On Shooting a Tsesarevich
On Shooting a Tsesarevich
Apologies for posting.
I should say by way of introductory remarks, that while this is an effort post, it is an effort post on a shitposting website, and thus ab initio a shitpost and therefore be taken in the correct spirit of levity in which it is intended. Don't get my thread locked.
Recent discussion on here has touched on the moral status of the execution of the Romanov family by Bolsheviks ahead of the advancing White Army1. While not exactly of practical significance given how few of us have Royal Families locked up in our basement, it did reveal several significant, (sometimes severe) differences in the philosophical underpinnings of the posters on this website.
A Moral Communism
Moral status as such actually has very little to deal with communism/leftist (in the Marxian vein) in terms of it's internal mechanism. Marx, Engels, Lenin, and the rest of that intellectual lineage2. famously thought very little of moral philosophy. A communist is thus entirely at liberty to dismiss this entire discussion as idealism, and observe that within a Marxist framework, there are no 'good' and 'bad', merely a historically deterministic sequence of class antagonisms that will eventually resolve in favor of the proletariat and thus choosing to be a communist is merely choosing to throw one's hat in with the predetermined victors. This strand of amoral communism thus is not terribly interested in this discussion, and anyone here that adheres to that framework is excused from the discussion as having won the argument.
Given the rest of us do have moral considerations that prefigure our political beliefs, it's necessary for us to sketch out at least a scaffolding for what moral commonalities leftists share before going further, lest we fall into a morass of fundamentally incompatible frameworks stemming from different axiomatic premises. Speaking from my own personal position, I ascribe to leftist political positions as they offer me the greatest promise of granting a comfortable and dignified existence to the largest number of people possible. That in of itself does not make a moral axiom though, as achieving a large amount of something is valueless if the individual components don't themselves have value, and therefore, and a fundamental value informing my politics is the axiomatic value/sanctity of human life. So I am taking on as an assumption that generally speaking, want everyone to have dignified and comfortable lives3. If that position doesn't more or less describe you, you are also excused as having won the argument.
Justifying Shooting a Tsesarevich in my Pajamas
Which brings us to the Romanovs. In keeping with 3. above, and considering the minor children of royals not culpable for the systematic injustices perpetrated under the dictatorship of their parents, we'll limit our discussion here to the minors (Anastasia, and especially Alexei), though I think the general outline of the argument can be applied to pretty much all of the Tsar's issue. The entirety of the family, along with their retinue, were bulleted and bayoneted in Yekaterinburg about 10 days before white occupied the city. In attempting to defend the legacy of one of the most politically successful socialist projects in history4., this action has largely been justified on the left. Examining the commonly proposed justifications in light of our moral principles finds them universally lacking.
- It was necessary in order to safeguard the immediate success of the revolution against an individual with claim to the throne.
This argument goes that while we do value human life and dignity, our efforts to maximize these will sometimes require that certain human lives be forfeit, essentially turning this into a trolley problem5.. This argument differs in an important aspect from the trolley problem in that the trolley problem consists of single moment in time with clearly articulable and certain outcomes given at the outset. Leaving Alexei alive was in no way certain to doom the revolution to failure of significant struggle, as he could have been maintained in custody, and ascribing such outsized influence on the course of political affairs to the life of a sickly 13 year old is a profoundly anti-materialist approach to history. History is replete with challenges to establish socialist authority6., none of which stemmed from claimants to the Imperial thrown. Further, liquidating the Tsar, his children, and his brother did not exhaust the Romanov line, his cousin could and did proclaim himself Emperor-in-exile, and despite being old enough to actually head a restorationist intervention, none materialized. So the notion that killing Alexei was necessary fails to stand up to scrutiny 7.. It is also worth noting as an aside that the Romanovs were deeply unpopular, and to wit, were not the government the Bolshevik revolution occurred under, and supporters of the provisional government (domestic and international alike) formed the overwhelming contingent of the White forces, and the notion that a 14 year old tsarist claimant to the thrown would have had a meaningful impact on that colossal clusterfuck strains credulity.
- It prevented a longterm challenge to Boshevik control in a manner similar to Jacobite uprisings or the Bourbon Restoration.
Taking a more longterm view of the problem, it might be acknowledged that the Alexei presented no immediate threat justifying his liquidation, but, drawing from the history of pre-CIA regime changes, he presented a longterm likely/probable/plausible/possible threat in the form of an eventual challenge, and that acting in light of that possibility was justified if not strictly necessary. If we wish to examine this in light of our moral principles, we need to develop some notion of probability calculus; at what point is taking in innocent life now justified in order to avoid certain possible harms that have a certain probability of occurring. You can formalize this to ridiculous extents8., or you can take the legal systems more qualitative approach, of establish some standard of proof (you are, after all, justifying killing someone), where the execution is deemed justified if seems more likely than not/clearly and convincingly/beyond a reasonable doubt that it will prevent further, greater harm in the future. This lets you weaken the requirement that it is necessary to kill him to merely it is prudent to kill him. What is lacking though is any evidence that anyone has meaningfully carried out this process for any standard beyond plausible. The greatest extent to which this is established is that historically, there have been several restorationist insurrections, but no systematized historical study has been undertaken to quantify the risk of insurrection/coup in the presence or absence of an legitimate claimant.9.
