the most childish, self-centered, historically illiterate...¶

Nihilism is the most childish, self-centered, historically illiterate perspective for a "communist" of any tendency to have. Our conditions are not uniquely hopeless, our working classes are not uniquely cowed and brainwashed, our enemies are not uniquely omnipotent. What special privilege do you imagine revolutions in our past held that gave them a potential we lack? What divine providence or spark of sublime purity was gifted to our forebears that we, mere mortals, are cruelly denied?

None.

We are as deserving and as capable. We are empowered by that heritage. There is no ancient civilization buried in the sand, its treasures and technologies lost to the eons: they wrote it all down. Every word! Every experiment! A gift for future generations of revolutionary scientists. To retreat into despair is to reject the sacrifices of our movement's ancestors. You either believe they were gods with powers beyond our grasp or devils whose efforts destroyed everything. Both sinister distortions of the truth: they were us.

Human beings. Struggling. Winning. Their victories were the results of their practice: their study, their action, their synthesis, their revised action. They showed us exactly how they prevailed.

Wherever they failed, they documented it just as assiduously. They were not emissaries of some heavenly mandate and their people were not purified of their sins before the could receive the kingdom.

They were simply people. People like us. Struggling to survive. Now they survive through our struggle. We have our history.

Now give it life.