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WASHINGTON TIMES KUHNER: Bury Lenin - without honors Soviet mastermind was a genocidal killer

Finally, Russians are considering burying Vladimir Lenin. Since his death in 1924, the Bolshevik leader’s embalmed body has been lying in a glass coffin in a mausoleum on Moscow's Red Square. For many, he is the shining symbol of Soviet communism - a martyr to the utopian cause of socialist revolution. But he is the opposite - the embodiment of a murderous, totalitarian ideology responsible for the deaths of tens of millions. The issue is not whether he should be buried, but what has taken so long. This is Russia’s shame.

Russian authorities may finally be taking action. This week, a story in The Washington Times by Marc Bennetts reported that Russia’sCulture Minister Vladimir Medinsky is contemplating whether to layLenin’s body to rest.

“I have always believed that a body should be entrusted to the earth,”Mr. Medinsky said. “And Lenin’s relatives begged the authorities not to place him in the mausoleum.”

Lenin was not simply a prominent leader of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. He was its founder and driving political and intellectual force. Without him, the communist seizure of power would have been impossible. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Lenin’s body should have been buried along with his failed communist regime.

Instead, as Mr. Bennetts points out, Lenin’s tomb has become a shrine for many Russians still nostalgic about the Soviet empire. From Moscow to the Urals, the Bolshevik dictator is still revered. Rock bands, subway stations, libraries, regional administrations, statues, monuments -Lenin’s name and image adorn them, signifying his continued prestige. The USSR is dead, but Lenin’s cult of personality is alive and well.

This is why numerous Russians continue to oppose burying him. According to Andrei Vorobyov, a senior official in the ruling United Russia party, the issue is a “hot one.” Even Mr. Medinsky thinks Leninshould be buried with “full state honors” and the Red Square mausoleum converted into a giant museum commemorating the Soviet past. Russian strongman Vladimir Putin uncharacteristically claims to be neutral on the issue, arguing the “people should decide.”

The Russians should be ashamed of themselves. Lenin’s shrine must go. But burying him with the pomp and ceremony accorded a state hero would be an insult to his countless victims. The idea reflects a profound moral sickness in modern Russia, an inability to confront the Soviet past.

Lenin was the architect of the greatest system of mass murder in history. He belongs alongside genocidal tyrants such as Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong and Adolf Hitler. In fact, Lenin gave birth to both 20th-century communism and Nazism. Contrary to myth, he was not some misguided compassionate socialist whose ideals exceeded the reach of humanity. Rather, he was a ruthless despot who engineered one singular, malevolent, totalitarian state.

Lenin grabbed and maintained power by waging relentless war upon his domestic opponents, both real and imagined. He fused state terror with one-party rule in an unprecedented bid to completely transform every aspect of society. His goal was not just a proletarian revolution. It was to remake human nature itself - to create what he called the “new Soviet man.” The socialist dream of human equality and liberation - of a new order without capitalism, nation-states and religion - required omnipotent state control and wholesale social destruction.

The result was genocide - the deliberate extermination of tens of millions of people. From 1917 until his death in 1924, Lenin established the Soviet empire through absolute brutality - the creation of the Cheka (the Bolshevik secret police and predecessor to the KGB), the confiscation and nationalization of all private property, the slaughter of millions of White Russians and other enemies of the regime, a terror famine that systematically starved to death more than 5 million “kulaks” (small peasant landowners), the annihilation of countless Christian churches and priests, the savage repression of basic freedoms, the building of a vast network of gulags, and the imperial subjugation of numerous peoples yearning for their national independence. In short, Leninerected the one-party totalitarian model later followed by Stalin, Hitler and Mao.

Lenin’s great sin - inherited from the Enlightenment - was that he viewed individuals as a means to an end - he never recognized or cared for their innate worth and dignity. He believed that a small ruling class of experts could reorder society to fit his ideological, socialist ambitions. For him, people were nothing more than pieces of clay to be molded into a futuristic, post-capitalist, post-Christian world. He was a revolutionary fanatic.

His Marxist offspring eventually would butcher nearly 100 million people in an insane attempt to fulfillLenin’s twisted goals. Ukrainians, the Baltic peoples, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Romanians, Croats, Serbs, Chinese, Cubans, Nicaraguans, Cambodians and Vietnamese - if one could pile up all the corpses killed by communism, they would reach the sky.

It is high time that Russians confront the dark reality of their Soviet past. Like Nazi Germany, SovietRussia was more than an iron-fisted dictatorship. It was a totalitarian police state and expansionist empire based upon almost unspeakable atrocities. The Soviet hammer and sickle is the equivalent of the Nazi swastika.

Could anyone imagine Hitler’s name being used - and revered - across Germany today? Or that a mausoleum with his embalmed body could lie at a major square in Berlin as a shrine for neo-Nazis? The very thought is disgusting, even unfathomable. Fascism’s crimes rightly have been condemned. Those of communism, however, remain unredeemed, confined to the deep recesses of our collective historical memory. This must end.

