"Yes, we were totally the ones that overthrew the Tsar!" - Red fash bootlickers spreading bullshit
(thelemmy.club)
"The idea that people would work towards power all their lives is ridiculous" is really the position you're taking.
No, my position was that someone working exclusively toward power wouldn't become a professional revolutionary years before the system was seriously shaken. There were simply better paths to power available to someone like Lenin.
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.
I am shook.
Still, what motivation would Lenin have had to go through more than two decades of radical politics other than believing in radical politics? That's a massive hole that you have to address before your argument makes sense.
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.
Okay admittedly I'm not the most familiar with Kai-shek's career, but also okay? The fact that he engaged in opportunism doesn't mean he didn't believe in anything; it just means he was willing to lie about his beliefs.
So in what way is being a true believer different than being a venal opportunist?
100% venal opportunists usually aren't a thing—like I said even someone who's in it for power needs to have a reason/justification why they deserve power, which is why I was arguing for a stronger claim: that Lenin and Stalin believed in values at the very least similar to the ones they espoused in public. Hitler fails this test because he didn't believe in socialism in any meaningful sense of the wrod. Kai-shek also doesn't. Trump doesn't need explanation (in hindsight that should've been my answer).
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.
I'd hope not? In the first place there's not enough people for a significant fraction of people to be killing them all the time.
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?
But that's the thing: Stay in power for what? There usually needs to be something there. This is counterterrorism, democracy, rule of law, "natural rights" (aka private property), the prosperity of the master race, national interest, etc depending on which utter piece of shit we're talking about. It's the existence of these justifications that allows them to do what they do.