Well perhaps we leave it there; a plausible narrative that places Alexei as the cause of some harm is sufficient in our eyes to justify his liquidation. The problem with this is that it is such a liberal standard that it can be applied to nearly everyone. There are scores of documented peasant rebellions throughout history, so by the same standard it is plausible that any given peasant may be at risk for launching a peasant rebellion down the line and thus, by that same standard, we are justified in liquidating them. Universalizing from this generic peasant^.10. to all peasants. And thus our system named aimed an providing dignity and comfort is able to justify pretty much any atrocity.
- The moral culpability of for the executions lies at the feet of the Tsar who created the system and not the executioners themselves.
This argument goes that it was actually the Tsar that placed him in position to be killed by standing at the top of a monarchical system that has ruined and ended untold numbers of lives. Had the Tsar dismantled that system before it came to blows, Alexei would have lived a happily inbred life as a continental European curiosity.
This argument plays fast an lose with the notion of fault to an extent that borders on the absurd. Within getting into the morass that encompasses the legal notion of fault, I'll observe that the executioners where in total control of the situation, given the Romanovs were in the zone of immediate material influence, while the Bolshevik leaderships were at a more distant proximity, and Tsar Nicholas II at the head of the Imperial State was a fleeting memory, having greatly influenced the events that now overtook them, but having no control over them. The Bolshevik's in Ipatiev House or those in leadership in Moscow alone decided who in that house lived and died, they knew that, and they exercised that choice.
- Unpleasant things happen during a revolution and we accept that as soon as they begin.
This is true, but once again, it comes down to the notions of control and proximity. As a leftist, I acknowledge that the struggle for political power may involve the world becoming a worse place (as judged according to my moral principles outline above) due to my actions to make it a better one. This is an abstract acknowledgement. It may also result in me taking actions that I find unpleasant or repugnant11. If it is the moral principles that describe motivate my political struggle though, it is fundamentally self-defeating to exercise my control over my immediate surroundings to knowingly act in a manner that results in an immediate degradation of the world around me (once again, as judged by my moral standards). My actions in the here and now, must be justified according to my principles in the here and now and my actions in the here and now. If 10 minutes ago I was standing in Yekaterinburg and the Whites are closing in, and now I'm still standing in Yekaterinburg and the Whites are still closing in, but now there is a brand new pile of child corpses of my making, then I have made the world a worse place.
No tears for dead peasants
It is reasonable to ask why go to such great lengths to challenge the justifications for the murder of Alexei (which is so emotionally remote to me as to essentially be fictitious). To which I offer the following justifications.
- It's ridiculous and therefore funny.
- Because eventually some of us may be in positions to make decisions that make the world a substantially better or worse place for others, and I want it be very clear what stands before us when making those decisions. No, none of us are going to decide whether or not an heir lives or dies, but we are going to decide how to treat with those around us, and want everyone to pause before they exercise what little control they have in the world around them before making it a worse place, justifying it with a glib aphorism or some half-baked argument.
1. The fitness for humor here is not considered, as something can be both morally bad and the legitimate target of well-done comedy. Like 9/11.
2. I was promised ice cream if I didn't say 'ilk' here.
3. To wit, one of the main justifications for political violence on the left is that it is directed at those preventing others from enjoying dignity, comfort, or well, life.
4. Such as it is.
5. which we may dub the Yekaterinburg Streetcar Defense
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Rebellions_in_the_Soviet_Union
7. One could alternatively take the logical form of necessity as a conditional, ~P -> ~Q with P being "the legitimate claimant to the imperial thrown is killed" and "Q" being "the revolution is successful". Given the contra-factual nature of ~P, the truth value of this statement can't be evaluated directly, but given the analogous situation in China with PuYi, we can strongly infer that this conditional is in fact false and thus logical necessity is not present.
8. define xi to be each enumerated possible future in space X, p(xi) to be the probability of that future occurring, and h(xi) to be the number of lives ruined by Alexei in that future xi. Shoot kid if
9. To reach a preponderance of evidence standard you would need to establish P(Insurrection|Legitimate Claimant) > P(Insurrection), which the strictly materialist interpretation would hold P(Insurrection|Legitimate Claimant) = P(Insurrection).
