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This story may or may not be a fairy tale, though there are certainly fairies in it. However, unlike any of his Victorian forebears or most of his contemporaries, Machen manages to achieve, only a few years before the comfortably kitsch flower fairies of Cicely Mary Barker, the singular feat of rendering fairies terrifying. With James Hogg’s 'Confessions of a Justified Sinner', Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Thrawn Janet’ and several of M. R. James’s marvellous ghost stories, ‘The White People’ is one of only a handful of literary texts that have genuinely unnerved me.

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By Yair Amichai-Hamburger

On the Internet, terrorists can find a wide-open playground for particularly sophisticated violence. I have no doubt that the people at the US Department of Defense, when they brought about the inception of the Internet, never thought in their worst nightmares that come 2013, every terrorist splinter group would boast a website and that all the advantages of the Internet would be at the service of terrorists for organizing, planning, and executing their attacks on innocent people.

The Internet helps terror groups in a variety of activities: recruiting members, establishing communication, attaining publicity, and raising funds. Terror organizations direct their messages to their various audiences over the net with great sophistication. The primary audience is the central core of activists, who use the website as a platform for information about various activities. Messages are disguised by pre-agreed codes, and if you’re unfamiliar with the codes, you won’t understand what’s being talked about.

By means of such encoded messages, a global network of terror can operate with great efficiency. It can manage its affairs like an international corporation: the leader passes instructions to various operations officers around the world, and they pass instructions onward to their subordinates. Using the Internet for information transfer, the organization can create a compartmentalized network of activists who cannot identify one another. Even if one cell is exposed, the damage to the overall network is minimal. Ironically, that survivability was exactly the factor that guided the US Department of Defense when it set up the Internet in anticipation of a doomsday scenario.

The second audience that the terror websites speak to is the general community of supporters. Messages for them are open, not disguised, and the operational side is toned down a little. At the site for the general public, the focus is on negative messages regarding the terror organization’s target, and on legitimizing attacks against it without going into specifics. The site presents history in a way that suits its agenda, and often it tries to attract legitimate contributions for its activities by concealing them behind various charitable fronts.

Some of these sites sell souvenirs with the terror organization’s logo, as if it were a sports team. Thus fans can buy scarves or shirts that give them a strengthened sense of identification with the terror organization. The site allows visitors to join discussions, and in some cases it also tries to attract people from the community of true believers into the community of activists. Of course such a process is undertaken with much caution in order that spies not infiltrate the organization. When new volunteers are recruited, there is a great advantage to enlisting people who don’t fit the terrorist stereotype, since such people can serve as couriers without immediately arousing suspicion. On the other hand, the less the new volunteer belongs to the community from which the terror organization sprang, or resembles a member of that community, the greater the suspicion of untrustworthiness. So such a new volunteer will be performing under close watch, or will be assigned to a one-time task that is to end in the grave.

The third audience is the group to be terrorized. In addressing this group, the organization has the objective of arousing fear, and it publicizes its terror operations in order to “win” the audience to the idea that each of them, including their family and closest friends, is likely to be the next terror victim. This baleful message is accompanied by an ultimatum to the audience: if all its demands are not met, the terror organization will make good on all its threats. The terror organization will try to show that because it’s fighting for absolute justice and has no mercy as it makes its way to that goal, it’s unstoppable. It immortalizes its terrorism in well-concocted documentary films that portray successes among its deadly operations, and by documenting executions performed on camera.

Examining the way that terror organizations address their audiences over various channels, we can see that most terror organizations deploy a rather impressive public-relations corps. Many terror organizations, not satisfied with a website alone, expand onto social networks and use other net-based avenues such as e-mail, chats, and forums.

The language of terror is quite interesting. Terrorists lay all the blame on the other party, which they label the aggressor while they present themselves as the real victims who speak in the name of human rights and who champion the oppressed. Take for example the international terror organizations. They explain that terror is the only method they have for striking back defensively at the imperialist aggressor. The terror organizations delegitimize their opponents and describe their enemy as the ultimate aggressor, a perpetrator of criminal actions such as genocide, slaughter, and massacres. Sometimes the fight is considered part of a continuing religious war and the messages bear a religious aura. For instance, a jihad with the prophet Muhammad as the commander in chief, in charge of the courageous legions that the organization represents.

