Donny Diggins · @DonnyDiggins
25th Oct 2015 from TwitLonger
Condoleeza Rice on the Bolsheviks
A Facebook friend pointed to Condoleeza Rice's writings on Soviet military strategy to make the perennially important point that our class enemy studies our thought and history closely. I would add that they do it with better funds than we. It is our duty to take the enemy as seriously as the enemy takes us. Here is an excerpt from Rice's 'The Making of Soviet Strategy':
'Few secular philosophies are as holistic as Marxism. Explaining and predicting all of human history in terms of enduring class struggle, Marxism explicitly rejects compartmentalization of the human experience. Narrow definitions of military strategy that neatly separated war and peace or the army and society were foreign to the Bolsheviks. Lenin and his cohorts were impressed with Clausewitz'e systematic analysis of the permanent interaction of politics and war. When the Soviets seized power in the war-ravaged Russian Empire in October 1917, there was no doubt in their minds that war, revolution, politics, and society were inseparable.
'Ideological predilection and historical experience suggested that conflict, sometimes violent, was a locomotive for historical progress. But although Marxism provided a framework, it did not provide a blueprint. The Bolsheviks tried to take seriously Engels's promise that "freeing the proletariat will create its special and entirely new military method." The revolution and the creation of the new socialist society, however, took place in complex and fluid circumstances....To harmonize ideological expectations with cold reality is a fundamental task facing new societies. It was never more critical than in Revolutionary Russia, where necessity, more often than not, dictated the direction taken.'