That is either dishonesty or an error.
I have no issue with that framing. Those are both possibilities.
What I took issue with was your concluding dishonesty and attributing that to me when it could just as easily have been an honest albeit erroneous interpretation. When I'm faced with such a choice, I always give the other party the benefit of the doubt and treat it as an innocent error. I would never call someone a liar unless dishonesty was established with certainty.
But you did not bother to copy the part which would have shown the first half was in failure
"They did believe that COMMUNISM was [not] good for the people, Lenin called COMMUNISM and propaganda a tool."
Eureka! I finally see our disconnect. You think that the second half obviates the first half. You think that if Lenin thinks of communism as a tool then the revolutionaries could not have thought communism good for the people. If that were the case, yes, I would agree that using only the first half would have been out of context. I might have have been suspicious of dishonesty, as well (although I would never have made that accusation).
But I did not see the two halves as in conflict but as two separate notions.
First of all, one of them is what Lenin said. Lenin, while important, wasn't the only player in the Russian revolution. I was focusing on the revolutionaries, in general, who were Marxists, in general, and thought that communism was utopia. So you have Lenin in the first half and "they," meaning the Marxist revolutionaries, in general, in the second half. Two different players.
Secondly, you have not only two different subjects but two different ideas being expressed. The idea that communism is or isn't good for the people, which is the first half, and the idea of tools, which is the second half, are different ideas. I wrote earlier in our colloquy when we were discussing thuggery that thuggery was a tool that may or may not be used to implement a noble or ignoble objective. I differentiated between objectives and tools. Your first half is about the idea of whether the objective is good for the people. Your second half is about the idea of using communism as a tool.
So, in summary, I see the two halves of your "sentence" having two different subjects, Lenin vs Marxist revolutionaries, and having two different ideas expressed. Given that both the subjects and the ideas are different, it is reasonable for me to see the two halves as independent, only vaguely connected to one another, even though you put them in one sentence. If they are independent, then they are severable, and quoting one and not the other is not taking anything out of context. Which is why I haven't been able to understand why you were accusing me of taking the quote out of context. You see?
I just love it when I finally, finally, get to the bottom of a disconnect... <g>
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