Terror organizations tend to describe their murderous activities as self-defense by a persecuted underdog. They ignore the human side of their victims and use the psychological tool of dehumanization against the opponent, defining it as a group that has no human face. Thus for example, after the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, the Al Qaeda organization completely ignored the thousands of murdered people and chose to focus on the indignities that the capitalist Americans had wreaked, and were continuing to wreak, and on the importance of the Twin Towers as a symbol of the western world’s decadence.

Yair Amichai-Hamburger is Director of The Research Center for Internet Psychology, Israel, and author of The Social Net: Understanding our online behavior. This article originally appeared as part of a series on Psychology Today.

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October marks the time of year when I go out of my way to read something scary, and not in a “Why did any publisher support this hot mess of a novel?” way, but in a “When am I ever going to sleep without the lights on again?” kind of way. I haven’t selected this year’s addition to that annual bookshelf, but if I had to choose the scariest book I ever read, I’d pick Jay Anson’s The Amityville Horror.

I know it’s now generally accepted that Amityville is a fake “true story,” but that didn’t make it any easier to descend into the basement after reading the book in the 9th grade. We had an old garage door opener on the wall down there with two red dots that glowed like the eyes of an evil doll, spirit, demon, the Devil, or what have you. The book—absurd as it was in spots—combined with those lights and a creeping dread that my mother’s house might contain a secret red room created a cacophony of horror in my brain, and the side effects manifested in equally absurd habits of safety and precaution for months afterward.

Since that first sample of terror, I became a fan of thrills, chills, and things that go bump in the night—be it eerie fiction, true crime, or the paranormal unknown—and when deciding what book to tackle this October, I grew curious about what other authors and editors I know would select as the scariest book they ever read, and so I asked…

What was the scariest book you’ve ever read, and how did it affect your writing and/or your life after you put the book back on the shelf?  

“Helter Skelter, by Vincent Bugliosi. When I was a kid, my best friend didn’t read fiction, and I rarely read nonfiction, so we made a pact to exchange books we each thought the other would like. I gave him IT. He gave me Helter Skelter, Vincent Bugliosi’s account of the Manson Family murders. No offense to Stephen King, but Helter Skelter messed me up in ways IT never could. Both books deal with the madness that lurks beneath the thin veneer of modern society—but while King wrote of monsters, Bugliosi convinced me that the monsters were us.”

– Chris F. Holm

“It was the right book at the right time—1968: I was 22, doing my student teaching, and my supervising teacher lent me I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. Utter claustrophobic terror—zombie-vampires—some of whom might happen to be your friends, loved ones, etc., back from the dead to get you. I’d read and loved Matheson’s collections of short horror stories, but this short novel built the nightmare and sustained it and sustained it until you were saying, “I want out of this” even as you knew you’d stick with it to the bitter yet triumphant end. Once I knew that a “modern writer” could do it without ghosts or ghoulies or an English moor and Gothic trappings, I was there. It was an epiphany, and strengthened the desire I’d had to write horror, which began in grade school with “The Pit and Pendulum” and “Tell Tale Heart.”

– Mort Castle

“The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood horrified me. The scariest part is that it becomes more and more evident that Atwood may have been forecasting the future of the North American female experience. The thing I take with me after I set it down is always the same: I should keep writing my experience, and never let the bastards shut me up.”

– Dena Rash Guzman

“Aside from the user’s manual for the first printer I got, I’d say the scariest book I ever read was James Dickey’s Deliverance. I was really too young when I first read it (about 14). My mom, a high school English teacher, had brought it home and told me not to read it, so of course I grabbed it and read it in secret as soon as I could. The impact on me was: the world is a much more dangerous place than I’d thought. Since then, as an author, I’ve remembered it and tried to write as well and as frankly as Dickey. And to not shy away from uncomfortable scenes and topics!”

