The Other Red Ken

A couple of caustic quotes from a blog-essay by my favorite ex-Trotskyist, Ken MacLeod:

The great scandal of Lenin was that he taught realpolitik to the lower classes and backward peoples. If the working class was ever to become a ruling class it had better start thinking like one, and for a ruling class there are no rules.

And:

The writings of a great amoralist—a de Sade, a Stirner, a Nietzsche—can inspire a handful of murders in two centuries. Over the same period, the writings of a great moral philosopher—an Aquinas, a Kant, a Bentham, a Mill—can justify, if not indeed incite, the deaths of millions in just wars and just revolutions. Morality is an immensely dangerous and destructive force, which must be restrained by the strongest human passions and sympathies if it is not to break all the bonds of society.