The Killing of the Romanovs on This Day in History

 

This day in history: Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and his immediate family and retainers are executed by Bolshevik Chekists at the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, Russia on this day in 1918.

From John Miltimore:

Few today would disagree that we live in a morally confused age.

Most of us have a sense of right and wrong. But if pressed to explain why we believe what we do, I suspect there would be a great many blanks stares and incoherent responses.

Justifying Murder

Much of this is attributable to the rise of emotivism, a philosophy that claims all evaluative judgments (even this one) are little more than expressions of preference or feeling, particularly with regard to moral judgments.  

For example, few people would accept the proposition that the statement “murder is wrong” is simply a preference. Most would accept this as a moral fact, even if they could not explain precisely why. 

However, even if this is a philosophy many people today embrace in principle, it is one they reject in practice, the philosopher Alasdair Macintyre has observed. For example, few people would accept the proposition that the statement “murder is wrong” is simply a preference. Most would accept this as a moral fact, even if they could not explain precisely why. 

The idea of justified murder has intrigued great and devious minds alike for generations. Murder as a utilitarian good is the centerpiece of the plot of Dostoyevsky’s masterpiece Crime and Punishment, for example, one of the greatest psychological literary works ever written.

Raskolnikov’s decision to murder an elderly pawnbroker is the result of his view that exceptional men are not bound by the same moral conventions as ordinary men. This is a moral philosophy Dostoyevsky rejects, but his thoughts on utilitarian justifications of murder—that it could be a moral act if it led to a greater good—were quite prescient. 

A little more than a half-century later, in his work “Their Morals and Ours,” the Communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky, a mass murderer, explained why murder in certain circumstances was quite justified— even rational.

“A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified,” Trotsky wrote. “From the Marxist point of view, which expresses the historical interests of the proletariat, the end is justified if it leads to increasing the power of man over nature and to the abolition of the power of man over man.”

He continued:

Primarily and irreconcilably, revolutionary morality rejects servility in relation to the bourgeoisie and haughtiness in relation to the toilers, that is, those characteristics in which petty bourgeois pedants and moralists are thoroughly steeped.

These criteria do not, of course, give a ready answer to the question as to what is permissible and what is not permissible in each separate case. There can be no such automatic answers. Problems of revolutionary morality are fused with the problems of revolutionary strategy and tactics.

Under such a philosophy, it made perfect sense for Trotsky to order the deaths of Tsar Nicholas II’s children—Olga Nikolaevna, Tatiana Nikolaevna, Maria Nikolaevna, Anastasia Nikolaevna, Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich—which he did.

“It had been right (as Trotsky says elsewhere) to kill the Tsar’s children, because it was politically justified,” wrote the Polish philosopher and historian Leszek Kołakowski in his book Main Currents of Marxism.

The Ends versus the Means

Trotsky, of course, famously fell out of favor with Stalin (a not uncommon phenomenon). As a result, Trotsky’s two sons were killed during Stalin’s purges, an atrocity Trotsky condemned. 

“Why then was it wrong for Stalin to murder Trotsky’s children?” Kolakowski asked. “Because Stalin did not represent the proletariat.”

Trotsky’s murders were justified because he was truly on the side of the proletariat, you see, whereas Stalin was a mere pretender.   

A moral philosophy such as this would have looked mad to most people throughout human history—as it does to many today—but it’s the product of several strains of modern philosophy that pervade our culture: emotivism, moral relativism, and utilitarianism.

The lesson? Ask yourself why you believe what you do. And beware those who would justify their means solely by the ends they achieve.

This post was originally published on Intellectual Takeout.

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. (Follow him on Substack.)

His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.

Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times. 

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Good Guy Tyrant Leon Trotsky on This Day in History

 

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This day in history: Leon Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Communist Party, leaving Joseph Stalin in undisputed control of the Soviet Union on this day in 1927. Many have wondered if Soviet Russia would have been better, and less violent under a Trotsky rule. 

Historian Lesley Chamberlain wrote this in the Wall Street Journal in 2009, "We are left weighing a multiple ­tragedy, of a man so loyal to an ideology he died for it; of an ideology that in one form or another killed ­millions; and of a 20th century in which political ­radicals world-wide called themselves Trotskyists and believed that Lenin was good and Stalin bad, that even if the Soviet Union was a degenerate workers' state, the real thing could be established elsewhere. Trotsky had people killed. But . . . [he] was not a bad man."

To this, Ilya Somin responded: "Well, let's see. Trotsky was responsible for the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, helped mastermind the establishment of one history's worst totalitarian regimes, and broke with Joseph Stalin in the 1920s in part because he thought that Stalin wasn't going far enough in extending Soviet totalitarianism at home and exporting it abroad. Other than that, he was a helluva guy. If that record isn't enough to qualify you as a "bad man," I don't know what is." Source

Trotsky believed that Socialism can only be instituted by brute force: “It is quite clear that if our problem is the abolition of private property in the means of production, the only road to its solution lies through the concentration of state power in its entirety in the hands of the proletariat, and the setting up for the transitional period of an extraordinary regime…Dictatorship is necessary because this is a case not of partial changes, but of the very existence of the bourgeoisie. No agreement is possible on this basis. Only force can be the deciding factor…Whoever aims at the end cannot reject the means.” [The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press), p. 738.]

Trotsky also supported the dissolution of the family: “The revolution made a heroic effort to destroy the so-called ‘family hearth’ — that archaic, stuffy and stagnant institution in which the woman of the toiling classes performs galley labor from childhood to death. The place of the family as a shut-in petty enterprise was to be occupied, according to the plans, by a finished system of social care and accommodation: maternity houses, creches, kindergartens, schools, social dining rooms, social laundries, first-aid stations, hospitals, sanatoria, athletic organizations, moving-picture theaters, etc. The complete absorption of the housekeeping functions of the family by institutions of the socialist society, uniting all generations in solidarity and mutual aid, was to bring to woman, and thereby to the loving couple, a real liberation from the thousand-year-old fetters.” [Revolution Betrayed]

Additionally, we have Trotsky to thank for the weaponized use of the term "Racism." "Trotsky did not ‘invent’ the word ‘racist or racism’. However, Trotsky certainly popularized the word(s) and made ‘liberal’ use of them in his two-volumed book ‘History of the Russian Revolution’. Perhaps more to the point here is that Trotsky was among the very first to ‘leverage’ the word ‘racist’ and his smearing definition or concept of it as useful means to his own political ends, which was not limited to but included fomenting dissent and sparking division amongst the populations. Trotsky was one of the first to ‘weaponize’ the word ‘racist’, using it (s) as propaganda; as tool of mass manipulation and as a way of smearing and silencing opposition. In doing so, Trotsky becomes a big reason why the definition of ‘racist’ or ‘racism’ is now so broad and so broadly applied—even ubiquitously—by today’s left, hence diluting it’s true power and meaning. By his cynical use of the word ‘racist’ and his opportunistic, amorphous over-application, we might even say Trotsky was the first to effectively denigrate the sad, ponderous depth and weight of the word’s true meaning as well as the tragedy of it’s consequences for history’s very real victims of actual racists."~Dan Kidd

Trotsky was murdered with an ice pick in Mexico in 1940 by a fellow Communist. Perhaps his exile and his violent death should tell us all we need to know about the ideology he lived by and defended.

In 2005, the now-famous ice pick was slated to go to auction to be sold for the highest price. A proper Capitalist ending to a Socialistic disaster. 

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