Notes from Chairman Lenin—and Dostoevsky
A few days ago a commenter here offered a link to this page of Lenin quotes. Some of them seem pretty apropos in light of recent developments, and so I offer them to you for your contemplation [I’ve emphasized some of the most “interesting” by highlighting them in bold]:
A lie told often enough becomes the truth.
Democracy is indispensable to socialism.
Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.
It is true that liberty is precious; so precious that it must be carefully rationed.
One man with a gun can control 100 without one.
The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency.
The goal of socialism is communism.
The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.
There are no morals in politics; there is only expedience.
No amount of political freedom will satisfy the hungry masses.
The final quote is of special interest because of the way it dovetails with the insights of the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky. Although Lenin was a mere nipper of ten when Dostoevsky wrote “The Grand Inquisitor,” (a chapter from Dostoevsky’s masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov, written in 1880), Lenin seemed to steal a page (or several) out of his book.
Dostoevsky was no stranger to the revolutionary socialist zeal and terrorist nihilism that was already beginning to shake Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century, which terminated in the Russian Revolution and the ascent of Communism there. Although he died in 1881 and did not live to see the final flowering of the movement that had taken root decades earlier, he had been a revolutionary himself in his youth, and had actually faced a firing squad after being arrested for subversive activities.
It was a traumatic experience for Dostoevsky, already a highly emotional and even unstable youth. He and his companions were subject to a mock execution, their sentences commuted at the last moment to years of harsh labor in prison camp. That experience and others made Dostoevsky a “changer;” he later renounced both socialism and a host of other Western ideas, embraced Russian Orthodoxy and a mystical spirituality, and became one of the world’s greatest writers.
I came across Dostoevsky’s works in high school and then again in college, during the period of upheaval and unrest that started in the late 1960s. In high school we were assigned to read Crime and Punishment, as well as the “Grand Inquisitor” excerpt from Karamazov, and in college I read his chilling work The Demons (then titled The Possessed), about the spiritual and moral bankruptcy of the revolutionaries.
Did I understand these works then? Not as well as I think I understand them now. But of all the lessons I learned during my school days, and of all the books I was assigned to read, these made perhaps the deepest and most powerful impression on me.
Much of school felt like the memorization of dry and irrelevant facts. Many novels seemed obscure and and hardly applicable to my life, and one would have thought that would have been even more true of these startling and intense Russian works from a time that seemed so distant then (although it seems much closer now; odd how that happens).
But something in them rang a bell, especially as the political upheaval of the 60s progressed. That bell had a sound not only of strange and inexplicable familiarity, it was also an ominous toll of warning. The books seemed to speak to the troubled times in which I was living, and made me realize that there is hardly any new thought under the sun. Those headstrong revolutionaries of the far-off Russian past were not stilted figures in an old and faded photo; they too closely and uncomfortably resembled the rebels of my own generation, who thought they had invented protest and cast off the shackles of the past.
I’ve quoted the following excerpt before on this blog. I’m quoting it again now. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I have reason to quote it in the future.
In this excerpt Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor is addressing Christ, who has returned to earth but is arrested and imprisoned again:
Oh, never, never can [people] feed themselves without us [the Inquisitors and controllers]! No science will give them bread so long as they remain free. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, “Make us your slaves, but feed us.” They will understand themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share between them! They will be convinced, too, that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious. Thou didst promise them the bread of Heaven, but, I repeat again, can it compare with earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, ever sinful and ignoble race of man?
[ADDENDUM: And then there’s Machiavelli.]
[ADDENDUM II: For an interesting discussion as to whether the Lenin quotes are authenticated or not, please see the comments section.]
The college I attended had a course entitled “Development of Western Civilization” that all freshmen and sophomores were required to take, five days a week, for four semesters. It wove through the history, literature, philosophy, and theology of Western Civilization from its dawn in the middle east to the current day. I remember reading Dostoevsky, positioned in the class as a response to the Marxism / Darwinism (as a philosophy, not science) of the day.
Many of the lessons of that period are applicable today. Whether or not it is the intent, the current events of history are leading America towards that philosophy. The path may be different (not by revolution but by peaceful democracy), but the end result of Obama socialism is the same, and the warnings of Dostoevsky are as relevant today as they were in the 1930s.
