@Theaetetus,
Theaetetus;107190 wrote:That is not possible. Lenin came previous to Hitler. Could you possibly mean Stalin? Lenin was not an anti-Semite and supported the Jews and wrote in their favor time and time again. Considering what Lenin helped overthrow, and the improvements that Russia witnessed after the ousting of the tzars, it is unfortunate the bad rap that Lenin receives in the eyes of history. Stalin ruined Lenin's reputation after taking over Russia and installing a harsh authoritarian regime. The Russians were able to liberate themselves after the Bolshevik revolution for a period of time.
My post was rather hasty. I did not mean chronological order, and pointed to Lenin as the opposite of Hitler in terms of sophistication. He invested considerable efforts in laying philosophical foundations of his policy, postulating that consciousness is a function of matter.
True, he was not anti-semitic, but he relished killing people as much as it was necessary for implementing his philosophy. In his books instructions to kill are persistent and the word
shooting is inevitably stressed by italics and additional pathos like "the more, the better".
It is too vast a subject to discuss here. One thing is certain, however: his revolution opened an era of unprecedented slaughter unimaginable under czars. Just in few years of his rule millions of people were killed, and the regime created by him made it possible for Stalin to take the power.
In the context of this discussion we can note that tyranny founded on sophisticated philosophy proved to be much more robust than Hitlerian improvisation.