10 Regular viewers will recognize this as universal generalization.
11 Orwell's description of the conditions of fighting in the Spanish civil war come to mind.
this is that it is such a liberal standard that it can be applied to nearly everyone. There are scores of documented peasant rebellions throughout history, so by the same standard it is plausible that any given peasant may be at risk for launching a peasant rebellion down the line and thus, by that same standard, we are justified in liquidating them.
This folds under scrutiny. Any given peasant may pose a threat of revolt, but a royal heir poses a specific threat, and of a much greater magnitude in both likelihood and severity that the two cases are not comparable. There existed specific powerful groups who had a vested interest in putting an heir to the throne back onto it, and the means to attempt to do so in bloody fashion.
In this case, the specific qualities of the subject set them apart from the general population. I liken it to BRCA positivity. Yes, any given breast may cause cancer. However, it is not prudent to excuse every breast. It is prudent to excise one's breasts if one is double BRCA positive. One does not have to do this, but it is a reasonable response to a specific threat that can prevent greater harm in the future.
Alright I was probably gonna make a post about this if you weren't.
First, I have to say that I'm very surprised at the reaction I've seen where a lot of people seem to regard me as a monster for not taking the event that seriously. So I think it's important to frame it in it's proper place.
A lot of innocent people died on 9/11. You can say what you will about the bankers but you can't seriously claim that the firefighters or plane passengers deserved it. This event happened much more recently than the Romanovs, and there are people alive today with real injuries or trauma who could concievably see a post making fun of 9/11. You can say "America deserved 9/11" all day long, but did those specific Americans? I could just as easily say "The Romanovs deserved it" (though perhaps not those specific Romanovs). We can compare the scale of 9/11 to the scale of the Iraq war in the same way we can compare the scale of the dead Romanovs to the scale of WWI and so forth, and we can compare the cringey overreaction to 9/11 to the cringey overreaction to the Romanovs, given for example that Nicholas II was canonized as a saint not all that long ago. So I say that making fun of 9/11 makes you at least 1000 times more of a monster than making fun of the Romanov's deaths - and yet we (mostly) all do it and make fun of people who take it seriously. So let's put aside the absurd grandstanding of people calling me a monster or whatever and turn to a more levelheaded discussion of the moral philosophy.
OP's approach is one that is concerned with justice and legal principles. They contend that it is necessary to establish an objective, scientific study to show that benefit can be derived from killing the Romanovs before it can ever be acceptable to kill them. But when should such a study have been produced? During the war, they were a little busy. Before the war, it's a little difficult to publish an objective, peer-reviewed paper discussing the merits and flaws of killing the currently living children of the royal family. In general, I find this view that you're not allowed to estimate probabilities in your head without doing a formal study to be unreasonable and unrealistic.
OP then goes on to describe how if you say it's OK to murder the Romanovs then you also have to say it's OK to murder random peasants. As usual with responses to consequentialist approaches, this is extremely trite and can hardly be taken as a serious criticism.
My framework for approaching these questions is quite different. I am only concerned with the consequences of each course of action, with cause and effect. I reject the notion of justice as an end of itself - though I recognize it can sometimes provide a guideline for producing better consequences.
Of course, it is impossible to know beforehand what the consequences of each action will be, which means that you have to constantly rely on your best judgement. Estimation of the likelihood of various events must be made constantly, and often with limited information. If I had to produce scientific studies before saying that an event was probable, I'd be paralyzed with indecision and stuck doing nothing but trying to find and read through scientific studies about which grocery store I should shop at.
Let me use an example here. Should I kill a Nazi? Let's assume right now I can search online, find someone who is definitely a Nazi, and I can surprise them with a gun and have an almost certain chance of killing them. Well, based on notions of "justice" and "deserving," maybe I should (not sure what's stopping you, in that case). But if I look at the consequences of that action, it probably means spending a very long time in prison. However, if I have good reason to think that a specific Nazi is about to do an adventurism against innocent people, then my calculus might go in the other direction. The fact that the Nazi is a bad person is relevant only in how it factors into my calculus and helps me to predict their movements.
When OP suggests that if you start doing calculations like that you'll end up murdering a bunch of random peasants, I think that's only because they don't have experience making calculations or understanding how they work. Obviously, if you murder a random peasant because they might start a revolution, you'll likely piss off a lot of other peasants and increase the chances of revolution, making it counter-productive and bad by virtually any framework (unless you're an accelerationist I guess?). Why doesn't this occur to OP?
It seems to me that OP's worldview, whether consciously or subconsciously, is influenced by Christian mythology. The goal is to prove you're a good person so that you can defend yourself at the pearly gates. Meanwhile the devil is constantly tempting us to sin, we are naturally inclined towards evil acts, and so we cannot trust our own judgement to make exceptions to moral rules. If we murder the Romanov children, it is because deep down we want to murder children, and we're making rationalizations to release the demiurge.