Anyone who is looking for a brief introduction to Dostoevsky should read Notes from the Underground, a short novella that is less than 100 pages, yet very powerful and exemplary of Dostoevsky’s larger works.
Dostoevski was not only prescient as to the consequences of socialism and other western isms, he knew the human soul and spirit better than anyone I’d ever come across in my readings. Everyone ought to read and reread him. I wonder if his books are still to be found on school reading lists.
Most Reasonable Conservatives have shrunk back from wanting to make comparisons between American liberals and socialists, and certainly not communists as governing around the world. There are no work camps and KGB assassinations, and we do not wish to appear feverish.
But the comparisons are beginning to become more apt, as election fraud continues to grow by a variety of means, as show trials leak into political hearings, and redistribution is seen as the only defensible moral stance.
We are well away from Ceaucescu or Mussolini and should not pretend otherwise. But the dosage of that poison has recently increased from negligible to mild. I also believe it has a long half-life.
The path may be different (not by revolution but by peaceful democracy), but the end result of Obama socialism is the same, and the warnings of Dostoevsky are as relevant today as they were in the 1930s.
The following might be slightly unclear and incoherent because I was thinking it out as I wrote, but I’ll submit it anyway:
I would say though that the radical motivations that bring about the change are the same. It is always a tiny minority of passionate people who are absolutely driven to re-make their societies according to their utopian imaginings. The majority is largely silent, disorganized, complacent, and naive as to what the radicals intend. The majority has a difficult time understanding the threat posed by radicals because their mindset is based more on reason and their personal interest in societal stability. The radical minority is largely built from people with raw passion based in ideals. Usually, they are learned, but without much self-interest in the stability of society because they haven’t invested anything into it. They just know they don’t like how it is.
I would say this is also largely why it is rare for mainstream, traditional Americans to protest. Because they all stand out there and can’t understand what the purpose of it all is. When there is so much to do, why stand out on a curb yelling like a crazy person.
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… there is another great Russian, a friend and contemporary of Dostoevsky: Vladimir Solovyev.
… no prophet, as I hope … but perhaps in vain.
Europe in the twenty-first century represented an alliance of more or less democratic nations — the United States of Europe. The progress of material culture, somewhat interrupted by the Mongolian yoke and the war of liberation, now burst forth with a greater force.
The problems of inner consciousness, however, such as the questions of life and death, the ultimate destiny of the world and humanity, made more complicated and involved by the latest researches and discoveries in the fields of psychology and physiology these as before remained unsolved. Only one important, though negative, result made itself apparent. This was the final bankruptcy of the materialistic theory. The notion of the universe as a system of dancing atoms, and of life as the result of mechanical accumulation of the slightest changes in material no longer satisfied a single reasoning intellect.
Humanity had outgrown that stage of philosophical infancy. On the other hand, it became equally evident that it had also outgrown the infantile capacity for naive, unconscious faith. Such ideas as God creating the universe out of nothing were no longer taught even in elementary schools. A certain high level of ideas concerning such subjects had been evolved, and no dogmatism could risk a descent below it. And though the majority of thinking people had remained faithless, the few believers, of necessity, had become thinking, thus fulfilling the commandment of the Apostle: “Be infants in your hearts, but not in your reason.”
…
Thinking thus, the superman of the twenty-first century applied to himself everything that was said in the Gospels about the second coming, explaining the latter not as a return of the same Christ, but as a replacing of the preliminary Christ by the final one — that is, by himself.
…
This man justified his selfish preference of himself before Christ in yet another way. ‘Christ,’ he said, “who preached and practiced moral good in life, was a reformer of humanity, whereas I am called to be the benefactor of that same humanity, partly reformed and partly incapable of being reformed. I will give everyone what they require. As a moralist, Christ divided humanity by the notion of good and evil. I shall unite it by benefits which are as much needed by good as by evil people. I shall be the true representative of that God who makes his sun to shine upon the good and the evil alike, and who makes the rain to fall upon the just and the unjust. Christ brought the sword; I shall bring peace. Christ threatened the earth with the Day of Judgment. But I shall be the last judge, and my judgment will be not only that of justice but also that of mercy. The justice that will be meted out in my sentences will not be a retributive justice but a distributive one. I shall judge each person according to his deserts, and shall give everybody what he needs.”
from
A SHORT STORY OF THE ANTI-CHRIST
From “Three Conversations”
(published 1900)
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Think Eloi and Morlocks. Unless we start complaining and pushing back, we’re the Eloi.
