cynicism, apathy, and fear. Now it too has been consigned to the dustbin of history, but its lessons remain. We can hear echoes of Leninism not only in Putin’s new totalitarianism, as Masha Gessen has called it, but here at home with a leader who depends on agitprop, scapegoating, and artificial facts. The Bolshevist specter refuses to die off.
Marxist revolutions are defined by their fealty to an "Historical Process" - their 'God', really. That "process" is defined differently based upon the time. In Lenin and Stalin's time it was a class based God whereby the 'proletariat' liberated the nation from the bourgeoisie, the nobility and the peasants. Today's Marxism is an identity based God whereby the 'woke' liberate non-white racial groups and non heteronormative sexual groups from 'white' and 'religious' devils.
Both forms are equally deadly to society, generating huge demographic deficits either through straight up murder or through the suppression of births. Leading to the death of culture and family. Modern birth suppression Identity Marxism is no doubt much less bloody and cruel than traditional Marxist slaughter but it's every bit as effective in enervating civilization. And radical Environmentalism provides a religious pretext for the Birth Holodomor: Like the Kulaks, the fecund are evil, seeking to destroy the world. So they must be stopped.
But they won't. Just the Christian ones. And the Muslims will inherit large parts of what used to be called Christendom and will slaughter the remaining remnant of identity Marxists with relish as the fools gape and beg 'but, but we're woke, we're on your side' to the flash of the scimitars.
