Now, I am not a Leninist, though I am a Socialist. I dislike monarchy, oligarchy, and those who seek to weaken trade unions and guilds of all kinds. This is really not a diary about Lenin. It's a diary about a famous poster from 1920. Who is sweeping whom off the globe today?
Follow me over the squiggly-do-dad for more....
What do we see in this image? We see V.I. Lenin with two monarchs (Kaiser Wilhelm? The Czar? King Edward? No matter, same family, same difference), a Capitalist--looking much like a figure well known to Americans as the banker from the Monopoly board game--and an Eastern Orthodox Priest under his broom. Sweeping filth off of the globe.
Now, Lenin's tactics and those of some of his minions, most notably the Chekist Felix Dzerzhinskiy, are not to be applauded, and I will not celebrate them here. I do have some questions, however, inspired by this poster.
Who is Sweeping Whom?
Today, we could put the obese, tuxedoed man with the money bags up on top of that globe with a broom in his hand. He'd borrow Lenin's worker's cap, just to give him some sense of "connecting with the working man", whom he oppresses at every turn. You know, a guy you would want to "have a beer with". The Priest and the kings, well, they would be hanging around watching. Watching to see that Moneybags gives them their money's worth, also called free speech.
Who would be those under the broom? I wonder. Here's what I think:
*Workers
*Teachers
*Licensed and Certified Allied Health Care Providers
*Public servants
*Intellectuals (to be fair, Lenin did say that "Intellectuals are not the brains of a Nation, rather, it's shit." Sound famiiar?)
*The LGBT community
*Women
*Liberals
*Ethnic and racial minorites
*The Unemployed
*The poor, both working and otherwise destitute
*The Common Person
Look familiar? It should. Lenin may have turned the Earth on its ear. Modern Capitalism, Free Trade and "Globalism" have turned it back on its other ear. The one that was constantly boxed by the kind of society that Karl Marx worked so hard to expose as a selfish fraud.
Somewhere in Hell, Ayn Rand is screaming.