But I reject that framing. I say that I don't have some beastly urge to murder children that I'm repressing, and I think the same is true of the vast majority of people. I'm not concerned with proving myself at the pearly gates, I'm concerned with producing the best outcomes. I trust my own judgement, which I have cultivated, and I think doing so is unavoidable - even if you defer to others' judgement or to some principle, it is still your judgement that leads you there.
If you want to argue that the specific choice of murdering the Romanov children was bad, based on what outcomes could be reasonably expected for the action to produce, that's a conversation we can have. But like you say, it's not like any of us have royal families in our basement so it's not the most relevant question, and what it really points to are the differences in our moral frameworks.
While not exactly of practical significance given how few of us have Royal Families locked up in our basement
They killed them kids because they believed they had to.
Why did they believe that? History.
If you don't want your kids killed simply do not participate in and reproduce the circumstances in which killing your kids would be believed to be the correct thing to do.
Fucking skill issue. If I was born a Romanov my kids would be just fine on collective land.
I don't agree with point number one. The more distant a claimant to the throne, the harder it is to draw support for their claim. Alexei represented a direct threat to the Bolshevik revolution, the White Army was closing in, and it's entirely possible that groups like the Black Hundreds would have been able to draw more support from other European monarchies if they had their hands on the rightful heir. Lenin clearly thought the right thing to do was to shoot the child, and I'm sure he had a clearer idea of what the heir of a monarchy meant to that government than any of us do.
Regardless, I think a more interesting question is why they shot the Romanov's head cook.
if my family was starved, tortured, or otherwise killed by someone like the tsar (who led secret police hunting jews and communists), i would probably be extremely willing to kill their family in front of them before killing them if i ever got the opportunity. i may or may not feel bad about it afterwards.
No tears for dead peasants
I was hoping you would go further on this, but didn't. So,
without further ado,
There were two "Reigns of Terror," if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the "horrors" of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror -- that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
(sub Russia for France)
I haven't read the post, just thought it would be relevant to point out that,
Liberals when a monarch's family line gets tortured to death and thrown in dungeons due to court rivalries and the power struggles they entail:
"Waow! Such intrigue!! Just like muh game of thrones!!!!"
Liberals when a monarch's family line gets shot in a communist revolution:
"NOOOOOO oh the humanity, the barbarism, how could they?!!?!??!"
i will reiterate my post that was probably rightfully locked to avoid extension of the struggle session:
Given the chance, I would personally turn the entire Romanov family and their collaborators into minced meat with a hammer - and I wouldn't have enacted a micron of the violence they did against the peasantry
Firstly, I appreciate your taking the time to write out a legitimate effort post here.
However I disagree with your argument on a number of levels. Firstly, I think the idea of applying any form of statistical analysis to a situation like this is deeply flawed. "What is the probability of a revolution succeeding" is not something a we can find equation for. No revolution in history has been launched based on a statistical calculation of probability, these type of decisions have to be based on what is essentially an educated guess. If I am wrong about this please enlighten me.
That being said your point about doing diligence to study the issue I would agree with. Was that done in the case of the romanovs? Idk, I wasn't in the room where that decision was made. I'm not taking a completely hard stance on the issue bc I don't feel like I know enough, or in general am in a position to fairly judge the decision to kill the romanovs.
My most important point though is that I couldn't care less. Even assuming that the decision to kill the romanov kids was completely unjustified, I want to ask why it's even discussed. Of all the millions of innocent people killed during the Russian revolution, world war 1 on the eastern front or in general during the rule of tsar Nicholas, why is it that these ones are paid so much more attention? Why point to a single grain of sand on a beach? The answer, plain and simple, is bourgeois propaganda. It is this bourgeois propaganda which attempts to demean the Soviet Union, by this trick of focus. It is also elitist and pro monarchist propaganda which elevates the lives of royals as being worth more than those of Jews, peasants, conscripts etc. It is very similar in form to American liberals raising hell about every bad thing the Chinese government does while ignoring the murderous imperialism of their own nation. It's not a1:1 comparison, but the point still stands that by focusing on certain bad things instead of others, whether intentionally or not we reinforce and promote bourgeois propaganda, as repeatedly in popular culture and media the killings of the romanovs are discussed on a personal level which almost no other victims of the era receive, this diminishing the value and possibly even dehumanizing all of the common people who died, and the broken families they left behind.
To sum it up, were the Bolsheviks right to shoot the Romanovs including the kids? I'm not sure, if I had to guess I would say probably but I really don't know. That being said, I don't think that we should be spending time giving sympathy to these people or debating the morality of killing them, because doing so is counter productive. Lest I be misinterpreted, I don't accuse you of trying to promote bourgeois propaganda, your post seems sincere and intelligent. I just believe that it unintentionally reinforces bourgeois propaganda and diminishes the value of others killed during the Russian revolution.
