Unfortunately, those in charge of writing history are very prone to sanitizing unappealing details. Take Helen Keller for example. We learn a lot of minor details of her history. But students never learn how she was a loud socialist. Information like that would be uncomfortable, inconvenient, or too challenging for those learning history.
> During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.
We remember Helen Keller because by all rights she should have been basically an institutionalized animal and not had a career of any kind whatsoever. What exactly she did is of less significance than that she did anything at all with her life.
This scene from "The Miracle Worker," a movie about her relationship to the teacher who taught her sign language and basic manners against very long odds, never fails to bring me to tears:
People are interested in HK because of the adversity she overcame, not because of her political viewpoints. I'm sure if she was a staunch libertarian, we would not hear much about those viewpoints either - because it isn't relevant to the interesting part of her life story.
To Keller the politics had a lot to do with blindness:
> I was appointed on a commission to investigate the conditions of the blind. For the first time I, who had thought blindness a misfortune beyond human control, found that too much of it was traceable to wrong industrial conditions, often caused by the selfishness and greed of employers. And the social evil contributed its share. I found that poverty drove women to a life of shame that ended in blindness.
If we're only telling her story as an allegory and divorce her from her personal viewpoints, we might as well tell fables.
She was already nationally famous before she became a political activist. And the reason she was famous was because of the adversity she overcame as a child, not because she had pretty run of the mill viewpoints on socialism.
I dunno, we say she "overcame adversity", but that doesn't really make sense unless you at least reference that she became a famous political activist. Otherwise, in what sense did she "overcome" her adversity?
Deafblindness isn't particularly unknown outside her case, and she wasn't the first person to be successfully taught to
communicate despite it. But her ability to become a nationally prominent political activist despite her handicap made her unique.
> Otherwise, in what sense did she "overcome" her adversity?
Well, she learned how to communicate and even speak. That seems pretty big. Clearly schoolchildren all over America, when they learn about this, are amazed by HK and her teachers. No one hears that story and says "Well, so what?" if they don't hear the part about how she became a socialist later in life.
> But her ability to become a nationally prominent political activist despite her handicap made her unique.
She was already nationally prominent before she became a political activist. It's not like she became a social activist, and then people said "Hey, we should look into her past and see what her upbringing was like", and then the Hellen Keller story emerged.
Its not that whitewashed, Helen Keller as a party member of Socialist party of America is on the first page of her Wikipedia, anybody having to look her up would have figured out and took way less effort than the female researcher with Kitty Marion.
And whats so controversial about being a socialist. The Europeans would be laughing at how "controversial" it is, seeing as the Socialist Party is the largest party in France and used to produce several French presidents.
The fact that you refer to him as a mass murdered shows he wasn't exactly canonized. I also don't see how you read the quote as a justification unless all you focused on was the name.
He had very strong views about revolution. He believed it was necessary and desirable at all costs (hence his actions).
He's lauding the role of the violent revolutionary without further reflection (because he'd already made his choice long ago) whether actions that generated waves of murder and generations of tyrants as a result were actually desirable.
I'd argue that results of his violence are a great argument against much of what he sad because he obviously didn't know how to control it or didn't care. As an example, he didn't want Stalin to come to power, but he was powerless to stop the bloodshed he'd put into motion and people suffered horrendously because of it. Sounds like a short-sighted and evil person.
As an example, he didn't want Stalin to come to power, but he was powerless to stop the bloodshed he'd put into motion
A series of debilitating strokes reduced Lenin to the status of an invalid, and Trotsky naively took Stalin's good faith for granted and avoided attacking him publicly despite Lenin's request for him to denounce Stalin's political opportunism. Omitting major causal factors doesn't say much for the quality of your argument.
> During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.