Posted on Tuesday, August 5, 2025
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by Barry Casselman
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7 Comments
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The Imperial Russian battleship Potemkin had its maiden voyage in 1900 but became famous in 1905 when its crew mutinied and sailed to Odessa to join that city’s anti-czarist demonstrations then taking place. After briefly going ashore and then firing on the city, its crew sailed to Romania, where the mutineers sought refuge.
The ship itself was then returned to the Russian navy, where it was renamed and modified. Later, it took part in World War I battles in Turkey, but its design, having been replaced by dreadnaught battleships, led to it being decommissioned and finally scrapped by the Soviet government in the 1920s
The historical Potemkin, however, was immortalized in 1925 when the Soviet government commissioned famed film theorist and director Sergei Eisenstein to make a propaganda film, Battleship Potemkin. The film’s script took liberties with historical facts, romanticized and overdramatized events, and was plainly pure propaganda.
But Eisenstein was a film-making pioneer genius, and he introduced so many new film techniques, including new camera angles and montage, in Battleship Potemkin that it has influenced filmmakers all over the world ever since. For its film innovations, and not because of its historical content, Battleship routinely makes almost every list of the most important films ever made.
Like the ship itself, the purpose of the propaganda film — the communist Russian revolution — was scrapped in 1991. Romantic radical activists, however, continue to aspire to and believe in global Marxist revolution even though every example of it being tried always has ended in catastrophic failure, usually after being propped up by persecution and terror.
The U.S. liberal political party, the Democrats, has a complex history and is now headed toward repeating the failures of earlier Marxist-socialist regimes. It defended slavery in the mid-19th century and opposed giving women the right to vote until the 1920s. It moved to the left in the 1930s and remained in the New Deal mode until the 1980s – while also leading the charge againstthe Civil Rights Movement. In the 1990s, it returned to power with more moderate ideas, but after 2000, it continued to drift back to the left.
Recently, the party’s activist base has moved sharply to the left, having been led by aging Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed socialist, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, and a younger group of radical urban House members known as “The Squad.”
Today, an even newer and younger group of activist Democrats is advancing openly Marxist and radical ideas in urban environments that have recently voted overwhelmingly for Democrats.
These activists, which include current candidates for mayor of New York City and Minneapolis, speak as if they just came out of watching the film Battleship Potemkin at a campus art film cinema or a class in radical film theory in one of the U.S. elite universities where much of the liberal arts classes are now more extreme left-wing partisanship and woke propaganda than useful education.
Although the 1905 events in Russia failed, the cruel and despotic czarist regime did collapse in 1917. But it was only replaced by another totalitarian regime, the Soviet Union. The glorification of so-called revolutionary events, epitomized by Battleship Potemkin and the myriad Marxist and socialist propaganda since then has not led to the many idealistic promises they made being realized.
And yet, we now have the spectacle of a new generation of radical Democrats sneaking aboard the ghost ship U.S.S. Potemkin 2025, commandeering it to try another voyage of histrionic failure. We saw the disastrous outcome of the maiden voyage of that vessel last November, when American voters collectively said, “No thanks – we prefer promises kept over promises broken.”
Barry Casselman is a contributor to AMAC Newsline.
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