Posted on 06/09/2003 10:07:16 AM PDT by quidnunc
The National Post, a Toronto daily of indeterminate politics, has just published a startling exposé about President Bush by a Canadian conspiracy buff named Jeet Heer, an academic at York University. His "exposé, " which ran June 7, is spread over a page of the National Post under the ungrammatical headline: "TROTSKY'S GHOST/WANDERING THE/ WHITE HOUSE ." Then come subheads: "Bush Administration Influence — Russian Bolshevik's writings supported the idea of pre-emptive war." Aha, Trotsky, yes, Communist Leon Trotsky was the inspiration for the war in Iraq.
On top of the page and above the headline are the words of Stephen Schwartz, a Washington journalist who has converted to Islam. Their relevance goes unexplained. In three lines of large type which newspapers traditionally have reserved to announce the Second Coming, Schwartz is quoted as saying: "Nobody who is a Trotskyist can really be a pacifist. Trotskyism is a militaristic disposition. When you are Trotskyist, we don't refer to him as a great literary critic, we refer to him as the founder of the Red Army."
And on the same page is a huge full face photo of Leon Trotsky described in the cut line thus: "Leon Trotsky (above) has influenced such White House confidants as journalist Christopher Hitchens, below, an advocate for military intervention in the Mideast. " The National Post story said: "Despite his leftism, Hitchens has been invited into the White House as an ad hoc consultant." Here you see scandalous editing at work. In the caption Hitchens is described as a White House confidant and in the story he becomes a mere "ad hoc consultant." I thought to myself: If Hitchens is really a White House confidant then things must be really pretty bad. So, I asked somebody who ought to know the goings and comings of White House "confidants." All I got was a snort of disbelief.
I would have thought that in the aftermath of the New York Times editing scandal, a responsible newspaper (which it was when Conrad Black, its founder and onetime owner, ran it) would do a little fact-checking or allow the victims of the Post's conspiracy theorist to utter a word of comment in the same account. After all, Heer dotes on conspiracies of which he alone has knowledge. For example, not only are the Defense Department Trotskyites behind It All, but the same people are acolytes of the late philosopher, Leo Strauss, about whom Heer wrote in the Boston Globe last May: "…. But if you read Strauss with a skeptical mind, the way he himself read the great philosophers, a more disturbing picture takes shape. Strauss, by this view, emerges as a disguised Machiavelli, a cynical teacher who encouraged his followers to believe that their intellectual superiority entitles them to rule over the bulk of humanity by means of duplicity."
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator, was paranoid. Perhaps his deepest fears centred around his great rival for the leadership of the Bolshevik movement, Leon Trotsky. Stalin went to extraordinary lengths to obliterate not only Trotsky but also the ragtag international fellowship known as the Left Opposition, which supported Trotsky's political program. In the late 1920s, Stalin expelled Trotsky from the Communist Party and deported him from the Soviet Union. Almost instantly, other Communist parties moved to excommunicate Trotsky's followers, notably the Americans James P. Cannon and Max Shachtman.
In 1933, while in exile in Turkey, Trotsky regrouped his supporters as the Fourth International. Never amounting to more than a few thousand individuals scattered across the globe, the Fourth International was constantly harassed by Stalin's secret police, as well as by capitalist governments. The terrible purge trials that Stalin ordered in the late 1930s were designed in part to eliminate any remaining Trotskyists in the Soviet Union. Fleeing from country to country, Trotsky ended up in Mexico, where he was murdered by an ice-pick-wielding Stalinist assassin in 1940. Like Macbeth after the murder of Banquo, Stalin became even more obsessed with his great foe after killing him. Fearing a revival of Trotskyism, Stalin's secret police continued to monitor the activities of Trotsky's widow in Mexico, as well as the far-flung activities of the Fourth International.
More than a decade after the demise of the Soviet Union, Stalin's war against Trotsky may seem like quaint ancient history. Yet Stalin was right to fear Trotsky's influence. Unlike Stalin, Trotsky was a man of genuine intellectual achievement, a brilliant literary critic and historian as well as a military strategist of genius. Trotsky's movement, although never numerous, attracted many sharp minds. At one time or another, the Fourth International included among its followers the painter Frida Kahlo (who had an affair with Trotsky), the novelist Saul Bellow, the poet André Breton and the Trinidadian polymath C.L.R. James.
As evidence of the continuing intellectual influence of Trotsky, consider the curious fact that some of the books about the Middle East crisis that are causing the greatest stir were written by thinkers deeply shaped by the tradition of the Fourth International.
In seeking advice about Iraqi society, members of the Bush administration (notably Paul D. Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defence, and Dick Cheney, the Vice-President) frequently consulted Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi-American intellectual whose book The Republic of Fear is considered to be the definitive analysis of Saddam Hussein's tyrannical rule.
As the journalist Christopher Hitchens notes, Makiya is "known to veterans of the Trotskyist movement as a one-time leading Arab member of the Fourth International." When speaking about Trotskyism, Hitchens has a voice of authority. Like Makiya, Hitchens is a former Trotskyist who is influential in Washington circles as an advocate for a militantly interventionist policy in the Middle East. Despite his leftism, Hitchens has been invited into the White House as an ad hoc consultant.