I recently read Dostoevsky’s Demons and was struck by how the well-meaning liberals in the novel devolved into unwitting “carriers” of ideas, like “carriers” of fleas or disease. The similarity to today’s carriers of ideas in the Democratic party is quite astonishing.
It is truly a pity that the Great Books of Western Civ idea has been abandoned. If only the well-intentioned liberals of today would read Demons, so as to avoid the errors shown in the novel.
If the Democrats are Morlocks, they have big appetites and bad teeth.
I don’t hesitate to say that I’d rather make political alliances with moral theist (or moral anyone) than amoral atheist; as social revolutionaries are almost always presumed to be atheist and amoral. Theist can be revolutionary and or absent of morality (as can anyone) — but we must remember that the believing suicide bomber community is not the ‘or’; they are the ‘and’.
I commend to your attention They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, and Misleading Attributions by Paul F. Boller and John George, in which most of your cited Lenin quips and tidbits are effortlessly swatted down. Corroborating refutations are also readily available elsewhere on the web via any of the popular search engines.
nyomythus, your message was garbled during transmission. Please try again. I can’t tell what you are trying to say.
rcareaga, link or page citations, please. Or choose an example.
There’s a searchable version of the tome here:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/12339776/Fake-Quotes
–although it tends to choke my browser after a couple of operations. The “best way to destroy the capitalist system” bit is actually from J.M. Keynes, who does attribute the sentiment to Lenin, but you will search in vain for it in that relentless man’s writings. I give two default points to this post for not calling him “Nikolai,” as Reagan was wont, and for not recycling the tired old “capitalists will sell the [t]rope” bit. For the rest, most bogus quotes of any currency will by now yield more Google “false positives” than will the refutations, but with a little work–which involves more than seeing a screenful of sentiments that makes you think “I just knew the bastard believed that!”–you can shake out the chaff. Try the technique on (Google search terms) “Lincoln” “corporations” “enthroned” or on “Caesar” “drums of war” and you can document some equally boneheaded counterfeits circulated on the left. For extra credit try “Jefferson” and “inflation” (or “inflate”) to find some fabrications lately popular online as the Teeming Millions attempt to make sense of the burps and hiccups of the economy.
The tome I cited is available on amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/They-Never-Said-Misleading-Attributions/dp/0195064690/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1236644912&sr=1-1
Oblio:
“nyomythus, your message was garbled during transmission. Please try again. I can’t tell what you are trying to say.”
Yeah. What he said.
Ooh, Ohh! While your here, maybe you could explain how it was you thought McCain/Palin was sooo radical and extremist, you ended up voting for the real thing.
“The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But, under the name of “liberalism,” they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.” Norman Mattoon Thomas
“I no longer need to run as a Presidential Candidate for the Socialist Party. The Democratic Party has adopted our platform.”
Norman Mattoon Thomas
[and who checks the checkers?]
he also said (maybe)
“The difference between Democrats and Republicans is: Democrats have accepted some ideas of Socialism cheerfully, while Republicans have accepted them reluctantly”
Who checks the checkers? A good start is to look for the suspect quotation in the published writings of the distinguished personage to whom the remarks are attributed. Of course, if you’ve fetched a “quotation” off the internets that perfectly demonstrates a premise you wish to advance at a given moment, this kind of research will seem unnecessary and even counterproductive.
NEO said: “…and made me realize that there is hardly any new thought under the sun.”
Ecclesiastes 1: 9-11 -“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us. There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.”
jon baker says,
Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new?
Cures and explanations for diseases, precautions for and predictions of famine, floods, tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanoes — and the knowledge that dispels the mystery of there causes; meteorology, weather systems, and plate tectonics … advances in our knowledge of physics, chemistry, biology; the discovery of our pre-history in fossil records, radio dating, dnd, genome, and this is the short list…
So, the Bible is wrong.
