Antifa, the BLM and the globalist elite standing behind them are driven by the desire not for reforms, but for the total destruction of Western civilization. In their hatred they merge with the “jihadists”
In April 1918, the Bolshevik government headed by Lenin signed the decree “On the Monuments of the Republic.” Monuments “in honor of the kings and their servants” must be demolished, but with a significant reservation: they should only be demolished if they had no “significance from either historical or cultural point of view.” This allowed for the preservation of a significant part of the cultural and architectural heritage of Russia. Thanks to it, in our time tourists can see the beautiful monuments of Russian tsars and emperors, although all of them were “ruthless exploiters of the working people”: Peter the Great, who built Saint Petersburg on the bones of millions of peasants; Catherine the Great; Alexander I of Russia (the famous Alexandrovskaya Kolonna in Petersburg), Paul I of Russia, and so on. The People’s Commissariat for Education even preserved the monument to Nicholas I because of its cultural value (the monument was erected by the French architect Auguste de Montferrand), although Nicholas I is traditionally considered as retrograde and a tyrant in Russian historiography. Surely, nobody could even think about demolishing monuments to victorious Russian generals and sailors, or to its greatest scientists, composers, writers and poets. Thus in St. Petersburg they preserved the monument to the sailors of the Russian battleship “Imperator Alexander III” (1908), who died during Battle of Tsushima against Japan.
Moreover, instead of desecrating monuments to the great, as Antifa did with the monument to Miguel Cervantes in San Francisco, the Bolshevik government erected monuments to many great figures of the past, for example the poets Heine and Goethe.
For the Bolsheviks, all these people were not faceless and odious DWEM (Dead White European Males), but objects of national pride and part of the heritage of the world culture. Yes, the Bolsheviks dreamed about the “new world,” but unlike Antifa and the BLM, they didn’t want to lose continuity with the past, and on the contrary, attempted to strengthen and emphasize it in every possible way.
Do I mean to say that the Bolsheviks were better than Antifa and the BLM? Not exactly… I want to say that they were much better than they!
Antifa and BLM cannot stand comparison with Lenin and Trotsky. No! There is only one relevant analogy to the ideology of Antifa and BLM — that of the Islamic State. That’s where we really see a complete and stunning resemblance: the desire for a total destruction of History as such, the destruction of all artifacts of the “old world,” regardless of their historical and cultural value.
Monuments to Columbus, Theodore Roosevelt, Nelson, Churchill, Kipling, Cervantes, and even Lincoln and Gandhi are doomed to destruction like the masterpieces of Palmyra, Buddhist statues in Afghanistan, the Assyrian Nimrud and the library of Mosul. Is it not symbolic that both the Islamic State and the “fighters against racism” are calling for the demolition of the Giza pyramids?
The resemblance is not limited to the demolition of monuments and destruction of artefacts. The absolute similarity of the ideologies is also manifested in the system of destruction of personality. The Bolsheviks committed many disgusting, monstrous and bloody crimes, but they didn’t put people on their knees. It was a weapon from the arsenal of other cultures.
There is a deep and ancient symbolism in this very action. A human put down on the knees ceases to be a human. He or she is turned into a slave, a worm that can be crushed, or perhaps spared. But even when spared, the victims are no longer human beings – they are worms. Such methods were widely practiced in the Asian tyrannies of the past and present, for example, during the Cultural Revolution in Maoist China and under Pol Pot’s regime. They have been replicated by the Islamic State, and today have become a way of subjugation of the “white masses” of the West, too.
The similarity between the current “revolutionaries” of the West and the Islamic State is not limited to symbolism. It is much deeper. A significant part of the Russian elite supported the Bolshevik revolution, just as the Western elite supports the BLM and Antifa now. The overthrow of Nicholas II occurred with the direct support of Russian generals, many of whom were as famous as Aleksei Brusilov, who subsequently sided with the Bolsheviks. The Russian intelligentsia thirsted for the destruction of the monarchy. Many representatives of the nobility, including Minister of Foreign Affairs Georgy Chicherin, People’s Commissar of Education Anatoly Lunacharsky, the writer Count Alexei Tolstoy, and Count Aleksey Ignatyev, worked for the Bolshevik government. However, there is a significant difference. Aristocrats who served Soviet Russia thirsted not to destroy their country, but to change it for the better. The globalists behind Antifa and the BLM don’t thirst for reforms. They thirst for the total destruction of Western civilization as such, and the destruction of nation-states and national democracies in the name of their utopias or dubious interests.
The revolutionaries of Russia can be understood, if not justified. They dealt with a dying despotism, an obsolete “prison of nations.” The current progressives and globalists have inherited healthy, stable, and prosperous communities that eliminated or nearly eliminated essentially all the flaws and shortcomings of the past. They don’t demolish dying, rotten regimes. Instead they bulldoze forceful democratic states.
They are driven by blind hatred and they are no different from the builders of the “new Caliphate.”
Like the progressives in the West, the jihadists and Iran are absolutely indifferent to the fate of Muslim states. They are ready to destroy entire countries completely, and they do it without the slightest remorse wherever they can: in Syria, Libya or Yemen.
Antifa and BLM receive support from Western globalist elites; ISIS and jihadists from Islamic clergy. Two heads of the hydra torment the body of the world civilization.
However, the hydra has problems. Her heads can’t tolerate rivalry, and at the earliest opportunity they will cross swords. And one doesn’t have to be a prophet to predict who will be the winner in this battle.
Alexander Maistrovoy is the author of “Agony of Hercules or a Farewell to Democracy (Notes of a Stranger),” available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.