By: Robert Patrick Lewis
All of these Marxist Leaders Came from Middle to Upper-Class Backgrounds
That’s a perfect segue into another interesting historical fact about the murderous Marxist tyrants that few people know, but which also draws a disturbing parallel to today’s most vocal and violent leftists: they all came from middle to upper-class backgrounds.
It should be a psychologist’s wet dream to diagnose the daddy issues that would lead the people who came from well-to-do backgrounds to base their entire rise to power and murderous rampage on destroying the very socio-economic class they and their families came from.
Of course, most in the profession of psychology today are solidly on the left, so they’d rather not talk about that uncomfortable fact.
But I will.
Pol Pot was the son of a successful farmer (the way to get into the middle class in those days of Cambodia). His father was so successful that most of Pol Pot’s radicalization came from his time studying abroad in Paris (another disturbing trend that we see when looking at all of these tyrants together).
Lenin came from a very wealthy family that I've seen referred to as aristocratic in some historian’s telling of his history (which he worked very hard to keep from the proletariat that he incensed to violent revolution).
Much of Lenin’s early life was spent traveling abroad, and whenever his fight for revolution would wear him down, mommy would spring for a trip to an international spa, often in swanky places like Switzerland or, again as seen with many of these dictatorial despots, Paris.
Lenin Family
Lenin was constantly of the belief that the working class around the world was just on the brink of staging a proletariat revolution that never actually happened. More of an intellectual than the other mass murderers in this group, Lenin is the only one I’ve seen who actually embraced his upbringing in his views on how to bring about the revolution.
Lenin became very critical of Bogdanov's (Russian Marxist intellectual) view that Russia's proletariat had to develop a socialist culture in order to become a successful revolutionary vehicle. Instead, Lenin favored a vanguard of the socialist intelligentsia who would lead the working-classes in revolution.
In other words, Lenin thought it would be the “enlightened” intellectuals and intelligentsia who favored socialism (which means they couldn’t have really been that intellectual or intelligent) that would lead the proletariat into revolution.
In reality, aside from Trotsky, more of the actual revolution came to be from street thugs like Stalin, one of Lenin’s right-hand men, who helped spur the revolution through violence and chaos.
Mao is perhaps the most interesting on this list, as not only was he the son of a prosperous father, but his father had been born into poverty, yet worked hard to bring prosperity to this family. I’m sure he’s turning over in his grave knowing that his son destroyed prosperity for the entire nation and killed 60 million of her people.
Again, a layman pseudo-psychologist like myself is spurred to wonder if the “daddy issues” from his father choosing to spend more time working towards prosperity than playing with little Mao when he was a child had anything to do with his animus towards the wealthy.
This is Fidel Castro’s first mention in this article, but it won’t be the last. Castro was born into a wealthy farming family but also married into an extremely wealthy family. He picked up his extremist leftist and anti-imperialist views while studying law at the University of Havana (sounds pretty similar to what we see going on today, doesn’t it?).
Fidel Castro with comrads Los Palos
Fun fact: Castro married into such a wealthy family that, after the wedding, his new father in law gave the happy couple enough money to travel to New York City for a three-week honeymoon.
“Man of the people,” indeed.
Tying It to Today
It’s become quite popular today for conservatives to label ANTIFA “momma’s boys,” “soy boys” or “mom’s basement dwellers” as an insult, but although meant to be derogatory, that insult doesn’t fall far off the mark from the bullseye of truth.
If today’s tyrants-in-wait leftists are indeed following in the footsteps of the murderous Marxist dictators of the past, then ANTIFA is certainly today’s version of Hitler’s Brownshirts, Mussolini’s Black Shirts, Mao’s KMT, or Lenin and Stalin’s Cheka (more on those later).
Members of ANTIFA get in formation after entering the security checkpoint required to enter the mall in downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, one-year after the violent white nationalist rally that left one person dead and dozens injured. (Photo by Logan Cyrus / AFP) (Photo credit should read LOGAN CYRUS/AFP via Getty Images)
What do we really know about ANTIFA? Not much, but we do know that their ranks are made up of school teachers, college professors, and a lot of college students.
Are these middle to upper-middle-class academics the “vanguard” that Lenin had hoped for? What about the upper-class CEOs of Fortune 500 companies who made multi-million dollar contributions to Black Lives Matter (BLM), an organization run by self-avowed “trained Marxists?”
Whether it be the origins of many of these US-based Marxist movements in Occupy Wall Street (ANTIFA had festered in Europe for nearly a decade, but Occupy seems to be one of the first real US public appearances) or the current destruction of Democrat cities like Portland, New York City or Seattle, it is a little mind-numbing when you really stop to think about it.