“their” — I always mess up some little thing .. well, it shows at least i’m not a bot. 😛
One of the things that I am coming around to is something that shocks my sensibilities and I have a hard time dealing with. For sure, I saw bits and traces of it in subtle “tells” many years ago when I was on the Left, and I pick up these same messages today.
The really hard core socialist revolutionaries hate us. In fact, hatred and envy are at the very core of their being. They are tormented souls who will only be at home in the world and in the universe when we who stand for what they oppose are dead.
I see no point in our society and our country trying to make nice with these people. It only puts off the inevitable time when they have us over a gun and put an end to us.
FredHjr — I’ll stand beside you brother.
rcareaga, one might also ask, “Who checks the checkers of the checkers?” Thanks for the link to Poller and George.
You are right that they effortlessly swat down various quotations from Lenin (among many others), in the sense that they make no effort at all. They merely label quotations “absurd” or “spurious” and cite various secondary sources, notably a book from 1970 called The Hoaxers written by Morris Kominsky. About this Morris Kominsky I found very little except the tantalizing note that he ran in 1938 for Governor of Rhode Island as a Communist. That was Hope indeed!
So unless The Hoaxers was more than a propaganda effort and apologia by an aging Old Stalinist, the trail of counter-assertions was not completely compelling, either. I got the impression that Poller and George tossed off a silly and sloppily researched book for the amusement of general readers.
It is a good point, however, that a lot of untrustworthy “facts” get posted and repeated until “everyone knows” that they are true.
I still don’t understand what nyomythus was on about. Does he have a problem with the Bible? With theists? He seemed to be hinting something about fundamentalists, but I can’t tell.
Or maybe it is about religion and science. You got me.
nyomythus- He appears to be speaking of human behaviour in general terms. Basic human nature- it does not change. Sure technologies and cultures change, but overall, is there anything really new? For example: The power hungry still want power, they plot for power, they lie for power, they scheme for power. It is merely a change of background scenery, a little diffenrent angle in the way they go about it, – but the same play over and over and over centered around the same basic human nature.
Very good post, Artfldgr.
It should be noted that the writer of “Ecclesiastes”, believed to be Solomon, seems to be writing of his search for fulfillment and meaning through various means. He finally concludes the work with ” Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God and keep His commandments, For this is man’s all. For God will bring every work into judgement, including every secret thing, Whether good or evil.”
Besides, Neo has indicated previously her appreciation of this book – so I was trying to score points. lol. I believe one of our modern* music groups had a song that sounded a little like Ecclesiastes Chapter 3 : “…A time for every purpose under heaven: A time to be born, And a time to die;…A time to mourn…A time of war, And a time of peace.”
*modern in a historical sense.
Ssince I was quoting from copyrighted work I should note the second quote was from the New King James Version, Copyright 1988, Thomas Nelson Inc.
Ever notice that these totalitarian monsters who crave power are all humorless folks? They most certainly do not laugh at themselves and if anyone were to express humor at their expense… God help the offender.
Beware of people who cannot laugh at themselves.
“I see no point in our society and our country trying to make nice with these people. It only puts off the inevitable time when they have us over a gun and put an end to us.”
Starting with mandatory gun registration, and then confiscation…
Do you then assert the truth, Oblio, of the cited Lenin “quotes” because you are not persuaded of the refutations?
rcareaga,
The Lenin quotes cited in Neo’s post are widely known and accepted by scholars as genuine. They have been for decades.
You claim, counter to generally accepted expert opinion that they are not.
Oblio looked into it, and responded saying ofyour source…
Obviously he does not accept the refutations. Nor do I.
As regards their truthfulness numerous sources agree they are. They have been accepted as genuine for decades. You provide one dubious source to the contrary. I say the burden of proof is on you.
On several occasions I had conversations about Dostoevsky with Westerners and almost every time observed the same knee-jerk reaction. They told me how deeply Dostoevsky understood Russian soul and how better they now understand it after reading him. I objected: Wrong. Dead wrong. He wrote not about Russian soul, but about human soul. Almost everything he wrote specifically about Russians simply is not true – a wishful thinking of a delusional Russian nationalist. But everything he wrote about humans as such is profound and just as relevant to you as to me. Note that Grand Inquisitor has no hallmarks of nationality or time: it is a mysteria, it happens everywere and at any time. (There never was Inquisition in Russia before Dostoevsky; it was created 40 years after his death.) Never delude yourself that your epoch or civilisation is so exceptional that you can be totally immune to medieval horrors and wide-scale societal collapse and regression: nobody is immune, and Germans felt it on their hides during Third Reich. Barbarians are not across the pond, they are inside your skulls.