Lenin was a dictator, a genocidal killer and a war criminal. Bury this man - once and for all. And skip the state honors. He doesn’t deserve them.

Jeffrey T. Kuhner is a columnist at The Washington Times and president of the Edmund Burke Institute.

WASHINGTON TIMES KUHNER: Obama’s revolutionary Supreme Court Americans have been demoted from citizens to slaves.

We now live in post-constitutional America. The rule of law has been replaced with arbitrary centralized government. The republic is dead. It has been strangled by President Obama and the Supreme Court. Upon its ruins, a socialist state is being erected. This is the real meaning of thecourt’s recent decision to uphold Obamacare.

The court majority, led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., declared the president’s signature health law valid. It is a major victory for Mr. Obama. His health care overhaul now has the high court’s stamp of approval. If he wins in November, nothing can stop its implementation. He will have succeeded in his fundamental goal: creating a permanent European-style welfare state. The middle class will be wedded to massive health care subsidies. Businesses will drop millions of employees from employer-based coverage, tossing them into government exchanges. The public will be saddled with a multitrillion-dollar entitlement.

Most importantly, the court’s decision was revolutionary. The state can compel individuals to purchase any good, service or product - in this case, health insurance - against their will. The federal government can coerce citizens to engage in behavior it deems moral. Today, the imperative is buying health care; tomorrow, it will be eating broccoli, driving an electric car or not using toilet paper. Obamacare is soft tyranny. The individual mandate is a fundamental assault upon the pillars of our republic. Are people free to make decisions that profoundly affect them and their families, or can the government nationalize our bodies, especially by exercising ownership over our health care? In short, are we citizens or slaves?

Yet, instead of addressing (and overturning) the mandate, Chief Justice Roberts did something even more ominous - he rewrote the statute. Using legal wizardry, he claimed the mandate’s penalty is a tax and, therefore, protected under the Constitution. The ruling grants sweeping new federal powers through the taxing provision. It opens up a vast domain for liberals to assert almost unlimited regulatory jurisdiction over American life - so long as it can be construed as a “tax.” The decision is a stake aimed at the heart of our federalist system. It essentially nullifies state sovereignty, individual rights and the rule of law. It has rendered the Constitution a meaningless piece of paper, a mere obstacle easily overcome by Mr. Obama in his relentless drive to impose a socialist state.

The man of the hour is Chief Justice Roberts. I never trust anyone with a constant silly smirk on his face. And he has confirmed my dislike of unmanly mannerisms. Clearly, the administration succeeded in intimidating him. For months, Mr. Obama and his surrogates made it clear that should the conservative bloc strike down Obamacare, the Roberts court would be vilified by the left throughout the election campaign. The strategy worked: The chief justice was cowed. The result, however, is that the court’s institutional integrity has been badly damaged. Mr. Obama has eroded the Supreme Court’s independence, bending it to his will.

Contrary to myth, the president is not a traditional New Deal Democrat or a black Franklin D. Roosevelt who believes in public works programs and lavish social spending. Rather, Mr. Obama presides over the most lawless, radical administration in U.S. history. He wants to forge an economic order dominated by big government, big labor and big business. He has appointed countless policy “czars” possessing Cabinet-level powers without the consent of Congress. In essence, he took over General Motors and Chrysler and gave it to his union allies. He has granted amnesty to nearly 1 million illegal immigrants. He has successfully prevented states, such as Arizona, from defending their sovereign territory from foreign criminals. He has exerted executive privilege to shield a racist and corrupt Justice Department complicit in gun-smuggling to Mexican drug cartels. He has passed a law, the National Defense Authorization Act, that enables the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens simply because the government says it suspects them of being “terrorists.” He has authorized a “kill list” that empowers him to assassinate alleged terrorists anywhere around the world - even if it means causing collateral damage, such as the deaths of innocent bystanders. And now he has compelled the Supreme Court to blatantly violate the plain text of the Constitution in order to amass the greatest power grab in U.S. history - by levying the largest tax increase in U.S. history - under the guise of universal health care.

This is not old-style liberalism, but fascism. It is a distinctly American kind of fascism - one buttressed by Congress and the Supreme Court, not jack boots and the secret police. But the result is the same: the destruction of our constitutional republic. Mr. Obama is increasingly unconstrained by checks and balances.

“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious,” said the Roman statesman Cicero. “But it cannot survive treason from within.”

Throughout his presidency, Mr. Obama has betrayed the American people, the rule of law and the Constitution itself. Obamacare is more unpopular today than when it was first passed. It is the means by which he is centralizing arbitrary power to expand government control over American society. Courts cannot be counted upon to defend our liberties. It is up to the voters in November. The choice is simple and stark: Defeat Mr. Obama and maybe Obamacare will be repealed or re-elect him and consign our republic to an early grave.

Jeffrey T. Kuhner is a columnist at The Washington Times and president of the Edmund Burke Institute.