Pt 4
was their execution, only to find that a blank was fired at them. Another had the victims buried alive, or kept in a coffin with a corpse. [Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 646]
The press played in integral role in radicalizing the masses and justifying the Terror. “Only rivers of blood can atone for the blood of Lenin,” cried one paper. Pravda announced that “the time has come for us to crush the bourgeoisie or be crushed by it.” It sounds ghoulish to us, but then again, our own papers run headlines like this:
The Reds were initially radicalized by the sense of being under threat. But once their full depravity was unleashed, it crucially did not start to moderate simply because they were winning. At the end of the Russian Civil War, thousands of soldiers and officers in the White Army surrendered after receiving a promise of amnesty. Once they were rounded up, all of them were shot. The next three decades of the Soviet regime brought one round after another of purges, famines, de-kulakization, and terror.
Lenin’s Red Terror carries important lessons for America in 2021.
Every time the terror in America seems to have peaked, it gets worse.
In 2017, people lost their jobs for attending the Charlottesville march. It didn’t matter if they engaged in any violence or broke any laws. Merely being there was enough.
Many normal Americans shrugged.
“It was some racist march anyway,” thought most conservatives. “They should have known better than to go.”
But of course, it didn’t stop there. Throughout the Trump administration, it became acceptable to target people for pettier and pettier offenses: Anonymous posts online, leaked emails, decade-old articles (or decade-old tweets), attending conferences with the wrong people.
April 2021 has brought us to a new low. In Minnesota, Derek Chauvin is going to prison, likely for decades, for using a routine policing method to subdue a man twice his size who was resisting arrest. In Virginia, a police officer’s twenty-year career has ended in termination after he sent a $25 anonymous donation to the defense fund of Kyle Rittenhouse.
Lt. William Kelly was placed on administrative duty Friday, April 16, after reports were made that he donated and expressed support for the actions of Rittenhouse, who is accused of killing two people and injuring another during a Wisconsin protest in August 2020.
Norfolk Police Chief Larry Boone said Lt. Kelly violated city and department policies by donating money to Rittenhouse’s defense fund.