Keynes and Lenin on inflation

An interesting quote from Keynes's "The Economic Consequences of the Peace":
"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. – As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.

Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose."

Though I encountered this (apparently well-known to the economists) quote in no connection to the current economic crisis, the context is very relevant. In his book "The Economic Consequences of the Peace" Keynes analyses the likely consequences of the peace treaty, imposed on Germany in the aftermath of the World War 1, and correctly predicts the rise of the extremist forces. The extreme inflation that followed the War indeed had contributed to the coming of Nazis to power. The knowledge of the impoverishing caused by the inflation and of its the disastrous political consequences is the the underlying basis for the anti-inflation stance so popular today in Germany.