I also often heard the same tired arguments from the left: Communist experiment got botched in Russia because of Russian mentality; we can do it better. The leave naked wires under high voltage not because they are Communists, but because they are Russians. Wrong again. The same tragedy occured in China, Vietnam, North Korea, Camboja, Zimbabwe – in every land and culture where socialism was imposed on society.
This post has been linked for the HOT5 Daily 3/10/2009, at The Unreligious Right
Lenin was a maniac suffering cerebral syphilis; the same sad story as with Nietzsche, except for Nietzsche never was in a position of power.
These quotes answer to his deeds, so as far as I’m concerned they’re genuine. The question before us is whether they describe what our President has in mind. And, if they do, “what is to be done?”
“what is to be done?”
Impeachment. As the last line of defence, constitutionally protected right to armed rebellion against tyranny. Can lead to civil war, though. Does it include coup d’etat? Political assassination? I am not a legal expert in these matters, but these measures are less painful and dangerous than a civil war.
Impeachment cannot succeed. Hussein must first be impeached, thereafter convicted of high crimes and misdemeanors, by his own party.
We can hope a tidal wave occurs in the 2010 election, but I doubt it.
rcareaga,
thanks for taking the bait.
MANY of these quotes are not quotes from literature, but quotes from real life!!!
so the person who is discrediting them may be playing a game based on what YOUR default concepts are, and relying on your lack of history to know where or when they were said.
and so they nail the coffin with things like. “search all their work and you will never find it”.. but how about speeches, meeting minutes, newspaper records by those who attended the dinner where the conversations were heard…
you will not find anywhere in lenins writings about his quote and comment as to free love when the matron of such said that “sex should be as free as water”, to which he replied “who wants to drink from a dirty glass?”
another caution on books which seek to set the record straight. read about lattimore and mccarthy… yes, that mccarthy (to whom a lot of false stuff is attributed!!!). well, lattimore was kind of pegged, and was in a huff. he wrote a book in which HE coined the term McCarthyism… and that it was a witch hunt, etc… except that in a witch hunt, we know there are no real witches, can we say the same of spies and subversives? so the analogy is false, and later, after venona was decoded, and mitrokhins work was passed along, turned out that Lattimore WAS a spy, McCarthy was RIGHT, and the book is what we all remember as truth.
wouldnt it be really convenient for the left to rewrite history and remove and erase the most embarrasing and revealing quotes.
after all “in the old days” a book would fall out of print, and only those tin hatters that went through the used book racks would get a copy.
but once you catch them at it, you catch them at it ALL the time, as the morals of not changing history, or the morals of lying in print (or in person), or the morals of not manipulating people for personal goals, is not present.
Margret Sanger is a darling of the left for the social good of planned parenthood… but if you read or know history, then you will know how much they scrubbed her clean with pumice. all relying on the fact that her AUTOBIOGRAPHY was no longer in print… but the internet raises dead ghosts of truth and they have more staying power, for truth need no energy expended to maintain it.
read about her… and you will read she is a feminist hero… you will read how she wanted to help the poor, and women, and so on… but read deeper and they will sometimes bring up the false history to discount it (from being from the antiabortion movement)…
but do MORE research, and you find out that planned parenthood had a prior name… its earliest name was “the negro project”, and its purpose was to exterminate the black man by visiting cultural and financial misery on him and use his sense of responsibility to have him exterminate his own children.
here are her words:
“The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.” — Margaret Sanger, letter to Clarence Gamble, Dec. 10,1939. – Sanger manuscripts, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College. (Dec. 10 is the correct date of the letter. There is a different date circulated, e.g. Oct. 19, 1939; but Dec. 10 is the correct date of Ms Sanger’s letter to Mr. Gamble.)
