Greg Lukianoff is frustrated with the widespread white-washing of Lenin. Excerpt:

Lenin wasn’t “complicated.” He was evil. Full stop. We don’t say that enough in the United States because most people never actually learn what he did and others with “intellectual” mentors, parents or grandparents can’t let themselves admit they had a warm heart for the man who ushered in the new age of true totalitarianism quite intentionally. Instead we get at best a cartoon: czar bad, revolution messy, Stalin later goes too far. Lenin is treated like the grim (or for true elitists, heroic) but necessary prologue. That’s backwards.

This is a man who personally ordered people hanged in public “so that the people will see, tremble, and know.” Not generals on a battlefield—peasants labeled “kulaks,” defined as the wrong class of peasant, you know? Like my family. He didn’t reluctantly authorize force in a crisis. He theorized terror as a positive good. He wanted fear as a permanent feature of the system. If deliberately terrorizing civilians as a category isn’t evil, the word doesn’t mean anything.

And what he built was not run-of-the-mill authoritarianism. A normal dictator mostly wants you to shut up and not plot against him. Lenin’s party claimed a monopoly on TRUTH. Every independent center of life, churches, unions, rival socialist parties, the press, civil associations, had to be destroyed or absorbed. Violence wasn’t a last resort; it was a standing method; it was “cleansing”. Whole groups were pre-classified as enemies to be “liquidated” if necessary. He made the jump from dictatorship to totalitarianism.