Ps: I know it was my shit post which started this little struggle session lol. My apologies
Formatting is fucked, had to split this into to parts for some reason.
Thank you for taking the time and effort to post this.
I'm gonna repost the thread that I assume led you to making this effortpost. Here it is, I will refer to some things from that thread, which I think are relevant. Beforehand I will say a little bit, but first I'll ask this question: Is it bad to kill child soldiers in war?I think you are misinterpreting the arguments people have made for why they understood that the soviets saw the killing as justified, and in some senses I think you're misrepresenting these arguments in order to give yourself a stronger case.
Leaving Alexei alive was in no way certain to doom the revolution to failure of significant struggle, as he could have been maintained in custody, and ascribing such outsized influence on the course of political affairs to the life of a sickly 13 year old is a profoundly anti-materialist approach to history.
If we wish to examine this in light of our moral principles, we need to develop some notion of probability calculus; at what point is taking in innocent life now justified in order to avoid certain possible harms that have a certain probability of occurring. You can formalize this to ridiculous extents8., or you can take the legal systems more qualitative approach, of establish some standard of proof (you are, after all, justifying killing someone), where the execution is deemed justified if seems more likely than not/clearly and convincingly/beyond a reasonable doubt that it will prevent further, greater harm in the future. This lets you weaken the requirement that it is necessary to kill him to merely it is prudent to kill him. What is lacking though is any evidence that anyone has meaningfully carried out this process for any standard beyond plausible.
No one is saying that leaving him alive was certain doom. The argument is that having him fall into the hands of the white army would be an immense risk. In the other thread you talk of peering into the future, here you instead just speak of probability calculus. You then point to future insurrections happening in the USSR as proof that it was not justified. How would the soviets know those future insurrections would happen? The soviets were able to peer into the past and observe the many MANY counterrevolutions centered around a royal heir, this was a worry and a legtimate one at that. Dismissing this worry is anti-materialist, though since we're doing a moral argument, I struggle to see why materialism all of a sudden matters.
Saying that the soviets could have moved the royal family once again is certainly true, but again you are looking at it with all knowledge available. What did they know? The whites were close by, things could go bad soon.
In the other thread you referenced Puyi and said you thought the family should have gotten the same treatment. The conditions that allowed Puyi to receive that treatment were significantly different from those that forced the soviets to carry out a summary execution.
Well perhaps we leave it there; a plausible narrative that places Alexei as the cause of some harm is sufficient in our eyes to justify his liquidation. The problem with this is that it is such a liberal standard that it can be applied to nearly everyone.
Again I think you are misrepresenting the argument here. Comparing the worries the soviets had of what would happen if the royal family fell into the hands of the opposition to just regular people is ridiculous. You are comparing the royal family of a country in civil war with just anybody else.
This argument goes that it was actually the Tsar that placed him in position to be killed by standing at the top of a monarchical system that has ruined and ended untold numbers of lives. Had the Tsar dismantled that system before it came to blows, Alexei would have lived a happily inbred life as a continental European curiosity.
This argument plays fast an lose with the notion of fault to an extent that borders on the absurd. Within getting into the morass that encompasses the legal notion of fault, I'll observe that the executioners where in total control of the situation, given the Romanovs were in the zone of immediate material influence, while the Bolshevik leaderships were at a more distant proximity, and Tsar Nicholas II at the head of the Imperial State was a fleeting memory, having greatly influenced the events that now overtook them, but having no control over them. The Bolshevik's in Ipatiev House or those in leadership in Moscow alone decided who in that house lived and died, they knew that, and they exercised that choice.Following this logic systemic issues do not exist. We must always focus on the individual and blame the individual for any action that hurts others. I'm sure this isn't something that is supposed to be a universal outlook, but if systemic issues are ignored one place, then it seems to me there is no reason they should ever not be ignored.
Furthermore the soviets were not in total control. They were afraid the white army would close in and take control of the royal family. What the people in the house knew at those times is hard to say. Additionally we cannot say wether or not an order to execute was given by the bolsheviks or it was the people in the house that made the decision on their own.Commenting on a detail instead of your core arguments, so I'll hide it.
spoiler
a historically deterministic sequence
This is a very common misconception that arises from getting your Marxist education from third-hand sources. History builds on previous conditions, and relations of property present differently on different societies, meaning different societies will follow different steps in development towards different results.
There is a letter Marx sent to a Russian revolutionary answering her questions about this exact topic, he clarifies that Capital describes western Europe and that the dynamic of society is not necessarily the same in Russia, while pointing to agricultural communes as possibly the main counterpoint to capitalists that should be developed there.