With slogans like “we are the 99%” and “eat the rich” has anybody ever stopped to tell any of these entitled kids that just having the ability to go to college, eat three meals a day, sleep under a roof every night and have access to running water puts THEM in the top 1% of the world?
Probably not. Their “grievance studies” professors probably wouldn’t want to teach that, as it very much goes against their preferred narrative of “USA evil” and “kill capitalism” (as their professors teach from tenured positions at for-profit universities using PowerPoint from the Apple laptops and organize anti-capitalism protests via encrypted messaging on iPhones).
Speaking of ANTIFA and BLM, they fit quite perfectly into yet another trend that we’ve seen develop when looking back on all of the murderous Marxist dictators:
Employ Subversives/Paramilitary to Enact Violence and Create Chaos
Happy, peaceful, comfortable, and unafraid people don’t willingly give up their rights to an iron-fisted tyrant, and each of these Marxist lunatics knew that. With their ambitions set on their despotic goals, they knew that they had to sew chaos in the streets in order to accomplish their greatest desires for absolute power.
Italy was already rife with factions vying for control between the socialist democrats, communists, and fascists when Mussolini was on his path to tyranny. In March of 1919, he re-formed the Milan fascio as the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento (Italian Combat Squad), consisting of 200 members.
The Fascisti, led by Mussolini’s close confidant Dino Grandi, created armed terror groups of war veterans called “Blackshirts,” (squadristi) with the goal of restoring order (or so he said). They clashed with other groups to bring iron-fisted control over the streets, with the government hardly intervening in their terror campaigns.
The Blackshirts were finally disbanded in 1927, but not until after they had terrorized, beaten, and murdered people across the nation.
Hitler greatly admired Mussolini’s Blackshirts, giving him the inspiration to start his own group of terror-inducing subversives, the Brownshirts.
The Sturmabteilung (SA or “Storm Detachment”) were Hitler’s own paramilitary force and pre-dated the Nazi party. Developed as storm troopers for WWI, the unit was brought back during Hitler’s rise to power to protect Nazi rallies, disrupt the rallies of other political organizations, create chaos when needed, and, of course, to commit mass murder.
The Brownshirts were so violent and vicious that the infamous Schutzstaffel (SS) originated as a branch of the SA before being separated into their own group.
Fun fact: the SA branch of the Nazi party started off small, as merely disgruntled war veterans serving as “beer hall brawlers” to rough up and eject hecklers from Nazi party speeches and meetings. Since the Nazi party mainly recruited people hurt by the financial crisis, they didn’t charge membership dues and used royalties from their brand of cigarettes, Sturm, to fund the SA.
By the time Hitler seized power in January 1933, the SA was 2,000,000 men strong - 20 times larger than the number of troops in the official German army.
As the first major Marxist mass murderer, Lenin paved the way for the use of subversives to sew chaos and intimidate opposing parties and views. As far back as 1839 when he was a young revolutionary who had just moved to St. Petersberg, Lenin was encouraging the formation of revolutionary cells in Russia’s industrial centers when he joined the “Social Democrats,” a Russian group modeled after the Marxist “Social Democrat Party” of Germany.
Lenin didn’t publicize his desire for ultra-violence at the beginning of his rise to power, but once his power was consolidated, he knew that he didn’t have a need to hide it anymore.
Speaking to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviets in November 1917, he declared that:
"The state is an institution built up for the sake of exercising violence. Previously, this violence was exercised by a handful of moneybags over the entire people; now we want ... to organise violence in the interests of the people."
Although it should have been well known by that point, as much of the funding for the Bolshevik movement had come from Stalin, under Lenin’s leadership, leading a band of criminals in robbing post offices, railway stations, trains, and banks.
In serving Lenin, Stalin waged a reign of terror on anyone they thought would oppose the Bolsheviks or could be squeezed for financing. Stalin used the Cheka to fight opponents, kidnap children of wealthy aristocrats, run extortion/protection rackets, and ran the Red Terror campaign which murdered and imprisoned tens of thousands of their countrymen who were believed to oppose the Bolshevik revolution.
The Red Terror campaign was so deadly that many believed its purpose was to eliminate the entire bourgeoisie class, social undesirables, and anyone who wished to return to the former czarist rule.
Mao is perhaps the most interesting, as although his death toll is by far the highest on the list, his beginnings as a guerilla leader meant that he didn’t need a separate group of subversives to wage a terror campaign for him.
