The Power of Denial

In the unequal Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of March 3, 1918, Vladimir Lenin signed away a quarter of Russia’s population and industry in addition to nine-tenths of its coal mines. Why? He couldn't wait to end the war with Germany. 


How could Lenin get away with it? By denial. He denied that he had betrayed Mother Russia. Somehow he convinced his fellow Bolsheviks that Germany, following Russia, would be ripe for a communist revolution. Whatever he had lost to an Imperial Germany, he promised to recover from a Communist Germany. Workers were supposed to own and share everything while respecting no borders. 


Of course, it was the victorious Allied Powers’ politicians, not the defeated German Empire’s workers, who finally abrogated the Brest-Litovsk treaty in the wake of the Armistice of November 11, 1918. 


Facts might be stubborn things, but they had not been stubborn enough to stop Lenin and Leninists from weaponizing denial through their CHEKA, a Soviet agency of terror, during and beyond the Russian Civil War.


by 寒苇

有把死的说成活的的本事，真让人信服，跟着他跑。这是art 啊。

举措和忽悠大众的能力是不容忽视的。这也就是后来东方大国公开说的“二杆子”。