"Understand the mind of a totalitarian. 'Probe with a bayonet,' Vladimir Lenin famously said. 'If you meet steel, stop. If you meet mush, then push.'" (Michael Totten, quoting Lenin).
What I find so intriguing about Lenin is not that he was evil. It's not that he was a totalitarian thug, or a Marxist, or a psychopath. It's not that his political strategy was so ruthless, or so cunning. No, the most fascinating thing about Lenin is that so much of what we know about him so profoundly demonstrates that he was a naked coward.
Lenin knew his survival depended on intimidating anyone who might expose his cowardice. He knew he couldn't win an intellectual debate, so rather than engage in one, he intimidated and then murdered his opponents. He knew neither he, nor his political faction, could win a physical fight, so he avoided them at high cost.
Preferring, instead to fight battles against opponents who he knew would offer only mush as resistance. Rather than stand on principle, Lenin simply exploited the soft underbelly of the courtesies and social conventions of his time. People knew he was lying, but they were too constrained by their own conformity to do anything meaningful about it. All the while, Lenin admitted, as demonstrated by this quote (among many others) that he was a weakling.
And, in time, all it took was for enough people to recognize the essential nature of all totalitarian regimes and to act accordingly in order to present an unflinching resistance instead of mush and the perverted creation he birthed crumbled from within.
The world could stand to refresh itself on the lessons taught by history. All the people of Iran need is a little steel-backboned solidarity from the West and the grotesque regime that has so badly abused them would collapse.
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