Most people alive today only know China as being ruled with an iron fist by the CCP, but if you understand China’s history, you know that before Mao came to power the history of China is one of great internal strife and civil war - so much so that Chinese generals today are schooled in military lessons taken from the “Warring States Period” in which all of China was ruled by warlords who fought for dominion.
But even more striking than his guerilla leader past are the reasons for his incomprehensible death toll - what Stalin would call “a statistic.”
Although each will be covered in greater detail later, it bears repeating that most of the 60 million deaths under Mao’s rule came from terrible ideas (The Great Leap Forward, land redistribution) and a brainwashed public who willingly killed those they saw as “enemies of the revolution.”
This is truly terrifying when you see the sheer level of brainwashing being done through Marxist university professors, lying Democrat politicians and a complicit media in America today.
Although his death toll is the most difficult to get a solid number for, Castro’s revolutionary and murderous rise to power is no different than the others. His radicalization came, as mentioned before, during his time studying law at the University of Havana, where he became part of the violent leftist gangsterismo culture at the university.
After the assassination of popular leftist leader Jorge Ayala led to widespread rioting and clashes between the government conservatives (backed by the Army) and leftist liberals, Castro joined the Liberal cause by stealing guns from a police station.
He formed a group called “The Movement” which operated via clandestine cells (like a terror group) and started publishing an underground newspaper El Acusador while arming and training anti-Batista recruits.
This culminated in an attack on Moncada barracks, a military garrison outside of Santiago de Cuba, where Castro’s group planned to dress in military uniforms and launch an attack. Like most Marxist plans it didn’t go as well as they’d hoped, with many of Castro’s guerillas killed or arrested in the raid.
After the raid, Castro fled for the Sierra Maestra mountains where he linked up with Frank Sturgis, who became Castro’s gun-running connection to the CIA and opened a training camp in the mountains, training Che Guevara and rebel soldiers in guerilla warfare.
Tying It to Today
It can’t be emphasized enough that these nations who saw themselves repressed, brainwashed, and terrorized by their own tyrants-in-wait lacked the ability to defend themselves against the roving groups of thugs intent on sewing enough terror and chaos to give power to the despots they supported.
One of the truly remarkable things that sets the USA apart from the rest of the world is our Representative Republic, which operates via Federalism, meaning each state has the right to create its own laws and regulations.
The left has tried for decades at the federal level to enact massive gun control measures, and while they’ve succeeded in some ways, they’ve been unable to contravene the Constitutional second amendment which gives Americans the right to bear arms and protect their family.
But what we’re seeing right now is proof positive of the absolute need for the red states who’ve retained the rights of their people to bear arms to keep up the fight for those rights.
If you plot the cities being overrun by ANTIFA and BLM violence for the past several months and overlay the (Democrat) controlled cities and states who’ve enacted strict gun control legislation, it’s impossible to not see why these leftist Governors and mayors have fought so hard to remove the ability of their citizens to defend themselves.
DENVER, CO - FEBRUARY 21: Students, teachers and community members protest guns in response to the Stoneman Douglas High school shooting in Florida at the Colorado State Capitol on Wednesday, February 21, 2018. Seventeen people were shot and killed during the school shooting on February 14, 2018. (Photo by AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post)
Just like each of the Marxist tyrants listed above, they need their citizens to be disarmed in order to allow this new era’s Marxist subversives - ANTIFA and BLM - to fully wage their campaign of terror on a populace unable to defend themselves.
Social media is replete with examples of what happens anytime these subversive militant groups try to wage their terror outside of their deep blue strongholds of Chicago, New York City, Denver, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, and Minneapolis - they get their asses handed to them.
The argument could be made that this is entirely due to the culture and other areas having citizens who refuse to be terrorized by ANTIFA and BLM, but I’m a strong believer that, at the very base of those citizens’ will to fight back is the knowledge that they have guns, the ability to protect their families and a police force that will back them up if the fight should escalate beyond fists and bats.
Long story short: every time you hear leftist politicians or media culprit trying to make the case to take guns away, just remember the historical points listed above and the present-day chaos we’re seeing in the cities with the strictest gun control measures who’ve been overrun by ANTIFA and BLM subversives.
History is repeating itself, but as long as we have the second amendment, we have an ability to fight back that the populaces taken over by murderous Marxist dictators of the past did not.
Robert Patrick Lewis is a Green Beret OIF/OEF combat veteran with 10th SFG(A), CMO of Heroes Media Group, entrepreneur, MBA and award-winning author of Love Me When I'm Gone: The True Story of Life, Love and Loss for A Green Beret In Post-9/11 War, The Pact and The Pact Book II: Battle Hymn of the Republic. @RobertPLewis on Twitter
