I first read this article, Leninthink, when it was published in 2019, but back then I treated it more as an interesting – if frightening – piece of history.

But it now looks more like a description of what I see and read every day (H/T Lucia Maria). The essay is not really about Lenin’s style of government – which was totalitarian with no rules except to gain and hold power and to deliberately employ terror – than about what drove it, which was something far beyond the ideology of communism but enabled by it:

These and other disastrous Leninist ideas derived from a specific Leninist way of thinking, and that is what this essay focuses on. I know this way of thinking in my bones. I am myself a pink diaper baby and I remember being taught this way of thinking, taken for granted by all right-thinking people. Memoirs of many ex-Communists, from David Horowitz to Richard Wright, confirm that, more than doctrines, it was the Leninist style of thought that defined the difference between an insider and an outsider. And that way of thought is very much with us.

And with perfect timing is this example in our Parliament on Wednesday:

Karen Chhour: So does the Minister agree with John Tamihere when he says his charity and Oranga Tamariki are in a partnership and not a contract, and if Te Whānau o Waipareira is struck off the Charities Register, will the Minister guarantee that this partnership will end?

Hon KELVIN DAVIS: What the member needs to do is cross the bridge that is Te Tiriti o Waitangi from her pākehā world into the Māori world and understand exactly how the Māori world operates. It’s no good looking at the world from a vanilla lens.

That’s LeninThink. Even though the economic and even the societal organisation pushed by Leninism is dead, the Leninist way of thinking is alive and well in the likes of Kelvin Davis. Take a look at some of these quotes from the article and compare them to what Western Leftists have been saying and doing, whether they’re politicians, activists or even blog commentators, and obviously include New Zealand.

For us, the word “politics” means a process of give and take, but for Lenin it’s we take, and you give. From this it follows that one must take maximum advantage of one’s position. If the enemy is weak enough to be destroyed, and one stops simply at one’s initial demands, one is objectively helping the enemy, which makes one a traitor.

Three Waters. He Puapua – and god knows what else is in the pipeline, perhaps for dealing with The Climate Crisis?

On paper, the Soviet Constitution of 1936 guaranteed more rights than any other state in the world. I recall a Soviet citizen telling me that people in the USSR had absolute freedom of speech—so long as they did not lie.
…
civil rights “are protected by the law unless they are exercised in contradiction to their social and economic purposes.” (Article 1 of the Civil Code of October 31, 1922)

Disinformation. Misinformation. The social goal is to save us from the Pandemic, therefore you cannot question the methods.

In Lenin’s view, a true revolutionary did not establish the correctness of his beliefs by appealing to evidence or logic, as if there were some standards of truthfulness above social classes. Rather, one engaged in “blackening an opponent’s mug so well it takes him ages to get it clean again.” Nikolay Valentinov, a Bolshevik who knew Lenin well before becoming disillusioned, reports him saying: “There is only one answer to revisionism: smash its face in!”

When Mensheviks objected to Lenin’s personal attacks, he replied frankly that his purpose was not to convince but to destroy his opponent. In work after work, Lenin does not offer arguments refuting other Social Democrats but brands them as “renegades” from Marxism. Marxists who disagreed with his naïve epistemology were “philosophic scum.” Object to his brutality and your arguments are “moralizing vomit.”

Think how many “debates” with Leftists occur now that consist merely of such “blackening”, perhaps not in as violent a way as Lenin, but tailored to the modern age: racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, denier...

Critics objected that Lenin argued by mere assertion. He disproved a position simply by showing it contradicted what he believed…It was easy enough to attribute to [Mach and Avenarius] views they did not hold, associate them with disreputable people they had never heard of, or ascribe political purposes they had never imagined. These were Lenin’s usual techniques, and he made no bones about it.

Often implied when not stated outright, and always as the main track of the debate, with facts, logic, rationality or any other of that debate nonsense dumped in favour of an appeal to emotion – “feelz”, in the modern parlance – with the objective to win by making the audience feel that your opponent is such a rotter that there’s no point listening to his “arguments”.