Maybe something to add… had the revolution failed, the blowback onto the Bolsheviks and their supporters would have been horrifically violent. The White forces would (maybe this is only possible and not a certainty, but it sure seems like a certainty to me) have slaughtered so many without any of the moral concerns we’re talking about here. And maybe executing the family would not have had an impact on the results anyway. But I guess I’m sympathetic to those who have to make these immediate decisions where failure means you are dead and millions suffer. Right or wrong, I’m not their historical judge.
As I’ve been reading more about the period under Stalin and the Great Terror, I’ve become a bit more detached from these questions of morality. I guess I’m getting more like who you describe in your intro. Yes, a lot of bad things happened and a lot of innocent people died. I can understand the context as much as possible. I can recognize the Soviets were forced to play the game on Impossible mode and thus circumstances forced them to have to make the best of bad choices, as well as make a lot of mistakes. But these questions of morality won’t bring these people or the USSR back to life. The only utility in studying the past of socialist projects is to understand the decisions they made, the situation around them, and try to apply that to the future.
(That last paragraph only applies when I’m hashing things out with comrades. Dealing with people who still gommunism killed 100 billion people is a different story. I just don’t really engage the later anymore).
Turns out one of the downsides of an autocratic hereditary power structure that brutally oppressed millions of people for hundreds of years is the heirs to said power structure are fair game when the oppressed rise up. Like it or not, royal heirs are a threat to any nascent socialist revolution and a figure for reactionaries to rally around.
Also I just want to mention in this very time period the very same royal family had spent years feeding millions of people to machine guns and artillery, and no small number of civilians, including children, were victims of that war too.
When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.
In other words:
No half measures Walter1 is completely unsubstantiated if you take a look at the trajectory of overthrown feudal dynasties throughout history. When a feudal dynasty gets overthrown, the current ruling monarch and heir apparent usually either get liquidated, whether by the usurpers or by their own hands, or get mutilated (castration, gouging eyes out) and forced into a monastery. In some feudal traditions like the Chinese, the usurper, after proclaiming a new dynasty and securing power, would go on to completely exterminate the previous imperial clan, the idea being that any potential relation could restore the previous dynasty, so they must be liquidated as well. Most feudal traditions are nowhere as brutal as the Chinese, and this observation undermines your argument. If there was no difference between an heir apparent and just some random descendant of a dynastic founder, more feudal traditions would adopt what the Chinese did because if the king's third cousin is as likely to restore the throne as the king's oldest son, then both the king's third cousin and oldest son need to be liquidated in order to tie up loose ends. But you see a difference in how the royal family of the overthrown dynasty are treated. The king, the king's brothers, and the male descendants of the king and king's brothers are usually liquidated, but beyond that, there isn't a consensus. This shows that even if they're all related to the previously reigning king, their legitimacy is not equal. And while the Chinese are very thorough, most feudal traditions don't care as much so the previous king's third cousin might still be liquidated under the Chinese feudal system but survive under a Russian feudal system. I guess the Bolshevik's could've castrated Alexei and turn him into Lenin's personal eunuch, thus blocking claimants to the throne since the heir apparent is still technically alive, but I seriously doubt you would agree with this lmao
Given that previous overthrows of feudal dynasties treat the heir apparent very differently from the previous king's third male cousin, usually killing the heir apparent while sparing the previous king's third male cousin, and given that many attempted overthrows were ultimately thwarted because the heir apparent (or heir apparent's younger brothers) were able to rally loyalist forces and preserve or restore the ruling dynasty, the Bolsheviks didn't do anything out of the ordinary. The onus is not on "shooting a 13 year old in the face is good aktually" side to prove their case, but for the "shooting a 13 year old in the face is bad aktually" side to demonstrate how this particular instance differs from other cases.
Have you considered hitting the dab on people who could only have grown to be monsters is funny.
Okay, this is going to be my final post about this subject. Sorry for jumping all over the place in your thread.
I changed my mind. I'm now of the opinion that they probably shouldn't have killed Alexei. But my change of opinion has less to do with your arguments per se but from reading his biography on Wikipedia although I guess if it wasn't for your post, I wouldn't have bothered to do the bare minimum and read the Wikipedia article.
It hinges on his hemophilia. It's bad, really bad. I thought it was "he can die from getting pushed down a flight of stairs" bad, but it's actually "he almost died from riding a carriage because the vibrations caused internal bleeding" bad. That's how bad it is. The average life expectancy for hemophilia in general pre modern treatment is 10 years old, so he is already beating the odds. The other distant members of his family with this disease, all inherited from Queen Victoria, didn't make it past their 30s, and those that made it to adulthood have a less severe version of the disease. My point being is he ain't making it to adulthood no matter how good treatment is, and from the Wikipedia article, he made peace with this fact to a certain extent.
