"Yes, we were totally the ones that overthrew the Tsar!" - Red fash bootlickers spreading bullshit
(thelemmy.club)
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.
... are there? What avenues to absolute power are there when the core ideology of the extant system is Tsarist "Unshakable autocracy"? What power is a non-revolutionary law student going to gain under that system?
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.
A desire for power. I thought that was clear by my previous statement.
That being said, there's also adventurism, personal ties, a desire for fame or infamy, even sheer fucking boredom. Shit man, people do insane and long-term shit all the time for reasons other than material gain or principles.
But hey, according to your theory, every Old Bolshevik bank robber was a true believer.
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.
See, your entire position isn't any sort of falsifiable theory or assertion as it is an article of faith. There is no form of proof that could possibly dissuade you from the notion you've taken up. No actions or statements matter; only the axiom that every mass murderer is a true believer deep down.
You remind me of the fundamentalist Christians I grew up around.
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,
... this is incredibly naive.
that Lenin and Stalin believed in values at the very least similar to the ones they espoused in public.
They believed in socialism because they took power away from the workers?
That's your definition of socialism?
Hitler fails this test because he didn’t believe in socialism in any meaningful sense of the wrod.
But one-man direction of the workplace - that is socialism in a meaningful sense of the word? Reducing the peasantry to serfdom under a totalitarian state - that's socialism in a meaningful sense of the word?
Kai-shek also doesn’t.
Okay? I didn't ask if Kai-shek was a fucking socialist, I asked if he was a true believer despite having no apparent genuine beliefs from his statements or his actions.
Trump doesn’t need explanation (in hindsight that should’ve been my answer).
Why is Trump not a true believer, when every other fascist shithead is? You already admitted, again, that Hitler believed in the core causes, and your only point of disputation is that it wasn't "real" socialism he believed in; despite the fact that he didn't even claim to believe in the same socialism you're defining.
Or hell, maybe he did - God fucking knows you've already went to bat for oligarchy once. Is your only quibble with Hitler's socialism that the Junkers won out instead of the Strasserists?
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.
Fucker, we live in comfortable enough circumstances to be arguing on an obscure web forum over history and politics. We are privileged here, and we are both killing people.
But that’s the thing: Stay in power for what? It’s the existence of these justifications that allows them to do what they do.
Jesus fucking Christ, you can't be serious.