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from your article

No one should directly compare Lenin’s seizure of power in a military coup in 1917 with the populist insurgency that has swept through America and elsewhere in the west through the democratic process. And the lies the communists told for decades are different from Bannon’s or Trump’s. But much of Lenin’s political style and strategy can be adapted to present conditions. He depended on constant conflict and drama. He deliberately used shock tactics. He was nearly always domineering, abusive and combative, and often downright vicious. He battered opponents into submission with the deliberate use of violent language, not because he was personally vicious – he wasn’t – but as a technique “calculated to evoke hatred, aversion, contempt … not to convince, not to correct the mistakes of the opponent but to destroy him, to wipe him and his organisation off the face of the earth”.