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One of the oddest sights one can see in Moscow’s Red Square, aside from the artificially preserved and no longer even quite real-looking body of V. I. Lenin, are the tombs of most of the other Communist chiefs of the Soviet Union, all placed in a row outside the Kremlin wall. Joseph Stalin, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko are there, along with several lesser Soviet officials.

Each of their graves features a bust of the revered leader, but none of them appear to be actually revered except the man who was arguably the most brutal of them all, Stalin himself. While the graves of the others are usually bare, Stalin’s regularly features bunches of flowers that Russians who still revere his memory have brought from all over the vast country to place at his tomb. They miss him. They love him.

It could be that the simple fact that Stalin was the leader of the Soviet Union during its darkest hour, World War II, accounts for this. When the country went through unparalleled suffering, Stalin was there at the helm, and he was still there when National Socialist Germany was crushed and Soviet Russia was victorious. And it may also be that the continuing reverence for Stalin is a manifestation of Machiavelli’s dictum, it is better to be feared than to be loved. And sometimes, human nature being what it is, being feared will make one be loved.

The rioters in Los Angeles have decided, as leftists and their jihadi allies so often do, to take the path of terror. They are trying to frighten the public into being too afraid to oppose the mass migration of unvetted people into the United States, as well as too afraid to support deporting all these illegal migrants. They want to terrorize the Trump administration and the public into accepting that the migrants are here to stay, or else.

They’re doing this because the migrants are essential to the left’s power base. If Trump succeeds in deporting a vast number of illegal migrants, Democrat states will suffer a significant decline in population, which means a significant decline in political power. Accordingly, California Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass have come out strongly in favor of the rioters and against Trump, insisting that he is acting like a dictator in calling out the National Guard to quell the unrest, and declaring that they’re going to do everything they can to ensure that the migrants stay.

Behind their pious declarations is the threat of the rioters’ terror, just as behind the Russian Marxists’ declaration of a just society in which workers would finally enjoy the just fruits of their labors was the specter of Bolshevik and later Stalinist terror. Newsom and Bass aren’t (at least in this case) hypocrites: they almost certainly believe that if they prevail, and the mass migration can resume, or at least the last mass migration cannot be reversed, the results will be good for Americans at large as well as for their own power base.

Machiavelli himself reflected this point of view when he wrote that “Cesare Borgia was considered cruel; nonetheless his cruelty restored the Romagna, united it, and reduced it to peace and to faith. On this matter, if one considers it carefully, one will see that he was much more merciful than the Florentine people, who, in order to avoid a reputation for cruelty, allowed Pistoia to be destroyed.”

See? It’s all for your own good. Leftists are convinced, just as Cesare Borgia was so long ago, that they know what is best for America, and for you. They want you to fear them now, and then when they achieve victory and establish their ideal socialist, authoritarian state, you will come to love them, just as so many Russians today love Stalin.

And indeed, if they do prevail, you will come to love them. You will have no choice. You’ll hear all day and all night about how great and noble they are, and about how evil their enemies are. (That’s right, it’ll be like having MSNBC on 24-hour blast.) The totalitarian vision is the boot on the face, stamping forever, and more: the man whose face is getting smashed is saying, out of his bloody, ruined mouth, “Thank you.” He loves Big Brother. He knows how dangerous it is not to.