THE RULING CLASS - PAST AND PRESENT

By Larry Pratt
October 17, 2010
NewsWithViews.com

Defenders of the idea that only the ruling class should be able to make decisions for everybody else desperately try to put lipstick on the tyrannical pigs of history and today.

One common argument – in both Russia and in the West – is the defense of Lenin as a well-intentioned guy whose good work was cut short by his premature death. Then that bad old Stalin took over and tyranny sprang up like flowers after a rain in the desert.

Robert Gellately in Lenin, Stalin and Hitler has examined this notion and has totally destroyed its claim to veracity from first-hand accounts. His conclusion is that Lenin was “a heartless and ambitious individual who was self-righteous in claiming to know what was good for humanity, brutal in his attempt to subject his own people to radical social transformation, and convinced he held the key to the eventual overthrow of global capitalism and the establishment of world Communism.â€