Yesterday marked the 108th anniversary since the Bolshevik Revolution, which took place on November 7th, 1917 (October 25th, according to the Julian Calendar). Rarely has a local event produced such a profound global effect as the October Revolution, which ultimately enslaved billions around the world and caused mass murder and famine at an unprecedented rate.
The events of October 1917 are largely familiar, but less well-known is the nefarious role of Germany in facilitating the Revolution. Tired of battling various forces in World War I, the German authorities arranged for Lenin, his wife, and some of his associates to travel by train from Zurich to Finland in “sealed” cars. This meant that the carriages with the Russian revolutionaries were locked and had the “extraterritorial” status of a foreign embassy to prevent border controls and document checks. A Swiss communist by the name of Fritz Platten liaised between the German officers on board the train and the Russian Bolshevik exiles.
The Germans were hoping that the return of Lenin and his associates to Russia would destabilize the country and thus indirectly help Germany in the war outcome. Little did they know that in addition to the mayhem that ensued in Russia, this episode would ultimately set large parts of the world ablaze in a totalitarian inferno. Churchill commented:
Lenin was sent into Russia by the Germans in the same way that you might send a phial containing a culture of typhoid or of cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city, and it worked with amazing accuracy.
No sooner did Lenin arrive than he began beckoning a finger here and a finger there to obscure persons in sheltered retreats in New York, in Glasgow, in Bern, and other countries, and he gathered together the leading spirits of a formidable sect, the most formidable sect in the world, of which he was the high priest and chief.
With these spirits around him he set to work with demoniacal ability to tear to pieces every institution on which the Russian State and nation depended. Russia was laid low. Russia had to be laid low. She was laid low to the dust.
Today, over a century later, the results are dismal — over 100 million murdered globally and billions starved and deprived of opportunities for normal lives. What is even more insidious, perhaps, is that the ideology of the October Revolution infected and conquered the education, media, and culture of the self-doubting West.
Mamdani’s election and the Western youth’s flirtation with socialism are but the latest disasters in the formidable list of calamities that the communists and their kindred ideologues have inflicted on mankind while completing their “long march through the institutions.” Our country, or at least half of it, remains the mightiest bulwark against the ever-multiplying metamorphoses of this toxic worldview, which functions under numerous guises of overlapping doctrines — most recently embodied by wokeism, intersectionality, Third-Worldism, and the sinister red-green-and-blue alliance.
But we must be ever-vigilant to marginalize the enemy from within by winning the long-term battle for the soul of America and the West. For this purpose, we must use every lawful means to disarm the influence of destructive ideologies on the media and education. We must reverse the “long march through the institutions” and help restore the cultural dominance of American and Western values.
Churchill promptly recognized the Bolshevik danger. In several speeches throughout his career, and as early as 1919, he advocated for “strangling” Bolshevik ideology “in its cradle.” In a House of Commons address in January 1949, he concluded:
I think the day will come when it will be recognized without doubt, not only on one side of the House, but throughout the civilized world, that the strangling of Bolshevism at its birth would have been an untold blessing to the human race.
Unfortunately, Bolshevism was not nipped in the bud, and the civilized world today has failed to condemn it in a united and meaningful way.
Nora D. Clinton is a Research Scholar at the Legal Insurrection Foundation. She was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria. She holds a PhD in Classics and has published extensively on ancient documents on stone. In 2020, she authored the popular memoir Quarantine Reflections Across Two Worlds. Nora is a co-founder of two partner charities dedicated to academic cooperation and American values. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and son.
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY