Lenin and inappropriate replies

First an observation.

Despite my recently published love affair with the "next blog" button, I've found a good deal of my blog reading from links on other people's sites. It stands to reason - you don't generally link to crap, so one can expect that the blog on the other end is going to be entertaining.

So.

I found myself on a "friend of a friend" kind of blog a few nights ago. Understand that I'm going to paraphrase everything here, beacuse I am still probably in the doghouse and don't want to link over un-invited, as it were. Anyhow, I was very surprised to see the beginning of the most recent post stating that her Russian (I believe) class had just celebrated Lenin's birthday. The post segued into a fun endeavor - readers would submit personal questions and the poster would reply.

My initial reaction was "Wha-what??" Celebrated Lenin's birthday? It was around 4 in the morning (perhaps one day I'll post as to why the hell I was up at 4 in the morning), so my decision-making centers seem to have gone to sleep. I found myself googling for a site that listed world leaders by the deaths that they were directly responsible for, and included it in a reply to the author's post in which I asked if celebrating Lenin's birthday was not unlike celebrating Hitlers? (I could have found a better example, but as his birthday had just been a few days before he was floating around in my subconscious).

To my credit, I tried to be as courteous and apologetic as possible when asking this question. But of course, the next day I realized how completely inappropriate it was, regardless of my feelings on the subject, to send a reply to such a frivilous game with such a heavy subject.

I'm starting to get long-winded, so I'll try to wrap this up.

After a hiatus due to embaressment, I finally returned to read the rest of the replies and face the music. The author had posted a fairly well-reasoned reply and I posted an apology. Then I tucked my tale and ran.

But I've been thinking about it since.

Now, I will not argue that my reply to her post was innapropriate. There was no excuse for it, and I am sorry. But since the topic has been broached, I have a couple of thoughts.

I chose the words "fairly well-reasoned" because a couple of things bothered me about her reply. She stated that the link in which I found the figures was very neo-con, and that one needs to look at history objectively. While I admit that I did not look at the site for more than what I needed, it seems strange to blame neo-conservatism for misunderstanding the death of 4 million people. Also, for anyone that has read more than a couple of posts on my site, I am much more liberal than conservative - yet it is seems hypocritical to say that neo-cons are viewing history all wrong while I have it right. All understanding is subjective.

As a fact, while Lenin was no Stalin, he is the 5th most barbarous (read: specifically responsible for death) individual in recent times. And this isn't the "people die because of a war you've started" kind of death count. This is the "ordering the execution of your own people" kind of death count.

She stated that death is to be expected in revolution. Agreed. But she also states that Lenin was putting down "counter-revolutionaries". I'd call them dissidents. She also states that it is hypocritical for us as Americans to point out this flaw because we are killing thousands in Iraq. First, I don't completely disagree. But I was never for this current war, so I do not feel hypocritical at all. Also, Lenin was killing the poorest dissidents in his own country (think thoughtcrime), not the active combatants that we are facing in the middle east.

Anyway, this is not so much an apology (as stated, I've already left one - a genuine one - on the author's blog). And although I coutered a couple of the author's arguments, this was not meant to inspire further dialogue or argument about the issue. I simply wanted to have my subjective say in the chain of events, and explain why it was that I was shocked by the idea of celebrating Lenin's birthday.

As a final thought, and something that I included in my apology, we celebrate Columbus day every year, and while it could be argued that he was not directly responsible for the deaths of millions of aboriginal Americans (although he was brutal in his own right while he was on our side of the pond), it is still, in my mind, a terrible thing to commemorate.