Denunciation was an old communist method of identifying and silencing enemies and in Soviet times it was usually the precursor to a knock on the door from the secret police. Nowadays, denunciation is just a standard means of communication on social media. Corbyn called for a “kinder politics” and end to “personal abuse” when he became leader, but he has benefited from a mass of younger activists such as Sarkar, Bastani and Murray, who view attack as the most effective means of defence. And social media is the ideal medium to spread the message.

I’m immediately reminded of almost all the commentators on The Standard and to a lessor extent on other Lefty blogs, as well as the shit-posting trolls we used to have at the old, unprotected No Minister site. Then there’s the ultimate cesspool of Twitter.

Opponents objected that Lenin lied without compunction, and it is easy to find quotations in which he says—as he did to the Bolshevik leader Karl Radek—“Who told you a historian has to establish the truth?” Yes, we are contradicting what we said before, he told Radek, and when it is useful to reverse positions again, we will.
….
In much the same way, a true Leninist does not decide whether to lie. He automatically says what is most useful, with no reflection necessary. That is why he can show no visible signs of mendacity, perhaps even pass a lie detector test…a true Bolshevik is not even a hypocrite.

Haha. How many times has Ardern and other Labour MP’s blatantly lied while smearing people? Little people too, powerless people like KFC staff. Did she feel any guilt or shame? There’s no sign she or the others did. They just said what was useful in the moment:

One morning The Daily Worker followed Pravda and described Nazis as true friends of the working class; the next, nothing too strong could be said against them. Crucially, and as Orwell dramatized in Nineteen Eighty-Four, there was never an admission that any change had taken place.

We’re no longer under the Covid-19 Traffic light system, even though our Covid case and death numbers are at levels that originally demanded a Red Light setting. Mandates are gone. Even those Lefties who are angry with Labour for dumping all this are asking what changed? They should read this article.

And it shows just how irrelevant are accusations of hypocrisy and double standards to these people. Trotsky imagined “the high priests of liberalism” asking how Bolshevik use of arbitrary power differs from Tsarist practices and sneered at their idiocy:

“You do not understand this, holy men? We shall explain it to you. The terror of Tsarism was directed against the proletariat. . . . Our Extraordinary Commissions shoot landlords, capitalists, and generals . . . . Do you grasp this—distinction? For us Communists it is quite sufficient.“

How many times have you heard Righties ask how their critics would react “if Trump (or any Republican did that”)? HA! What a joke: “For a Leninist, the shoe is never on the other foot because he has no other foot”.

And not just Leninists either. Dr Gaurav Sharma should have paid attention to the following passages about how The Party works before he joined Labour:

The true Party member cares for nothing but the Party. It is his family, his community, his church. And according to Marxism-Leninism, everything it did was guaranteed to be correct.
…
when Koestler described a Communist confessing to fantastic crimes because loyalty to the Party trumped everything else. If the Party needed one to confess to spying for the Poles, Japanese, and Germans at the same time, while conspiring with Trotsky to murder Stalin and spread typhus among pigs—all while one was already in prison—a true, party-minded Bolshevik would do so.
…
The true Leninist did not even believe in Leninism. [he believed in The Party]

Trotsky again:

“None of us desires or is able to dispute the will of the Party. Clearly the Party is always right. . . . We can only be right with and by the Party, for history has provided no other way of being in the right. . . . [I]f the Party adopts a decision which one or other of us thinks unjust, he will say, just or unjust, it is my party, and I will support the consequences of the decision to the end.“

The more I read Trotsky the less sorry I feel for him getting a Stalinist ice pick in the head in 1940.

Sharma, who clearly cares deeply about many issues, should have read about American Communist, Richard Wright:

It gradually dawned on him that the Party takes stances not because it cares about them—although it may—but because it is useful for the Party to do so.

It explains a lot about the Labour Party failures in recent years.