Posted on 06/16/2003 5:03:58 PM PDT by ComtedeMaistre
Trotskycons?
Pasts and present.
By Stephen Schwartz
EXCERPTS
".....This path had been pioneered much earlier by two Trotskyists: James Burnham, who became a founder of National Review, and Irving Kristol, who worked on Encounter magazine. Burnham was joined at NR by Suzanne LaFollette, who, piquantly enough, retained some copyrights to Trotskyist material until her death. But they were not the only people on the right who remained, in some degree, sentimental about their left-wing past. Willmoore Kendall, for example, was, as I recall, a lifelong contributor to relief for Spanish radical leftist refugees living in France. Above all, Burnham and Kristol, in a certain sense, did not renounce their pasts. They acknowledged that they had evolved quite dramatically away from their earlier enthusiasms. But they did not apologize, did not grovel, did not crawl and beg forgiveness for having, at one time, been stirred by the figure of Trotsky......"
"......That is, of course, insufficient for some people. There remain those for whom any taint of leftism is a permanent stain, and who cannot abide an individual who, having in the past been a Trotskyist, does not now caper and grimace in self-loathing over the historical truth, which is that, yes, Trotsky commanded the Red Army, and yes, Trotsky wielded a sword, and yes, Trotsky, a man of moral consistency if nothing else, took responsibility for the crimes of the early Bolshevik regime. But of that, more anon......"
"......Well, I consider Beichman's intent more sinister: to exclude Hitchens and myself from consideration as reliable allies in the struggle against Islamist extremism, because we have yet to apologize for something I, for one, will never consider worthy of apology. There is clearly a group of heresy-hunters among the original neoconservatives who resent having to give way to certain newer faces, with our own history and culture. These older neoconservatives cannot take yes for an answer, and they especially loathe Hitchens. But nobody ever asked Norman Podhoretz to apologize for having once written poetry praising the Soviet army. Nobody ever asked the art critic Meyer Schapiro, who was also a Trotskyist, to flog himself for assisting illegal foreign revolutionaries at a time when it was considered unpatriotic, to say the least. Nobody ever asked Shachtman or Burnham, or, for that matter, Sidney Hook, or Edmund Wilson, or a hundred others, to grovel and beg mercy for inciting war on capitalism in the depths of the Great Depression........"
".....One might also add that nobody ever asked Jay Lovestone and Bertram Wolfe, ex-Communists whose company Beichman doubtless would prefer, to apologize for having defended the Soviet purge trials and the Stalinist state, long after so many of the brave band that carried a banner with the strange device of the Fourth International were murdered for their defiance of Stalinism. And I have yet to read an apology by Beichman for his own involvement with the Communist network......"
"......To my last breath I will defend the Trotsky who alone, and pursued from country to country, and finally laid low in his own blood in a hideously hot little house in Mexico City, said no to Soviet coddling of Hitlerism, to the Moscow purges, and to the betrayal of the Spanish Republic, and who had the capacity to admit he had been wrong about the imposition of a single-party state, as well as about the fate of the Jewish people. To my last breath, and without apology. Let the neofascists, and Stalinists in their second childhood, make of it what they will......."
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
If the whole thing is a fabrication by Jeet Heer, then why is Schwartz, an un-apologetic Trotskyite, attacking Beichman while defending Jeet Heer?
I don't find it idiotic at all. Even Horowitz himself would be unable to know how deeply he has been influenced by his Stalinist past, and how much of it continues to perdure in his intellectual approach to issues.
And it's not "guilt-by-association" when the featured Trotskyite is proud of his past, and more than happy to proclaim it to the world.
Trotsky did pretty good when he ran War Communism. Churches dynamited and looted. Millions murdered. The entire Bolshevik movement was a criminal organization from the start. Marxism was the cover for theft and murder. They were after power and money, not social justice. Trotsky was a clever and articulate criminal. Nothing more. U.S. Attorney General A Mitchell Palmer made the case in 1920:
Robbery . . .is the ideal of communism. This has been demonstrated in Russia, Germany, and in America. . . . Because a disreputable alien . . .Trotzky . . . can inaugurate a reign of terror from his throne room in the Kremlin, because this lowest of all types known to New York can sleep in the Czar's bed, while hundreds of thousands in Russia are without food or shelter, should Americans be swayed by such doctrines?This stuff about neocons and Trotsky is bunk. There is no one of importance on the American national political scene who has any relationship to Trotskyism whatsoever (well, maybe Bill and Hillary...nah...not even them).. . .communism in this country was an organization of thousands of aliens who were direct allies of Trotzky. Aliens of the same misshapen caste of mind and indecencies of character, and it showed that they were making the same glittering promises of lawlessness, of criminal autocracy to Americans, that they had made to the Russian peasants. . . .
The whole purpose of communism (is) a mass formation of the criminals of the world to overthrow the decencies of private life, to usurp property that they have not earned, to disrupt the present order of life regardless of health, sex or religious rights. By a literature that promises the wildest dreams of such low aspirations, that can occur to only the criminal minds, communism distorts our social law....
Why is that? Why is it that in order to be a critic one must assume that one knows the author better than he knows himself?
Frankly, I find the whole business of deconstructing motives to be a hinderance to the formation of any intellect at all.
So you are pinning the murder of millions on Trotsky? That's absurd and the first time I've ever seen him put up in the ranks of the Stalin Mao and Lenin. I cannot remember ever seeing Hitler accused of "murdering" the millions of combatants that were killed in WW2 by the Germans
Don't be silly with sloppy reasoning. To repeat Marx once again, "Quantity changes quality". No way did Trotsky kill millions. This is never written about because it never happened. He was not the mass murdering psycho that other communists were. Such as a Mao or a Stalin. Pol Pot. Hitler.
I used to believe Trotsky was the ideologue who was not involved in any atrocities beyond what one would expect in a Revolution and Civil War. The information which has been released in the last decade changed my mind. I'm open to correction.
But, once again, I don't get what Trotsky's ideology has to do with anyone in the GOP (or the Democrat party). This neocon stuff is annoying. Seems to be nothing more than an attempt to split conservatives.
I'm sure he has his reasons. But that is a matter for psychological speculation, not political discussion.
How the hell is than an "aspect of neo-conservatism"?
It's an aspect of this guy Stephen Schwarz, whoever that is. You seem to extrapolate quite a bit.
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