Babbling Botkin: Last Leadership Memo to the President - Part Three

I am wiped out today!  

My husband and I own an old farmhouse that a previous owner decorated with lashings of 1960's-style wood paneling.  

I don't like wood paneling - but taking it out seemed like a massive undertaking so I learned to tolerate it.  

Not long before my son was born, my sister-in-law pointed out that painting the wood paneling would change the look a lot.  In fact, her really cute house had previously had similar dark wood paneling - and adding some soft pastel colors made it look much lighter and brighter.  

I've been a bit busy in the intervening four years, but I always planned to take on that paneling - and today was the day!  The center hallway of house had poor lighting, no windows and the dark paneling absorbed whatever light made it into the area.   

Now,  I painted the central hallway and the staircase in off-white semi-gloss.  As a paint associate, I know that flat paint is in - but I like the shine of glossy paint, plus I like the increased durability of the higher gloss paints.  There is so much more light in that area - and I haven't seen it in daylight when the light enters through the window at the top of the stair!

Let's see if I can write this before I fall asleep :-). 

We are at the final installation reviewing Geoffrey Botkin's video, "My Last Leadership Memo to the President.  Maybe."    I must admit the title is catchy in its brazen refusal to admit the obvious that Trump is leaving office on January 20th and will not be coming back.  

The first part of the review featured Botkin attempting to convince the President that he and his family would be assassinated if they left office.    Personally, I think running his own personal family cult for the last 10 years or so has made Botkin sloppy.   He's kept his daughters under his thumb by teaching them that the world is filled with rapists who will attack them if they go to the grocery store alone and unarmed in the middle of the morning - but that kind of insane hype is hard to pull off with people who interact with other adult humans.    I find Trump to be quite credulous if information is combined with praise - but he's nearly impervious to things he does not want to hear.  I doubt he wants to hear that unnamed people are out to get him from a random nobody.

The second part of the review is a historically inaccurate review of Nicholas II's reign and abdication.  It's fascinating that the historical person Botkin thinks Trump has most to learn from is Nicholas II - the last ruler of an authoritarian hereditary monarchy.    Botkin has always espoused strange views on governance that combine a very strong, heavy-handed government based on Leviticus for people who disagree with him - while still wanting the small, weak, local governance of Botkin's personal life espoused by Libertarians.    Those two governance types seem like a paradox - but that section made it clear for the rest of us: Botkin wants to be a authoritarian monarch.    In that system, he can punish anyone he wants while being above punishment - let alone criticized.

Most of the previous section of quotes from Botkin had a running fogginess about which revolution - and therefore what time period we were in.    Here we reach a section with a set time point:

The population was managed through intimidation and then punishment and then terror.  There was routine murder of non-Communists.  Nicholas II and his entire family were rounded up, were put under house arrest and then assassinated by the Cheka, the small secret police force.[00:03:26] 

A critical skill in teaching is figuring out where a student's mental concept map has an error.   

Here's a quick timeline of the rise of Communism in Russia:

• February 1917 - Nicholas II abdicates; a provisional government with lots of local control forms.
• March 1917 - The Imperial Family is arrested by the provisional government.
• October 1917 - Provisional government falls; Civil War begins.
• July 1918 - The Imperial Family is murdered in Yekaterinburg.
  
• June 1923 - End of Russian Civil War - between 7-12 million deaths occurring over five years.

Near as I can tell, Botkin believes that February 1917 marks the beginning of a combined Communist government and everything that happened after February 1917 can be blamed on the Communists alone.   

Unfortunately, it's not that simple.   

The House of Romanov had stayed in power by using intimidation and punishment to keep the population from rebelling.  

The supporters of the monarchy and allied supporters who didn't want to restore the monarchy but also didn't want to have a communist government used intimidation and execution to fight back against communist governments.

Hell, even the communist-socialist groups were not aligned.  The October Revolution occurred when a left-wing socialist controlled provisional government fell to the left-wing communist city-groups known as soviets.    Now, to Botkin, that might sound like two identical groups - but just because a government is based on government-control of the economy doesn't mean that government is happily aligned with all other Marxist government.

Don't believe me?   Look up China and Russia's relations after 1940.

From 1917-1923, Russia was a war zone.  Political violence is never right - and in this case - all sides were using it.    That means Botkin's breathless assertion that non-Communists were being killed was true - but so were Communists.

Let's discuss the arrests and murders of the Imperial Family.

If I've not made it clear so far, there were a lot of very angry armed people in Russia in 1917.   The Provisional Government had control of the government - but their control was tenuous at best.  The arrest of the Tsar fulfilled two issues.   The arrest showed people that the government had control over the former leader while providing some security to Nicholas II and his family against assassination.

Why was Nicholas II and his family murdered?   

Let's think about what a heredity monarchy is.  In that form of government, the office of the head of the government is passed down through a single family line.  The House of Romanov had strictly punished members of the House who married non-royals with expulsion from the line of succession and exile until 1911.   In that year, the House adapted their rules so that members outside of the direct line of succession could marry non-royals if they renounced their place in the line of succession.   This matters because there were a total of 65 members of the House who were in the line of succession at the time of the abdication. 

 As heredity monarchies go, that's not very many.  

World War I made exiling the Tsar's family nearly impossible.  France and Belgium were active war zones. Germany and Austria-Hungary, two empires that the Imperial Family had close family ties to, were enemy states.  The Tsar also had family ties in Great Britain which was allied to Russia in World War I - but popular opinion was strongly against absolute monarchists in Britain an offer of exile was revoked.  

