The Zman has a piece on the Bolsheviks’ first terror. It occurred after Lenin was shot in 1918 by a Social Revolutionary activist, Fanny Kaplan. Her act demonstrated to Lenin that his power base was precarious, and there were enemies on all sides even within his palace guard. So firmness was needed to preserve the revolution. I mean, he was fighting to create a new Russia: Lenin was the Good Guy! Incidentally, Fanny Kaplan was Jewish.
Zman wants us to think of Trump as a similar threat to our Regime. Our liberal friends know they are the good Guys, and Trump is a monster. That is what they all know. To us, the 2016 election was a necessary corrective to decades of liberal stupidity; to us the election of 2020 was a ham-handed regime effort to keep the regime game going one more time. To liberals, Trump is an insult to all that is good and true, and his supporters are Enemies of the State. So therefore, Zman ays,
The regime is Lenin, lying on a couch... The reality of that thinking is not important. What matters is the belief that the revolution is in mortal danger.
The enemy must be destroyed.
Problem is, of course, that the regime’s problems are not due to the racist-sexist-homophobe insurrectionists trying to destroy all that is good and true. The regime’s problems are its own fault: its runaway spending; its stupid economic policy, and its crazed war on energy.
Some might say that the regime is running out of other peoples’ money.
And, incidentally, the combination of all these follies is likely to bring on the end of the regime.
Meanwhile, “What lies ahead is not a break from the madness, but a renewed assault by the radicals.”
Still, I’d say there is a difference between our Regime and Lenin’s regime. Lenin had everything to lose.He had to win or be demolished. Our regime supporters have a lot to lose: their sinecures, their reputations, and the difficulty of pushing their war against Trump through all the difficulties that the legal system presents to them.
And our regime is composed of lots of people that inherited their positions rather than creating them, as Lenin and his Bolsheviks did.
But who knows what they will do next year if they start seeing the whole thing slipping away.
The Zman calls the regime supporters radicals. I wonder. Aren’t they really conventional people that believe what they have been taught, in school, from their fellow regime supporters, and from the media?