His profound disability also removes him from being a viable monarchical rallying point imo. I made an earlier comment about how a lot of feudal lines of secession is vibe based, and this goes both ways. Despite being the heir apparent, he loses vibe points for being so sickly and so easy to die. Alexei could legitimately die from busting a nut (if he could almost die from a nosebleed, I'm going to say that having blood that's not able to clot properly suddenly flooding into a body extremity will lead to complications). He probably can't even have penetrative sex properly without suffering from some internal bleeding or severe bruising, so this means no issue and no descendants. He might as well be infertile, which is a complete dealbreaker against any claimant, even the heir apparent. And this is assuming he could even make it past puberty.
More importantly, his disability is a state-kept secret with few people knowing the true extend of his disability. Most people knew he suffered from some debilitating illness, but nowhere near to the extend that he would constantly be almost dying even with 24 hour surveillance. This means that even if the Whites got a hold of him, they would almost certainly lack the medical training (and compassion since reactionaries tend to be unempathetic thugs) to take care of him. He would almost certainly have died before the Civil War ended, except instead of dying from getting shot in the head while being in a wheelchair, he would've died because some reactionary loser manhandled Alexei and caused him to bleed out from his wrists. In his final days, he got a hemorrhage in his groin from coughing too much. Hell, there was a decent chance he wouldn't have made it past 1918 anyways, making his execution completely pointless.
This is my current assessment. Shooting some 13 year old disabled kid in a wheelchair in the head is not a good look, especially after you failed to kill him despite shooting and bayoneting some immobile kid whose blood can't even clot properly. Not shooting him in the head is a viable option since he's already close to death's door anyways, and there's no need to rush things. The big brain move would've been to give Alexei to the Whites "for his safe-keeping" and wait for his inevitable death although it would've been tricky to give them Alexei but kill the rest of the imperial family.
within a Marxist framework, there are no 'good' and 'bad', merely a historically deterministic sequence of class antagonisms
amoral communism thus is not terribly interested in this discussion, and anyone here that adheres to that framework is excused from the discussion as having won the argument
I don't think this is really correct or at least not the best way to put it.
morality is a real thing that's shaped by (and in turn shapes) material conditions. it can be different in different epochs as things change - for example, capitalism introducing factory work started to unravel old patriarchal morality and led to the first successful womens movements. things like very cheap plant-based food and textiles and climate concerns are chopping away at carnist morality. class war dissolves the edifice of bourgeois morality like calvinist brainworms about one's "station" being a sign of god's favor (which of course makes it hard to question the rich). etc etc
at some point marx got spooked by the hegelian abyss and became conspicuously occupied with trying to put his conception of history on firm footing that didn't depend on morality. that's where you get the quotes of him insisting that the framework doesn't itself rest on today's passing morality- even though it can still explain it!
even worse, smuglords sneering at non-class antagonisms fail to see how those antagonisms work themselves out. e.g. rosa on womens rights:
If, however, there is a feeling of injustice in large segments of society – says Friedrich Engels, the co-founder of scientific socialism – it is always a sure sign that the economic bases of the society have shifted considerably, that the present conditions contradict the march of development. The present forceful movement of millions of proletarian women who consider their lack of political rights a crying wrong is such an infallible sign, a sign that the social bases of the reigning system are rotten and that its days are numbered.
moral questions can themselves be a site of class struggle so there's no need to excuse them to the other room as presuppositional while we talk about class struggle as a separate thing.
I don't really want to get too much more into the weeds on this because it's such a tired topic in vegan spaces but the takeaway is that "amoral" (i.e. "anti-moral") materialism is imo a vulgarization of marxism
At the risk of being a little petty by using this post as an opportunity to address some things said to me on the locked thread I never got a chance to respond to:
Comparing killing the Romanovs to not only dropping atomic bombs on civilians, but also to the Iraq War you really have no sense of scale at all huh.
It has nothing to do with scale. It has to do with the justice (or rather injustice) of innocent people, kids nonetheless, being killed. I am so very aware of the scale. I am aware of the insignificant scale any of this makes in the geologic history of the earth. I am aware of the insignificance of the scale of less than a dozen people compared to thousands. I am also aware of the scale of being from a family where a single child was murdered. Gone. Dead. Lost. And while her snuffed out little life is not on the scale of the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and all the children wiped out from that despicable war crime, the life she won't ever have is NOT FUCKING INSIGNIFICANT. I assure you, on the scale of her family and the people who loved that child, it matters. It always fucking matters. Got that? It always matters.
I really don't care about this at all, I'm sorry it makes you so upset.
That's very telling. I'd say thanks for your crocodile tear "sorries," but I know you don't care about the death of children who you don't personally know because you said as much. A few kids a hundred years ago, right? Who cares? None of the kids murdered by the OG nazis will matter soon, so long as they're taken on an individual basis. It's only scale that matters.
