More of me actually backing myself up instead of trying to censor others
Putin the Marxist-Leninist
Sometimes the simplest explanation is the best explanation. You cannot understand Vladimir Putin and his war against Ukraine unless you understand that he is a Marxist-Leninist.
During his school years, Putin read the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin in his spare time. He came of age in 1973, when the Soviet Union was a superpower and sponsoring Marxist regimes on every continent, advancing Lenin’s dream of a communist world. He joined the KGB in 1987 at age 35 and spent the next 16 years rising in the ranks to lieutenant colonel. In 1984, he was sent to Moscow for additional training at the Yuri Andropov Red Banner Institute. As KGB chairman, Andropov had pushed hard for the Warsaw Pact to crush the 1968 Prague Spring.
An educated Marxist-Leninist such as Putin accepted that there had been more than 100 million victims of communism, an acceptable price to pay to remodel the world. He accepted the purges that Lenin and Stalin used to cement their rule, the forced famines that eliminated enemies of the state, the forced labor camps in Siberia, the tight control of all media. Putin studied the techniques of agitation and propaganda, applying them in his KGB assignment in Dresden in East Germany during the Cold War.
We can deal effectively with Putin only if we accept how much he is in thrall to Marxism-Leninism.
www.nationalreview.com