ever notice that black politics is dominated by the ministers? do the wealthy/elite abort in numbers similar to the ‘dysgenic races”? (as they put it). why are there four times the numbers of clinics in minority neighborhoods? why are you allowed to donate money to be used for a specific race? (which amounts to donating money to make it easier for a person of that race to off their legacy and posterity. a group went and called planed parenthood and made sure that this was not a split hair, by tellin ghtem that they were white and they wanted fewer blacks to compete against their children and would it be ok to donate money to abort a black child… they said sure!)
i would forget trying to find the best quotes ni their work if they are not fiction writers like heinlien… in which they invent situations, then dialogue, and sometimes make up or steal cleverness… but lenin would have no way to have those comments IN his work… if you read his work, you would easily see why…
it would be like ben bernanke dotting a state report with such phrases littering the document having another purpose.
fredhjr,
The really hard core socialist revolutionaries hate us. In fact, hatred and envy are at the very core of their being. They are tormented souls who will only be at home in the world and in the universe when we who stand for what they oppose are dead.
you are only half right..
they do hate us…
but if history is a guide, what they love is they love to hate…
that is, even if they get to wipe out the thing they hate, they are not satisfied in that. it is their nature to hate, and witout somethign to hate, they then choose another something, cause when you love hate, you want hate, and you want to hurt sadistically (and perhaps getting a sexual kick out of it), then you have to find a way to make it acceptable so that you can live “happy”
one thing i have never had the time to discuss or bring up is the menageries. that the left is a heirarchical structure in which everyone ‘thinks’ they are on top, because eveyrone leads everyone else to believe that.
to people looking at this, these differences amount to a negation… when they are just the structure of an alternative system they are trying to understand from their system. (projection of the qualities of another system creates a false sense of mind, and so leads to not understanding and being effective agasint or in concert with others)
the top of the hierarchy is the real socialists.. they are the ones that SEEM to hate… they dont hate… they are emotionally cold, and power is their game. they dont stand in the open… they lead from the shadows and put up another to be the target of their policies (and they remove them when things go bad. if they can – sometimes they cant since the appearance of power in someone cant be distinguished from the real power. so a person put up can turn aroudn and act like a dictator, and will be till stopped as the real power has to be in the stooges hands for the stooge to use it).
there is a thug glass to this. they are KEY… they are the police acting like animals torturing with tasers, etc.. they did this by changing the psych profile goals.. and controlling what tests are given, and so control what kind they let through under a premise.
you have your social army… these are peopl who make grand pronouncments as to improving society. but unlie a doctor under hippa and other things, they do not have a review board and such to insure that the people they experment on have given permission with FULL KNOWLEGE of the things being done to them. in effect, under the guise of social policy and improvments, they are expermenting on humans and destroying their lives, just to find out things… like how to manipulate them better and contrl them better using neurolinguistics, and other psych forms rather than overt forms. (these things being antithetical to our religous past and our ideas of self determination. if they are tweaking things, and changing the inputs, there is no such thing as self determinatino, unless its self determination DESPITE tehm)
there are the useful idiots… and others… they are frothed up to hate… but they cant think straight..
[edited for length by neo-neocon]
I believe one of our modern* music groups had a song that sounded a little like Ecclesiastes Chapter 3 : “…A time for every purpose under heaven: A time to
actually several..
the one your thinking about is one of the groups promoting edenic utopia of the aquarian age (which technically was the age of the reich was trying to make… the fact that their peace sign is a inverted german one, adn that the story as to its creation is as compelling as a politically active communist writng the truth about embarrassing quotes).
the song is “turn turn turn” by the Byrds.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNopQq5lWqQ
one of the intellectual groups posing as something else to the common man… but if you know references and uch, yuo can pick out a lot of stuff.
part of doing this was to replace religoun as a source of wisdom with pop culture as the source of wisdom… so those who heard the song, as adorno said, would find it both familiar and new, the requirement to manufacture a hit… in the early days of primitivizaion to induce propagandic effects, they had a problem. the music eeveyone knew was either bible or classical… (folk tunes too).
