Time to topple Vladimir Lenin's statue in Portland? Internet debates if he was a 'slave owner like George Washington'
As the Black Lives Matter protests continue over police brutality and systemic racism against the African-American community, especially in the wake of George Floyd's death, vandalizing statues of slave owners has become a thing. And when The Daily Wire decided to compare and contrast the fate met by a George Washington statue in Portland, and a Vladimir Lenin one in Seattle, all hell broke loose as social media users heavily indulged in abundant passionate name-calling and factual stumping, debating whether Lenin was a slave owner or not. And more importantly, should his Seattle statue remain intact?
The Wire's tweet showed Washington's statue vandalized with smeared red paint and facing the ground. The Lenin one was still standing proud, prompting several users to ask why Lenin, who they claim was a slave owner, was left alone. Quipping about the outrageous bias in vandalizing statues of white supremacists from the past, a user tweeted: "Why would any location in the US have a statue of Lenin?" Another chimed in with the grim reminder that "Lenin created an entire slave nation." Lenin, who served as the head of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924, was known for his extremely criticized practice of gulags, which Twitter has now ruled an equivalent of plantations where slaves were forced to work.
These tweets seemed to gain momentum soon and enough to call for pro-Lenin supporters to come to fight back, claiming he never owned a slave, but Lenin's critics came armed strong and factually. Soon they began dropping the little reminder of Lenin's gulags, the government agency in charge of Soviet labor camps that was eerily similar to owning slaves. "I would say a country that brutally enforced slavery for another 75 years run by a dude whose dentures were made of slave teeth isn’t exactly a model of 'nonauthoritarian' government," snarked yet another user.
Soon Lenin supporters tweeted, "To the best of my knowledge, Vladimir Lenin didn’t own slaves so this post is really stupid." The controversy was further catalyzed by army vet and writer Charlotte Clymer trying to educate her followers on Lenin's truth, and the non-vandalized statue of him in Seattle, tweeting: "Hi, pics of the Lenin statue in Seattle are being passed around among conservatives. A few quick notes: 1. It's privately owned and situated on private property. 2. It has, in fact, been frequently vandalized. 3. Lenin was not a slave owner, you Confederate apologist f*cks." Another one chimed in, tweeting: "The accusation of Lenin being a slave owner because of 'forced labor camps' and 'gulags' is SO F*CKING RICH coming from the country that props up the prison-industrial complex, the 13th amendment, and capitalism."
Noting how the bigger narrative was shifting focus from racial brutality to what statues get vandalized, a user simply stated: "I don’t defend slave owners or advocates of slavery. I also don’t defend Lenin, whose bolsheviks enslaved an entire country and ostracized religious groups, especially Jews. Is this the hill you want to die on? If his statue goes down, it goes down. F*ck him. And you."