– Elizabeth Sims

“Horror’s like Erotica—imagination is key. Don’t rob it by giving every last grisly detail. Exercise some subtlety and restraint. As a writer, I learned this and more from Henry James’ truly haunting The Turn of the Screw.”

– David Comfort

As you can see from the answers above, there are all kinds of ways we can scare ourselves—everything from hack-and-slash stories to tales that make us see the horror in our ourselves and in our potential futures. Tell us what you think in the comments below…did we select your favorite frightful tome? Is nonfiction scarier than fiction? Is there a book we should consider reading that will keep us awake in the dead of night?

–

James Duncan is a content editor for Writer’s Digest. He is also the author of The Cards We Keep: Ten Stories

CNN National Security Analyst Peter Bergen visited the Carnegie Council in New York City late last year to discuss Talibanistan, a collection he recently edited for Oxford University Press. Bergen, who produced the first television interview with Osama bin Laden in 1997, discussed the positive changes in Afghanistan over the past ten years: “Afghans have a sense that what is happening now is better than a lot of things they’ve lived through…”

Bergen was joined at the event by Anand Gopal, who wrote the first chapter in Talibanistan. Gopal recounts the story of Hajji Burget Khan, a leader in Kandahar who encouraged his fellow Afghans to support the Americans after the fall of the Taliban. But after US forces received bad intelligence, perceiving Hajji Burget Khan as a threat, he was killed in May 2002, which had a disastrous effect in the area, leading many to join the insurgency.

Peter Bergen on Afghanistan:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Anand Gopal on the tragic mistake made by the American military:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Peter Bergen is the director of the National Securities Studies Program at the New America Foundation, and is National Security Analyst at CNN. He is the author of Manhunt, The Longest War and The Osama Bin Laden I Know. Anand Gopal is a fellow at the New America Foundation and a journalist who has reported for the Wall Street Journal, the Christian Science Monitor, and other outlets on Afghanistan. Talibanistan: Negotiating the Borders Between Terror, Politics, and Religion was edited by Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann and includes contributions from Anand Gopal.

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Part One - The Suit Naturally, in a lot of ways, this is the most important part. I was volunteered for the role of The Bunny for our five stores here and I had no involvement in choosing or renting the suit. This was a horrible, horrible mistake. If possible, go to the rental place - see the suit - try it on if at all possible. The suit we got was a misbegotten thing that looked like it was

A classic spaceman via the 1950's, with some contemporary and victorian aesthetics, versus a classic space amoeba, enjoy.

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By Edward Zelinsky

The torture debate has become its own form of torture. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi finds herself enmeshed in ongoing acrimony about what she knew and when she knew it. Former Vice President Dick Cheney has emerged as an outspoken defender of the Bush Administration’s interrogation policies. Unfortunately for him and his party, Vice President Cheney, like Speaker Pelosi, currently lacks credibility with much of the public.

Our public debate about torture will continue to be as unedifying as it is bitter until we move beyond the partisan counter charges and acknowledge some simple, albeit inconvenient, truths: In the wake of 9/11, we were scared – and justifiably so. In this environment, some practices took place which should not have occurred. The universal fear felt after the attack on the Twin Towers does not justify these improper practices. It does, however, explain them.

Though it was only eight years ago, it is difficult for many of us to recall the environment after the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. That attack traumatized the United States. September 11, 2001 was, by some measures, the single bloodiest day in U.S. history. The general, and quite plausible, assumption was that the U.S. mainland would again be assaulted by terrorists. The overwhelming imperative, embraced by Republicans and Democrats alike, was to prevent or mitigate another 9/11-type onslaught.

It is now clear that the U.S. government did some things in the wake of 9/11 which it should not have been done. Federal agencies did these things, not because Americans are a bad or immoral people, but because we were frightened. Members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, were informed of these practices and supported them – or at least acquiesced to them. Democrats today do not want to admit that they were complicit in these improper practices. Republicans do not want to admit that inappropriate practices occurred. Until we get past this unproductive posturing, we cannot have a serious and necessary national debate about the future.

