Somehow, calling for the spirit of Lenin is not a great idea...

I am getting very worried about Liberal Youth. In all honesty, looking in from the outside it almost seems like most of the people involved haven't got the foggiest idea what the hell they are doing. But the thing is, that's not always a bad thing. However, I have wonder of the rank and insultingly short sighted stupidity of certain rhetoric that a certain author of a certain piece in the new .pdf magazine distributed to all those on LY's mailing list. It is this:

So, let’s ditch Stalin and take on board some Lenin. We might not be communists, but we are (in our own
way) revolutionaries. As Lenin once put it, we must learn to have ‘the heart on fire, the brain on ice’. Both
are as important as each other.


I obviously agree with this. There is nothing wrong with drawing inspiration from a violent revolutionary that deposed a newly democratic Russian government and turned Russia into the USSR, that caused the deaths of quite a large amount of people over it's long, repressive and violent history. Whilst I can appreciate that this is a great example of foresight and a terrific use of writing technique, I could imagine that some people, in their ignorance, might just consider that drawing on one of the most illiberal people that ever lived as a call to arms to revolutionize a failing, increasingly arrogant and utterly divorced from reality organization would be a bad idea. In fact, some of them even have written lists of why this shambolic catastrophe of a magazine is so insulting to their inboxes. Such a list might look like the following:

1) Tienanmen Square on the front cover?
2) Shoddy layout that appears to suggest that the author(s) have never read a publication like Private Eye for clues as to how to create a quarterly magazine.
3) Microsoft Word font used for title...
4) Stupid name.
5) Appears to be filled with the pro-reformist agenda.

It's a strong argument, I agree. But I think that it's clear that the strengths of the document outweigh it's weaknesses:

1) LY have delivered a finished product.
2)

Personally, I prefer Gorbachev.

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