[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
As the world saw in abundance when Charlie Kirk was murdered, one striking aspect of the left’s discourse is how utterly hateful leftists are. While preening about how they’re the party of love and tolerance and acceptance, leftists are actually brimming with hate, eye-poppingly hateful, and increasingly uninterested in making even the most cursory effort to conceal that fact. Yet despite the apparent (and it is indeed only apparent) discrepancy between the left’s stated commitment to tolerance and the heat and venom of its rhetoric, the viciousness of leftist rhetoric should not come as any surprise. Pioneering the left’s favored rhetorical style was none other than the principal founding figure of the Soviet Union, V. I. Lenin.
In Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror, his massive and illuminating biography of the great murderer and oppressor, Victor Sebestyen writes of Lenin that “from his first days in the dissident salons of St Petersburg he worked out a method that marked him as different from other radical agitators; almost single-handedly he changed the language on the revolutionary Left, which followed the coarse and aggressive pattern laid down by him.”
“Coarse and aggressive” was an understatement: “Those who disagreed with him were ‘scoundrels’, ‘philistines’, ‘cretins’, ‘filthy scum’, ‘whores’, ‘class traitors’, ‘silly old maids’, ‘windbags’ (one of his favourite epithets, found frequently in his writings) and ‘blockheads’. Often he would resort to the obscene, in language rarely used in the St Petersburg society of that era – his opponents were invariably ‘s**ts’ or ‘c**ts’.”
Nowadays leftists are much more circumspect and respectful of their opponents. They limit themselves to referring to President Donald Trump as “Fat Hitler. Emperor Ovaltine. The Mango Mussolini. The Marmalade Moron. Cheeto Benito. Agolf Twitler. The Nectarine Nazi.”
And it isn’t just name-calling. Lenin “would deliberately pile on the invective. ‘He does not reply to an opponent,’ recalled Moishe Olgin, a long-time comrade who saw him operate from the early days as a young revolutionary making his way in the Russian capital. ‘He vivisects him. He is as keen as the edge of a razor. His mind works with an amazing acuteness. He notices every flaw in the line of argument. He disagrees with, and then he draws the most absurd conclusions from, premises unacceptable to him. At the same time he is derisive. He ridicules his opponent. He castigates him. He makes you feel that his victim is an ignoramus, a fool, a presumptuous nonentity. You are swept by the power of his apparent logic. You are overwhelmed by his intellectual passion.’”
An ignoramus, a fool, a presumptuous nonentity: that ably sums up the left’s picture of Trump, and not just Trump. The left has ridiculed every Republican president since Ronald Reagan as an embarrassing dunce while at the same time ascribing to the same dunce all manner of evil power to thwart the hopes and dreams of the oppressed masses.
As we saw with the murder of Charlie Kirk, this kind of rhetoric is not neutral. As it relentlessly dehumanizes the object of the left’s hatred, it positively invites violence. That follows Lenin’s pattern as well: “His successors well after the Stalin era adopted this method of derision. Communist Parties everywhere, even following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, learned that it made sense to play the man, not the ball – and how to do it with ruthless efficiency. It was one of the principal lessons of Leninism: ‘The harshness of polemics became settled Bolshevik practice,’ as one of his chief critics put it, ‘and the translation of words into corresponding action, physical violence to complement verbal brutality, was no more than a logical end to the process.”
We are seeing the left resort increasingly to that “logical end to the process,” not just with the assassination of Charlie Kirk, but with ever-increasing numbers of leftist politicians calling for violence against their opponents. They’ve called us racists and bigots and fascists for years, and now they want their slavering minions in Antifa to cleanse the world of those evil elements by rendering it awash in blood. V. I. Lenin would have been pleased.