In large measure, America’s response to 9/11 is cause for national pride. Despite the trauma of the World Trade Center attacks, there was nothing equivalent to the Red Scare of World War I or the World War II detention of Americans of Japanese descent. The spirit of McCarthyism did not reemerge after 9/11, in no small measure because President Bush carefully and consistently defined America’s battle as a fight against Islamic extremism, not against Islam’s believers.

Nevertheless, after the attacks on the Twin Towers, some things happened which should not have. Congressional Democrats and Republicans were informed and acquiesced. We need to explore these improper practices in a sober, careful way. Such an exploration must identify which practices crossed ethical and legal borderlines. Such an exploration must also help us understand how to deter such improper practices in the future while, at the same time, encouraging the aggressive protection of Americans and the American homeland. Such a measured debate will not interest the partisans determined to score political points. It will, however, be the way in which we pursue simultaneously our security and our national values.

Karen Greenberg is the Executive Director of the Center on Law and Security at New York University School of Law.  Her newest book, The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First 100 Days, is a gripping narrative account of the first 100 days at Guantanamo and an analysis of how this time set up patterns of power that would come to dominate the Bush administration’s overall strategy in the “War on Terror.”  Below is an excerpt from the very beginning of the book.  Be sure to watch tonight when Greenberg appears on The Daily Show.

Two days after Christmas, the decision was announced to the public.  Donald Rumsfeld made it official.  The new detention operation would be set up at Guantanamo Bay.  SOUTHCOM would supervise the activities on the base.  The 2nd Force Service Support Group, normally based at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, North Carolina, would run the effort.  It would be a joint command, combining the efforts of the various branches of the U.S. military.  The name of the joint task force would be JTF 160-the very same label that had been used for the task force during the migrant crisis.

Relying on the patriotism of the forces on the ground and their obedience to the chain of command, Secretary Rumsfeld anointed Guantanamo in defiance not just of warnings from the past, but of military professionalism.

True, the military men and women on the ground, their superiors at SOUTHCOM, the interagency group in Washington, and the Pentagon all seemed to agree with one another.  In the shadow of 9/11, they all wanted to do the patriotic thing-which in this case was to help General Franks get rid of the prisoners under his command.  But the ready assent was the beginning of a long, slow slide into an untenable and, as it would turn out, extralegal situation that would be more and more difficult to end with each phase of its existence.

But underneath the narrative of agreement lay missteps and warning signs that would come to plague Guantanamo going forward and that were apparent even before the operation was up and running.  Chief among these exceptions to the norm had been the subversion of process that had been illustrated in the exclusionary and secretive way in which the Military Order of November 13 had been drafted and turned into policy, a habit that would come to define the Bush administration through its eight years.

This bureaucratic exclusivity would grow in its destructive impact as Guantanamo came into being, but for the moment, there was a more pressing danger, one that lay outside of the usurpation of powers in Washington or the extralegal premises of Guantanamo, and one that was overlooked by those making policy in D.C.  This was the danger posed by the fact that the United States military was not quite equipped to handle the mission that was about to be handed them-that of detaining prisoners of war.  It wasn’t just that the naval base itself was being asked to perform well above its capacity in terms of resources.  It was also a matter of professional expertise.  The nation’s military did not have the requisite expertise in prisoner of war detention, as the United States had not had to deal with prisoners of war on its own since World War II.

Nor was it helpful that the military was to conduct the operation on the blueprint of migrant detention operations.  The task at hand and the professional skills readily available to the Pentagon did not match up.  The plan for the detention effort that JTF 160 was given stood on the books as a migrant crisis operation, a template that ironically had itself struggled with definitional terms when it forbade the use of the term “refugee” for the camp’s residents. Now, in the year 2001, the definition of terms was intentionally obfuscated once again.  No matter what words were used, prisoner incarceration was not equivalent to migrant detention.  Captives were neither refugees nor migrants; they demanded a whole other kind of treatment and a separate set of policies.  This lack of expertise was further hindered by the fact that the job of SOUTHCOM was to deal with the countries and of the Caribbean and Latin America and issues germane to that geographical part of the globe.  Thus, its knowledge base was largely irrelevant when it came to Middle Eastern and South Asian culture.

