"Yes, we were totally the ones that overthrew the Tsar!" - Red fash bootlickers spreading bullshit
(thelemmy.club)
That’s… not what I was saying though?
Your framing is only possible in hindsight.
Whether Lenin had the makings of a tyrant or not, he had to have believed in the revolution or he wouldn’t have dedicated his life to it (which, love him or hate it, that’s exactly what he did). Lenin had been a professional revolutionary for more than 20 years by 1917, and the idea that this was all an act so he could eventually seize ultimate power is frankly ridiculous without some hard evidence. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
"The idea that people would work towards power all their lives is ridiculous" is really the position you're taking.
... come the fuck on.
I mean unless he got himself expelled from university and derailed his career for material gain, it’d have to be principle.
This may be a shock, so I invite you to sit if you aren't sitting already, but there are more things in life than just material gain and principles.
“Why,” I asked Hitler, “do you call yourself a National Socialist, since your party program is the very antithesis of that commonly accredited to socialism?” “Socialism,” he retorted, putting down his cup of tea, pugnaciously, “is the science of dealing with the common weal. Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not Socialism. The Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from the Socialists. Socialism is an ancient Aryan, Germanic institution […] We demand the fulfilment of the just claims of the productive classes by the state on the basis of race solidarity. To us state and race are one.”
Which has about all the validity of redefining democracy as autocracy, and then claiming to be a believer in democracy.
But furthermore, and contrary to your claims, this would establish Hitler as a 'true believer' in the socialism he espoused in public.
No? The answer to my question is “Hitler,”
... but you already explicitly said that you considered Hitler a true believer in his core causes.
but also of these the one I know is Kai-shek, and that guy was absolutely a true believer… in radical conservatism, rule by the ultra-rich and somehow also Georgism???
Radical conservatism, except for the part where the KMT was anti-conservative in both rhetoric and, when it suited Kai-shek et co's power-seeking to be so, action. Rule by the ultra-rich, except for the part where the ultra-rich took a backseat to the military and any-fucking-one-else that Kai-shek felt he needed at the time.
Either way current or future tyrants craft their ideologies at least in part to justify their rule, making them essentially rationalizations, in which case yeah mass murdering dictators had ways to rationalize their atrocities.
So in what way is being a true believer different than being a venal opportunist?
It’s impossible not to kill thousands or millions of people and not feel something about it; that’s just not how people are built.
It's incredibly easy. You probably kill people all the time, man. I kill people all the time. All you have to do is reduce it from seeing someone face-to-face (and some people can do even that, though they're generally exceptional and often sick fucks) to a distant, bureaucratic process.
We're both probably relatively normal human beings. Actually, fuck that - we're both probably above-average in conscientiousness. You heap moral opprobrium on the consciences major political actors all the time for their murders - not without cause. Do you want to take a guess at how easily they would sign away millions of lives and sleep easy for the least cause of staying in power?