so how do make it familiar, yet replace the sources or wisdom… and that had to do with exploiting the folk, and bible stuff… and they even inserted lines from great works…
another group that did a lot of this, and one member drove himself mad with the truth… was pink floyd… who took a darker view of solomons tale… more in line with solomon…
they were kings at rewriting the wisdom of the prior culture, and embedding it. dark side of the moon was the top album of all time… being on the charts for more than 20 years… (it tells the same story as rocky horror and shock treatment)
All that you touch and all that you see
all that you taste, all you feel
and all that you love and all that you hate
all you distrust, all you save
and all that you give and all that you deal
and all that you buy, beg, borrow or steal
and all you create and all you destroy
and all that you do and all that you say
and all that you eat and everyone you meet
and all that you slight and everyone you fight
and all that is now and all that is gone
and all that’s to come and everything under the sun is in tune
but the sun is eclipsed by the moon
a more selfish version of solomon…
they told us a lot in the music… a kind of devils deal artists through the ages have always made.. (see el greco)… that they embedded inthe work the messages they wanted, hidden in the messages their patrons wanted… (patron being who selects them for fame, not who listens to them).
TIME being one of their best pieces… it has embedded in it thoreau…
Every year is getting shorter
Never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to nought
Or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone
The song is over
Thought I’d something more to say
the quote its from is:
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
the last line though is the most poignient and relevent to today.. and its a lesson from CS Lewis!
CS lewis wrote teh screwtape letters, and one thing you get out of them, is that to miss the things you are to do in life, one only has to be distracted at the right time, put off, etc. that the devil does not tempt with gold he does not have or cant give, he temps with the PROMISES of such…
[edited for length by neo-neocon]
delete what you like neo..
nothing looks that long when i am typing…
rcareaga, you are suggesting a straw man argument. I don’t know whether all the quotations are genuine or not, pace Tim P. Some might not be. I would be happier if I had verifiable citations, since you have raised concerns about their authenticity.
Nevertheless, for the sake of the argument, I am provisionally willing to accept them. If some of them turn out to be duds, it doesn’t affect the thrust of Neo’s essay which is about how current events reflect timeless concerns. For the sake of the argument, Lenin is a literary character who stands for the historical, political manifestation of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor.
Given what we know of the real Lenin–an unsentimental, humorless, ruthless, intellectual utterly lacking in humanity who qualifies as one of the great villains in history–the lines don’t seem out of character.
It is sad that we will probably never know the complete truth about what Lenin and the Bolsheviks really did say and do: his Communist followers and defenders have covered history in a mountain of lies. They also stimulated counter-lies. The real history of Russia and International Communism from 1917 to, say, 1953 will remain patchy and open to misinterpretation, intentional and otherwise, for the foreseeable future.
You may dispute the quotes, Neo’s argument, or anything else you like, but you should remember that simply disputing a claim is not the same as refuting it. I wish the NYT could remember this.
Oblio,
My impression of rcareaga’s posts is that he is rather off topic. Instead of falling in with the real theme, he’s functioning as I suspect was his intention all along: attack neo’s site by impugning her accuracy and credibility. The message seems to be: you’ve got us socialists all wrong and our founding figures all wrong. Stop misquoting us. It’s a hit and run tactic, which over on the other side he can brag about and they can have a good yuk about it. I’ve seen shit like this before in the weblog world.
If anything good comes of it, let me just laud neoneocon, because this signifies that the other side has taken note of her blog and they deem her worthy of their efforts to distract, deflect, and run interference of.
I am going to give neo the benefit of the doubt in the matter of those quotes. I have seen them before and they seem mostly accurate to me. Another reason why I give her the benefit of the doubt and not the other side… well, having been on the other side over 22 years ago I have witnessed first hand how they are given to deception and fudging.
Fred, there is no difference between your position and mine. I thought you would be pleased to find a Communist candidate for governor of Rhode Island at the source of the drive-by attack on Neo’s intellectual integrity. I wasn’t surprised.
It’s amazing what you can find in the footnotes.
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I am not saying your content is not good., however what if you added
a title to possibly get a person’s attention? I
mean neo-neocon » Blog Archive » Notes from Chairman Lenin-and Dostoevsky is kinda vanilla.
You could look at Yahoo’s home page and watch how they create
article headlines to grab viewers interested. You might try adding
a video or a related picture or two to grab readers excited
about what you’ve written. In my opinion, it could make your website a little livelier.