Though Guantanamo may have provided a legal godsend and a logistically manageable environment, deeper realities suggested that trouble lay ahead for the detention facility.  It stood not just on historical precedent and legal opportunism but on the unstable ground of secrecy, disregard for professionalism and expertise, and a legal flexibility.  The deployed of JTF 160 to Guantanamo was an emergency act, done in lieu of a better option-the least worse choice for the least worst place.

No one understood better the treacherous pragmatic-and moral-implications of sidesteppping established law and policy than the man chosen to command the detention operation there.

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For today's high five, we have flashback to the 70s.


Stan Lee's Incredible Hulk.

Yes, I watched every episode of The Incredible Hulk. I loved that show - the wise doctor with his crazy monster side. "You won't like me when I'm angry!"

I love monsters. When I was five years old I went to go see Godzilla with my cousin Jack. I had a hard time watching movies as a child. I'd place my hands on my ears just in case something happened that freaked me out. I would also dive under the seat at the movie theater. I can remember my mom trying to fish me out after the movie and not being able to do it until an appropriate Junior Mint box was offered to draw me out. I spent a lot of time as a child, not being terrified by the movie or the book, but being terrified by what I imagined the book or movie might say. So today’s tip is to remember the fear and let it inform your work. Think about your monsters and slip some of that into you story.

Well, the first thing is that I love monsters, I identify with monsters. Guillermo del Toro

I hope everyone is working hard and have lots of fun. Let me know how it goes!

Yuval Ginbar is a scholar and human rights activist, and has recently written a book for us called Why Not Torture Terrorists?: Moral, Practical and Legal Aspects of the “Ticking Bomb” Justification for Torture. In the post below he gives his opinions on the Israeli academics who support the use of torture in the “war on terror” and are seeking its legitimization.

Apologies. What follows are not sensational revelations about Israel’s secret involvement in torture worldwide (though there have been some reports to that effect). I am referring to a possibly less exciting phenomenon, which is all in the public domain. To me, however, it is no less worrying: Israel has produced a surprising yield of academics who support torture and seek its legitimization, if not legalisation. Publishing widely, including in the most prestigious journals and publishing houses, they advocate the use of interrogational torture in the “war on terror”.

There are variations, of course. One favours torture to be authorized by a “public committee” – a variant of Alan Dershowitz’ “torture warrants” idea. Others propose allowing “only” methods that are “short of torture,” including one who attempts to show Americans how some forms of “coercive interrogation” would accord with their Constitution. However, the methods that the “torture lite” academics recommend, such as sleep and sensory deprivation, become by all accounts - legal, “common sensical” and factual - full torture, at least over time. No - guidance on how interrogators would know when to stop are not attached. Nor are any examples of how such methods were used without becoming torture. This is because no such examples exist.

But perhaps the speciality of pro-torture Israeli academics is devising schemes which would, they say, enable an absolute legal prohibition on torture to co-exist with allowing its use in “ticking bomb situations” – a “relativized” absolute prohibition, as one of them (seriously) quipped. Some have proposed that while torture should be prohibited by law absolutely, if a leader orders torture in extreme situations, his act would later undergo “ex post-facto ratification”. Others propose a modification of deontological morality so as to allow torture in extreme situations, as long as it is not “officialized”.

However heavily endowed with academic titles the writers are, however extensive and thorough their research is, and however rich their essays and books are with references, cases and footnotes, the results are invariably absurd, as the very combination they seek is self-contradictory. In my book I analyse several of these “have-your-cake-and-eat-it” solutions. Actually, perhaps a more apt – and updated -description would be the “yeah-but-no-but” approaches to torture. They ultimately make as much sense as Little Britain’s Vicky Pollard.