Even if a country had been found, the Imperial Family would have to be transported somehow through areas of Russia held by military groups who wanted the Tsar dead.

In a country where over 1 million men have been killed in a foreign war and the government is struggling to maintain power, any members of the House eligible for succession were a threat.  Nicholas abdicated for his son Alexei - but Alexei was a minor whose life-threatening hemophilia was not widely known.  Would he abide by an abdication made by his father when he was 21 or 25?   

The Tsar also had four handsome eligible daughters between the ages of 22 and 17.  While Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia were officially only able to succeed if all male members of the House of Romanov died, Russia does have a long history of female rulers.  In a country in a state of near chaos, what would happen if one of the daughters married a fairly powerful member of the military allied with the anti-Communists?  Would a new imperial house be founded linking the House of Romanov with a new military leader?

After 15 months of imprisonment, the chances of the Romanov House being restored by anti-communist forces grew too high.   In June of 1918, Grand Duke Michael, the next in line to succession after the abdication was murdered. The Imperial Family was murdered on the 18th of July 1918.  The next day, six additional members of the House of Romanov were thrown into a mine shaft and killed - including an elderly nun who had been serving the poor for decades.  Finally, in January of 1919, four more male members in the line succession were murdered.   Correctly recognizing that Russia was unsafe for Romanov survivors, 47 additional members of the family entered exile.

Lenin then called for ruthless mass terror and a merciless smashing of counter-revolutionary activity. He issued his famous "Hanging Order" instructing party faithful to round up and hang 100 dissident citizens simply as a public deterrent to dissent. Just randomly picking them off the street. One hundred citizens as a public deterrent to dissent.[00:03:52] 

Lenin was a terrible, ruthless, cruel leader.

In the previous post, Botkin rambled about how the communist started committing crimes while there was a revolution going on.  That made no sense in relation to the February and October Revolutions of 1917 - but is completely true of Lenin's followers after the 1905 Revolution.  

Lenin had been agitating for the rise of the proletariat for a decade prior to the Russian Civil War.  When he was unable to be organizing in Russia, he'd escape to a safer country like Switzerland and argue finer points of Communist theory with other organizers - critically important points like "Can communism rise up from industrial workers alone or are experiences of the agrarian class the only way for communism to rise?"   Seriously, this was a major fracture point among Communist philosophers. 

Eventually, Lenin got tired of waiting and decided to help things along.  Since the proletariat was always short on cash, Lenin advocated robbing banks, train stations and other cash-heavy locations to fund the revolution. Several groups took him up on this endorsement of crime including one led by future crimes- against- humanity leader Joseph Stalin.

Lenin did write a telegram in  August of 1918 ordering the leaders of the Penza Gubernia to publicly hang 100 dissidents to pre-emptively avoid the riots preventing food from reaching the major cities of Russia from reoccurring.    No one knows if the orders were followed out - but even if they were not - Lenin is a horrible, horrible person.

Weirdly enough, Botkin seems more upset in the video about the idea that these people were randomly picked up off the streets than the fact they were possibly murdered extrajudicially....

And then the nation descended into a deadly civil war which lasted five bloody years before the Soviet Union was created.[00:03:59] 

Nope again.    The "Hanging Order" preserved at the Library of Congress happened a year after the Civil War started.  In the timeline at the beginning of the post, it would fit in two months after the Imperial Family were massacred.

Seriously, Botkin needs to take better notes or make a timeline or learn how to read for comprehension.  

I will agree that the Russian Civil War lasted 5 years.   *rolls eyes*

"The essence of Bolshevism." - said Parvus describing what was going on in 1918, he said - "is to ignite the revolution everywhere, not choosing the time, regardless of the political situation and other historical realities.  Whoever is against is the enemy, and the conversation with the enemies is short - they are subject to urgent and unconditional destruction. [00:04:29] 

Who the fuck is Parvus?

*goes to the interwebs*

Ah, Parvus is Alexander Parvus who got the entire idea of "permanent revolution" revived in the early 1900's.  He was also worked with German Intelligence to try and foment a communist uprising in Russia to undermine Russia during WWII.

As a counter-point, there were roughly 30 countries that actively described themselves as Communist or Socialist in 1985 containing roughly 1/3 of the world's population.

Today, there are four countries in that same category- China, Vietnam, Cuba and Laos - or five if you count North Korea* who swears they are not Communists.  The total world population in Communist countries has dropped to 20% 

And North Korea's set of problems is pretty deep regardless of if Kim Jong-Un calls himself a communist leader, or an absolute monarch, or a completely democratically elected *wink-wink* president so I'll keep them off the list.

I feel like Botkin is stuck in, oh, 1983 and somehow missed the fact that 26 countries have left Communism.    It's really not an ongoing worry for anyone besides Botkin.

And so, Mr. President, all Americans understand that if you cross the Rubicon, there will be no retreat, only moving forward.  On the other side of the Rubicon is a place of justice that can protect you from arbitrary injustice and a place of leadership, a secure place of leadership from which you can restructure the administration and give American citizens the protection they need to lawfully position themselves against enemies foreign and domestic and the escalating tyranny which faces a nation ruled by the deep state. [00:05:06]

That place across the Rubicon is known as an authoritarian dictatorship. 

It's what Nicholas II had going for him - he just dressed it up by saying that God dictated that his family be allowed to rule forever.

I have no doubt that Trump would enjoy immensely being an authoritarian dictator - but the US is a democracy.   

We've been a democracy for 245 years - and we will continue to be one when Joe Biden is sworn in on January 20th at noon.

Good night - and God bless America!