So is it bad form, or breaking rules to tag users from the other thread about this that got locked? Because I'd kinda like to see what they have to say about this. For the record I think murdering kids is bad and counterproductive to revolution. Which puts me in agreement with OP if I'm reading this right.
Thank you for taking the time and effort necessary to lay out a comprehensive argument. I appreciate your work, even if I'm about to take a dump in your living room in one more sentence.
I don't care. This happened during a war so long ago that none of our grandparents could have possibly been alive yet. Relitigating the ethics of what some troops did then is just navel-gazing. It doesn't have any material consequences today—it's so far removed from our current struggles that it's just a weird purity test for how xXxTREME COMMIE you are.
Wake me up when we've successfully overthrown the empire and need to worry about who's going to wrestle Barron Trump1. I'll be in our garden if you need me.
1 It should be me. He may be 9 feet tall, but I know karate and I'm fat. I got a sturdy base to flip him over.
This is a great effort post, thank you! A few early things to comment on though:
While not exactly of practical significance given how few of us have Royal Families locked up in our basement
That is of course true. But if anyone here is ever in a position where, 'god willing,' we are participating in a proletariat revolution (unlikely in the imperial core but much more likely outside it), this precedent most certainty could be of practical significance.
This strand of amoral communism thus is not terribly interested in this discussion, and anyone here that adheres to that framework is excused from the discussion as having won the argument.
Excused from it, yes, but not having "won" it. It is fundamentally a moral argument, which means the people taking that amoral position should have nothing to say on the matter outside of context-specific events where every eventuality is already known. What I mean, is that if the children of monarchs were to survive, we wouldn't know that this would lead to even more death and suffering, which is the claim of the child-murder apologists. We don't know that, even in retrospect with the killing of the Romanov children, it's still a hypothetical. We do know that the collective capitalist world didn't need any such excuse to use every means at their disposal to undermine it even in the most petty ways. If it's the position the strict determinists take that morality should not be a consideration, it should also be the position they take on any argument where morality is in question.
Choosing not to participate is a reasonable position, but it is not "winning," only neutral at best. Morality exists, even if it is not the domain of a Marxism that only serves to describe the world and not change it. But isn't that the point, as someone said?
Excusing the murder of children for "practical" concerns will never be moral, and any Marxist who bases their politics on their sense of morality (even if doing so is not strictly 100% the vulgar materialism some here seem to advocate for), it is extremely common. What's more, it is not in contradiction with a strict materialist approach.
This doesn't address your argument, and it's hearsay that I've heard that I don't know where to investigate, so take what I'm saying with a salt shaker. I heard that the execution wasn't ordered by Lenin or any other party higher-ups but was a decision made by the Bolsheviks that were there. Apparently the party covered up the execution for years afterwards. If this is true, it ends up making the execution much less helpful to the bolshevik cause than it's often portrayed.
I think it was a mistake, but an understandable one by the Ural Soviet, given the Legion was advancing on the town and there had been major (somewhat justified) anarchist/SR riots in the town shortly before.
They were not to know the situation was stabilising. They thought the political situation was getting tenuous and, well, can you imagine the Czech Legion with the Tsar or his children under control? Or the SRs and Anarchists with the same (which could go any number of ways, many worse than what happened)? People panic, and when they panic they do dumb shit.
Continuing my trend from my other comment of only talking about things that are tangentially related:
Regarding your 8th footonote, how does one enumerate the set of possible futures? Also, how do you calculate the probability of a future occurring and the number of lives ruined by Alexei in a given future? I can't wrap my head around how you can apply formal logic to this.
Regarding this part of your post:
Moral status as such actually has very little to deal with communism/leftist (in the Marxian vein) in terms of it’s internal mechanism. Marx, Engels, Lenin, and the rest of that intellectual lineage2. famously thought very little of moral philosophy. A communist is thus entirely at liberty to dismiss this entire discussion as idealism...
While it is true that the moral status of something is irrelevant to a marxist, it could make sense to investigate morality as part of a society's superstructure and how it interacts with the base.
Permanently Deleted
- Monarchs (according to people who support monarchs) are not people as soon as they are aware of their circumstances. Thus killing a monarch transcends morality of killing young vs old.
On the other hand, imagine if hitler was holding monarch's heir as a rallying point for him (whitess and monarchs' views on jewish question make that very real possibility)
P.S. But yes ideally, they should have send them to felix.
This is the first effort post I've seen that is actually coherent and well-argued. And has footnotes.
amorality functions perfectly consistently without an (acknowledged) metaphysics. the regression here is moving from amorality back to morality, without acknowledging the necessity of re-establishing a metaphysics of morality. instead of a new morality backed by a new metaphysics, we have an old morality, supported by the rhetorical skills of the philosophy department.
personally i prefer divination. we flip a coin on whether or not we kill people, and then, blame the coin. hence god only has to move the coin. economy.
