Nietzsche, Lenin, State Idolatry

 From Nietzsche's Of the New Idol chapter in Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

The State is the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies too; and this lie creeps from its mouth: 'I, the state, am the people.'  

Confusion of the language of good and evil; I offer you this as the sign of the state.. 

 It is destroyers who set snares for many and call it a State. 

And with this in mind, a quick look or reminder of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, (or Marxist-Leninists). Broadly, under such statist ideologies the state is elevated to the highest power in life and effectively owns its citizens. The people don’t dwell in life, but rather the parameters of the State are said to be life itself. The state of existence and the state are one and the same!

So onto Lenin, and after he, in his benevolence, allowed general elections to the Constituent Assembly in November 1917 the more moderate Socialist Revolutionaries won 41% of the vote, while Lenin's Bolsheviks gained 23.5%. Lenin's response was to dissolve the assembly, and carry on as a dictatorship, justified by the term "dictatorship of the proletariat". And anyone from now on felt to be a threat to the State dictatorship was declared and demonised as “an enemy of the people.” 

So exactly as Nietzsche described, this state stated itself to be “the people”, and so to be a threat to the totalitarian system was to be, as said, “an enemy of the people.” The language of confusion.

Just to add, the typical modern transposition of that phrase “enemy of the people” appears to be “on the far-right”. And in some little snippet recently I saw an Irish governmental politician, when pressed as to what was meant by “far right”, and against which such threats the state was awarding itself powers to limit or silence “hate speech”, in her stumbling response, she mentioned a trait of being of the far-right was being “anti-government” and “anti-state.”

And even on that point, since what is historically meant by far-right is, just as with the far-left, a belief in the limitless elevation of the parameters of the state to absolute power over life, then to be ideologically of the far-right is certainly not to be “anti-state” - in fact the opposite. Though of course, despite the bandying about of words like “misinformation”, intellectual truth is not any kind of concern in these realms.