The REAL Obama-Lenin Connection

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When Obama was running for president a lot of people looked at one of his posters and noticed striking similarities between the poster and an old poster of Lenin.

http://andrightlyso.com/2008/07/24/obama-lenin-gaffe/

Immediately the insults went flying. "Obama is a Marxist!" "Obama is a Leninist!" I don't know if Obama has actually called himself a Marxist but if Obama does call himself a Marxist then Karl Marx is rolling in his grave.

Karl Marx wanted the proletariat to rebel, overthrow the government and put a new government in place that would one day "wither away". Lenin made his own version of Marxism called Marxist-Leninism. In Marxist-Leninism there is a totalitarian vanguard party of intellectuals who are supposedly there to teach the proletarians how to behave properly. What happened was the vanguard party did not let themselves or the government "wither away".

In the first half of the 20th century was a philosopher called Leo Strauss. Leo Strauss dreamed that one day America would be ruled by an elite of intellectuals who would preserve national unity. I'm not sure if Strauss read Lenin but he might have.

By the time Bush came into power the Republican Party had been taken over by Straussians. That's how they managed to pass the Patriot Act despite the Fourth Ammendment.

Now Barack Obama refuses to disagree with the Repblicans on anything except a few minor things like abortion and immigration. He isn't a Marxist but he is arguably a Leninist.

Obama is a Marxist. Quite the radical back in college. Was "educated" that the best way to spurn revolution was to do it from within the system. Then he mellowed his tone.

He announced his candidacy for president in the home of prominent Marxists.

All the evidence is there....few were willing to expose it as to criticize Obama is to be labeled a racist.

No, he's a bleeding-heart liberal in a conservative suit.

Apparently, he sucks at Marxism nearly as badly as he sucks at liberalism. He's more of a hole in the air than any other identifiable ideology, or perhaps a funhouse mirror that shows the viewer whatever they want to see, be it friend or foe. I don't think anyone's really willing to claim him at the moment, at least without any qualifiers. I mean he's technically a Democrat, though if he were to be described to a completely ignorant party solely by what he's done in office, I'm not sure they could identify him as such.

Then maybe he's a badly-shaved Bigfoot clone ... ?

If Obama is a Marxist then he is the most pathetic one ever. First he is not a revolutionary. But even besides that he is at most Third Way (but not really)--which most socialists view as a too far to the right. He has done absolutely nothing that would qualify him as a socialist in my books. Even the health care bill, while a positive step, was a rather sad piece of work--it is nowhere near proper universal healthcare and, besides the many confusing aspects, seems to still have many confusing aspects. Plus there will still be multiple tears to the healthcare system, which socialists hate.

The word Leninist is vague--it seems to mean whatever the user wants. If you are referring to it as an elite group ruling the rest of the country, then I think that describes most US presidents (at least in this century). But usually it's used to refer to some sort of "non-revisionist" Communist. Obama is most definitely not a communist--if he was he wouldn't have allowed a clergyman to swear him into office, for a start. And he'd dismiss the healthcare bill as "bourgeois socialism" designed to pacify the proletariat and keep them in their place. And he probably would have made the Republican party illegal... (the bad part of me wishes that was possible, but I realize that would be highly undemocratic and a very bad thing to do).

Honestly, when Americans make these sort of comments I think it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what socialism, Marxism, Leninism, communism and just about every other left-wing idea is. (Mind you, people use the word Communism with so many different meanings that I don't think anyone understands what it is.)