All this could all have been quite amusing were it not for the fact that such scholars – and other, non- Israeli ones, of course - are advocating that our officials be allowed, through one moral or legal scheme or another, to inflict excruciating pain on helpless prisoners, demolishing in the process an international legal and moral consensus it took humanity hundreds of years to achieve. And were it not for the fact that a “yeah-but-no-but” torture system, which most of the Israeli academics are in effect modelling their proposals on, is actually in operation – you guessed it – in Israel.

In 1999 Israel’s Supreme Court prohibited issuing the General Security Service (GSS) with instructions on how to inflict what was euphemistically called “moderate physical pressure” on Palestinian detainees, as had been the custom until then, and ruled that GSS agents cannot be authorized to inflict such “pressure”. The Court cited the absolute prohibition on torture in international law. So far so good. However, when it comes to “ticking-time bomb” situations, the Court ruled that the case of a GSS interrogator who tortures (the Court too preferred a euphemism: “applied physical interrogation methods”) would then be considered by the Attorney-General, and if need be by the courts, where “his potential criminal liability shall be examined in the context of the ‘necessity’ defence” – a criminal law defence which, as currently held in Israeli law, justifies actions in extreme situations if they produce the “lesser evil”.

The result has been predictable. Within a couple of years the GSS itself was admitting it was torturing – oops! – euphemism time again: using “exceptional interrogation measures” – in dozens of cases annually. All were cases of “ticking bombs”, of course. Figures from human rights NGOs, such as the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, have been much higher. Number of GSS interrogators convicted of torturing (or any other offence)? Zero. Prosecutions? Zero. Criminal investigations? Zero. Once introduced as a means of legitimizing torture, the “ticking bomb” and its legal corollary, the “necessity defence”, have overwhelmed the system.

Israel is not the focus of my book, but of the four “models of legalized torture” described and analysed there, two have, unfortunately, been in operation in Israel, in one form or another. Then there is the “torture warrants” model. The fourth is, of course, the US model.

But what about the big questions? Is ‘waterboarding’ or (perhaps more importantly) other, less blatant interrogation techniques considered torture under international law? Does international law allow the use of painful techniques falling short of torture, or the use of the “necessity defence” to exonerate torturers? What happens to a state, morally and practically, once it allows anti-terrorist torture? And – maybe the biggest question - would it not be morally justifiable to torture terrorists in order to save many innocent lives in “ticking bomb situations”? In other words – Why Not Torture Terrorists?

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Below we have excerpted part of the introduction from the 40th anniversary edition of Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror: A Reassessment.  This book, the definitive work on Stalin’s purges, provides an eloquent chronicle of one of humanity’s most tragic events.  Robert Conquest is the author of some thirty books of history, biography, poetry, fiction, and criticism.  He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the British Academy, and the American Academy of Art and Sciences. He is at present a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

The Great Terror of 1936 to 1938 did not come out of the blue.  Like any other historical phenomenon, it had its roots in the past.  It would no doubt be misleading to argue that it followed inevitably from the nature of Soviet society and of the Communist Party.  It was itself a means of enforcing violent change upon that society and that party.  But all the same, it could not have been launched excpet against the extraordinarily idiosyncratic background of Bolshevik rule; and its special characteristics, some of them hardly credible to foreign minds, derive from a specific tradition.  The dominating ideas of the Stalin period, the evolution of the oppostionists, the very confession in the great show trials, can hardly be followed without considering not so mch the whole Soviet past as the development of the Party, the consolidation of the dictatorship, the movements of faction, the rise of individuals, and the emergence of extreme economic politics.

After his first stroke on 26 May 1922, Lenin, cut off to a certain degree from the immediacies of political life, contemplated the unexpected defects which had arisen in the revolution he had made.

