Why should Russian nihilists have targeted Alexander II, the most liberal czar Russia ever had?
Alexander had freed the serfs — thus liberating the third of the population owned outright by private landowners, not to mention an equal number owned by the crown. Before the liberation of 1861, serfs were routinely bought, sold, and lost at cards. His “great reforms” included creating organs of self-government, first in the countryside (1864) and then in towns (1870). The entire justice system was reformed along Western models. The modernization of the military in 1874 reduced mandatory active service from 25 to 6 years. Nevertheless, the radicals insisted that terrorism was their only choice. “There was nothing to hope for in legal and pacific means,” Stepniak explained with a straight face. “After 1866 a man must have been either blind or a hypocrite to believe in the possibility of any improvement except by violent means.” The very day the czar was killed he had approved a reform moving in the direction of a constitution.
Westerners who met Lenin early in his rule often commented that he was a full blown violent psychopath who relished violence. However, modern historians, who are either actual communists or comsymps, cover up Lenin’s criminality and ascribe it to Stalin if they must, or more commonly ignore both and rant about Hitler.
Likewise with Marx and Engels; few note that the strictures of Marxism mandate theft and expropriation, making them virtues and turning rule of law and private property into crimes.
Part of the problem we have with dealing with the left is that we utterly fail to condemn them and their half-price gods for their essential inhumanity and criminality. Che Guevara was a mass-murdering psychopath who enjoyed killing, and yet his blood-stained visage stares out at us yet from the chests of equally insane youth.
You hear endless loud condemnation of the Nazis and Hitler, but for the rest of his left-winged ilk, we hear nothing, not even a whisper of condemnation from the left. The really amazing thing is how thoroughly they’ve turned Hitler and his goons into “rabid right-wingers”, ignoring that little “Socialist” bit of their party name… Hitler is only a right-wing figure in that he was, indeed, slightly to the right of the Communists and Stalin. Up until Barbarossa, he was their stalking horse in the West, with the Comintern fomenting their minions to ease Hitler’s conquests. Without the French Communists, Hitler would have had a lot harder time moving west, and would likely have become bogged down in a slightly more mobile version of WWI, at least until the Germans ran out of money. At that point, the odds are that they’d have had to sue for peace, unable to pay for war material.
Socialism is organized crime on an incomprehensible scale. Even now, we live in an era of the “bust-out”, where a legitimate enterprise has been taken over by the mob, and is in the process of being looted, with the proceeds disappearing into the coffers of the criminal element that is the Democratic Party. Trump, I fear, is only a bump in the road to their final victory–When the costs of servicing all those loans making up the National Debt exceed the annual budget, well… You’ll see the final stages, and experience the consequences. Of course, the criminal stooges and enablers will still remain nice and warm, nestled in with our stolen resources as they will be. Ten thousand retirees will starve and freeze in the dark for each of them, but the men and women who enabled things like Solyndra will continue to prosper.
The next generations here in the US will be interesting to observe. I’d rather do it from space, but that’s kinda unlikely. Musk has the right idea… Get the hell off this rock, and away from the stupid.
The status of a serf in Imperial Russia was less than that of a negro slave in the USA!
Bob Sykes – Bertrand Russell who traveled to Russia to study the Bolshevik Revolution and was broadly sympathetic with it wrote after meeting Lenin that if one had chanced to sit next him on a train not knowing who he was and engaged in conversation with him one would come away thinking of him as a fanatical and tiresome crank.
If you know how you can feel being in such a lofty position compared to people around you that you could buy and sell them, you might understand your reaction to someone who wants to eliminate that positional advantage.
If you haven’t experienced such a case, try to imagine when your team – the one you play on – wins big. Over and over again. Then dial what you feel about that to eleven. Now, start playing all your games with an umpire who routinely throws the games to your opponents, justifiably or not.
Given all that, and given that “the radicals” were, um, non-serfs, their having no choice but to use nihilistic terrorism is not a surprise. I’d be really pissed, too. Horrid traitors to our class stealing our birthrights *should* be bombed!
“If you know how you can feel being in such a lofty position compared to people around you that you could buy and sell them, you might understand your reaction to someone who wants to eliminate that positional advantage.”
If you were in such as position, like Perrin, you might say and write things like “One million outgroup lives are not worth a single ingroup fingernail.”