Other supporters of the Iraq war also have a Trotsky-tinged past. On the left, the historian Paul Berman, author of a new book called Terror and Liberalism, has been a resonant voice among those who want a more muscular struggle against Islamic fundamentalism. Berman counts the Trotskyist C.L.R. James as a major influence. Among neo-conservatives, Berman's counterpart is Stephen Schwartz, a historian whose new book, The Two Faces of Islam, is a key text among those who want the United States to sever its ties with Saudi Arabia. Schwartz spent his formative years in a Spanish Trotskyist group.
To this day, Schwartz speaks of Trotsky affectionately as "the old man" and "L.D." (initials from Trotsky's birth name, Lev Davidovich Bronstein). "To a great extent, I still consider myself to be [one of the] disciples of L.D," he admits, and he observes that in certain Washington circles, the ghost of Trotsky still hovers around. At a party in February celebrating a new book about Iraq, Schwartz exchanged banter with Wolfowitz about Trotsky, the Moscow Trials and Max Shachtman.
"I've talked to Wolfowitz about all of this," Schwartz notes. "We had this discussion about Shachtman. He knows all that stuff, but was never part of it. He's definitely aware." The yoking together of Paul Wolfowitz and Leon Trotsky sounds odd, but a long and tortuous history explains the link between the Bolshevik left and the Republican right.
To understand how some Trotskyists ended up as advocates of U.S. expansionism, it is important to know something about Max Shachtman, Trotsky's controversial American disciple. Shachtman's career provides the definitive template of the trajectory that carries people from the Left Opposition to support for the Pentagon.
-snip-
(Jeet Heer in the National Post, June 7, 2003)
To Read This Article Click Here
"Just weeks after the LaRouche in 2004 campaign began nationwide circulation of 400,000 copies of the Children of Satan dossier, exposing the role of University of Chicago fascist 'philosopher' Leo Strauss as the godfather of the neo-conservative war party in and around the Bush Administration, two major establishment publications have joined the exposé."
So brags an article under the byline Jeffrey Steinberg on Executive Intelligence Review, a Web site devoted to the perennial presidential campaign of Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. This time around, Mr. LaRouche is running on a platform equating the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon with the 1933 Reichstag fire, set by Nazis so they could blame the Communists and take over the German government.
In his part of "Children of Satan," Mr. Steinberg charges that a "cabal of Strauss disciples, along with an equally small circle of allied neo-conservative and Likudnik fellow-travelers" has been hovering around the government for 30 years, "awaiting the moment of opportunity to launch their not-so-silent coup."
It does seem to be true that the LaRouche screed was first in line in thrusting Leo Strauss, author of such volumes as "Natural Right and History," into the middle of the debate over the Iraq war. The theme was later sounded by James Atlas in the New York Times and Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker.
Mr. Atlas's article on "Leo-Cons" included a photo essay with shots of Mr. Strauss and presumed disciples including Edward Shils, Allan Bloom, Saul Bellow, Albert Wohlstetter, on to Clarence Thomas and Leon Kass. It ended with big photos of Richard Perle (along with the howler, later corrected by the Times, that he was married to Wohlstetter's daughter Joan) and Paul Wolfowitz.
Mr. Hersh's "Selective Intelligence" basically aired one side of an intelligence debate, defending dovish (or if you prefer, intellectually conservative) CIA analysts. It described the other side as "the Straussian movement," citing Mr. Wolfowitz and Abram Shulsky, head of a special Pentagon shop set up to review intelligence on Iraq. And it included a quote from an academic about "Strauss's idea--actually Plato's--that philosophers need to tell noble lies not only to the people at large but also to powerful politicians."
Looking at the striking similarities in these accounts the conspiracy-minded might conclude that the New York Times and New Yorker have been reduced to recycling the insights of Lyndon LaRouche. But it's entirely possible that Mr. Atlas and Mr. Hersh have stumbled into the fever swamps all on their own.
To those of us who have lived this history over the decades, the notion of a Strauss conspiracy is totally unhinged. Leo Strauss, I learned as graduate student in the 1960s, was a champion of ancient philosophers, a critic of attempts at empirical political science if not of modernity itself. While this is centuries and leagues removed from Saddam Hussein, it's true that Mr. Strauss did influence Irving Kristol and his wife Gertrude Himmelfarb, and through them other neo-conservatives.
-snip-
(Robert L. Bartley in The Wall Street Journal Opinion Journal, June 9, 2003
To Read This Article Click Here
I'm not entirely sure why old Leon's shade should be wandering the East Wing inasmuch as he had an ice-axe lobotomy in Mexico courtesy of some KGB feller, but hey, no sense in ruining a good story...
The Islamist slant is interesting. Canada is becoming a real haven for Islamofascism in general. Sad for them...scary for us, the target.
Well of course Donald Rumsfeld is a Trotskyite.
Look at this:
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