He had already remarked, to he delegates to the Party’s Xth Congress in March 1921, “We have failed to convince the broad masses.”  He had felt obliged to excuse the low quality of many Party members: ‘No profound and popular movement in all history has taken place without its share of filth, without adventurers and rogues, without boastful and noisy elements…A ruling party inevitably attracts careerists.”  He had noted that the Soviet State had “many bureaucratic deformities,” speaking of “that same Russian apparatus…borrowed from Tsardom and only just covered with a Soviet veneer.”  And just before his stroke he had noted “the prevalence of personal spite and malice” in the committees charged with purging the Party.

Soon after his recovery from this first stroke, he was remarking, “We are living in a sea of ilegality,” and observing, “The Communist kernal lacks general culture”, the culture of the middle classes in Russia was “inconsiderable, wretched, but in any case greater than that of our responsible Communists.”  In the autumn he was criticizing carelessness and parasitism, and invented special phrases for the boasts and lies of the Communists: “Com-boasts and Com-lies.”

In his absence, his subordinates were acting more unacceptably than ever.  His criticisms had hithero been occasional reservations uttered in the intervals of busy political and governmental activity.  Now they became his main preoccupation.  He found that Stalin, to whom as General Secretary he had entrusted the Party machine in 1921, was hounding the Party in Georgia.  Stalin’s emissary, Ordzhonkidze, had even struck the Georgian Communist leader Kabanidze.  Lenin favored a policy of concilation in Georgia, where the population was solidy anti-Bolshevik and had only just lost its independence to a Red Army assault.  He took strong issue with Stalin.

It was at this time that he wrote his “Testament.”  In it he made it clear that in his view Stalin was, after Trotsky, “the most able” leader of the Central Committee; and he criticized him, not as he did Trotsky (for “too far-reaching self-confidence and a disposition to be too much attracted by the purely administrative side of affairs”), but only for having “concentrated an enormous power in his hands” which he was uncertain Stalin would always know how to use with “sufficient caution.”  A few days later, after Stalin had used obscene language and made threats to Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, in connection with Lenin’s intervention in the Georgian affair, Lenin added a postscript to the Testament recommending Stalin’s removal from the General Secretaryship on the gournds of his rudeness and capriciousness- as being incompatible, however, only with that particular office.  On the whole, the reservations made about Trotsky must seem more serious when it comes to politics proper, and his “ability” to be an administrative executant rather more than a potential leader in his own right.  It is only fair to add that it was to Trotsky that Lenin turned in support in his last attempts to influence policy; but Trotsky failed to carry out Lenin’s wishes.

The Testament was concerned to avoid a split between Trotsky and Stalin.  The solution proposed- an increase in the size of the Central Committee- was futile.  In his last articles Lenin went on attack “bureaucratic misrule and willfulness,” spole of the condition of the State machine as “repugnant,” and concluded gloomily, “We lack sufficienct civilization to enable us to pass straight on to Socialism although we have the political requisities.”

“The political requisities…”- but these were precisely the activity of the Party and governmental leadership which he was condemming in practice.  Over the past years he had personally launched the system of rule by a centralized Party against- if necessary- all other social forces.  He had creaded the Bolsheviks, the new type of party, centralized and discilpline, in the first palce. He had preserved its identity in 1917, when before his arrival from exile the Bolshevik leaders had aligned themselves on a course of conciliation with the rest of the Revolution.  There seems little doubt that without him, the Social Democrats would have reunited and would have taken the normal position of such a movement in the State.  Instead, he had kept the Bolsheviks intact, and then sought and won sole power- again against much resistance from his own followers…

…In destroying the Deomcratic tendency within the Communist Party, Lenin in effect threw the game to the manipulators of the Party machine.  Henceforward, the appartus was to be first the most powerful and later the only force within the Party.  The answer to the question “Who will rule Russia?” became simply “Who will win a faction fight confined to a narrow section of the leadership?” Candidates for power had already shown their hands.  As Lenin lay in the twilight of the long decline from his last stroke, striving to correct all this, they were already at grips in the first round of the struggle which was to culminate in the Great Purge.

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