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The New International, September 1942


Churchill on Lenin

 

From New International, Vol. VIII No. 8, September 1942, p. 232.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

 

The following are characteristic excerpts on the subject of Lenin from The Aftermath, by Winston Churchill:

Implacable vengeance, rising from a frozen pity in a tranquil, sensible, matter-of-fact, good-humored integument! His weapon, logic; his mood, opportunist; his sympathies, cold and wide as the Arctic Ocean; his hatreds, tight as the hangman’s noose. His purpose, to save the world; his method, to blow it up. Absolute principles, but readiness to change them. Apt at once to kill or learn; dooms and afterthoughts; ruffianism and philanthropy. But a good husband, a gentle guest; happy, his biographers assure us, to wash up the dishes or dandle the baby; as mildly amused to stalk a capercailie as to butcher an emperor.

The quality of Lenin’s revenge was impersonal. Confronted with the need of killing any particular person he showed reluctance – even distress. But to blot out a million, to proscribe entire classes, to light the flames of intestine war in every land with the inevitable destruction of the well-being of whole nations – these were sublime abstractions.

 
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