No one can understand Marxism today who has not made his own the Leninist concept of the party: the disciplined élite theoretically and technically trained to seize the state machine and work it ruthlessly in the name of the proletariat. If the ultimate end is almost the liberation of human association from the mutilation and disfigurement which is deemed the inescapable consequence of inequality and coercion, the road to that end lies through a kind of rational violence. The student of Lenin's writings is repeatedly impressed by the union in them of an almost icy discipline with a neo-Hitlerite passion of destruction. There is no flinching from a breach with the past of the savage and drastic kind: yet the mood is never one of Götterdämmerung; the temper is often more nearly that of the Aufklärung, the mood Voltairean rather than Wagnerian.
(Denys L. Munby and D. M. MacKinnon, "Leninism and Stalinism," in Christian Faith and Communist Faith: A Series of Studies by Members of the Anglican Communion, ed. D. M. MacKinnon [London: Macmillan & Company, 1953], 21-57, at 34)
Note from KBJ: Sound familiar?
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 