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Trotskycons? (Neo-Con Scholar Confesses Neo-Conservatism Was Founded By Trotskyite Communists)
National Review ^ | June 11, 2003 | Steven Schwartz

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 ...


TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Foreign Affairs; Politics/Elections; Russia; US: New York; Your Opinion/Questions
KEYWORDS: communists; leftists; neocommies; neocons; neoconservatives; stevenschwartz; trotsky; trotskycons
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To: rmlew; Cacique
ping.
41 posted on 06/16/2003 10:20:16 PM PDT by Black Agnes
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To: Maximilian; Destro
Hey Destro,

Looks like this Neo-Cons = Trotskyites meme is catching on.

Previous thread:

Trotsky's ghost wandering the White House: Bolshevik's writings influence on Bush aides

I'm still not buying though.

42 posted on 06/16/2003 10:30:50 PM PDT by Incorrigible
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To: dennisw
He was not the mass murdering psycho that other communists were.

I beg to differ.

I will never understand the need some people have to try to find and salvage the reputation of some benighted "good communist" among those murderous terrorist thugs (which is what they were) to whose defense they will tirelessly rally. It used to be Lenin: "Lenin wasn't that bad, Stalin perverted his theories, took them to the extreme", bla bla bla. For you, it's Trotsky, he's a misunderstood pussycat cuz his hands got covered in the blood of thousands rather than millions (or whatever the perverted reasoning is... i see you take refuge in some quote of Marx, "quantity changes quality", as if it were holy writ).

Don't misunderstand, I don't want to argue with you about your little Trotsky. You can have your "intellectual" thug Trotsky. I just wonder why some people seem to need him, or someone like him, so much. For some unknown psychological reasons it's awfully difficult for many people to just open their eyes and see those bastards for what they were.

Just think what a waste of time and electrons it is for you to sit on a bulletin board in 2003 and type words in defense of "Trotsky" or whatever the hell the oh so "intellectual", "theoretician" (why? cuz he wore spectacles??) terrorist's real name was (funny how the cowards all took fake names). Gawd it's pathetic when you think about it.

43 posted on 06/16/2003 10:31:47 PM PDT by Dr. Frank fan
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To: Dr. Frank
How the hell is than an "aspect of neo-conservatism"? It's an aspect of this guy Stephen Schwarz, whoever that is.

Stephen Schwartz is a prominent neo-conservative. And apparently it's an aspect of Christopher Hitchens and Irving Kristol as well.

44 posted on 06/16/2003 10:48:27 PM PDT by Maximilian
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To: ComtedeMaistre; dennisw; Dr. Frank; Captain Kirk; Maximilian; 11th Earl of Mar; Archimedes2000; ...
Incorrigible, now you done it! You know whenever I see that crypto-convert to Islam, Stephen Schwartz Suleyman Ahmad I go into a rage.

You force me to post a link to my STEPHEN SCHWARTZ'S STENCH

What is a modern Trotskyist, I mean what do they take away from this 20s origin movement? World wide revolution but no longer for communism but for democratic socialism -- sort of like big govt. that does not act like big govt. -- cyrpto-socialist state (I just coined that copyright pending).

I think the Trotskyist's fear nationalism. They hate ideas of borders-an evolution from the slogan "workers of the world unite" to maybe something like "citizens of the world unite." Citizens that are uni-racial, uni-cultural, uni-you name it. In other words it is the elimination of all things that make humans conflict with each other. To do so you need a strong hand to smash people into place when they don't act homogenized. That is why the laughable pronouncements that Iraq, after the war would somehow transform itself to a selfless democracy.

That is the key I think to understanding neocons--their ideal for selfless actions as a policy guide, which itself is of socialist origin. I know it sounds decent and even Christian, but what motivates people is selfish interests. The same selfish interests that guide Adam Smith's invisible hand of capitalism also guides our democracy.

Being selfish in your own self interest seems not to be a good policy taken individually but applied on a mass scale it is the only system that works. Neocon policy is to IGNORE national self-interest, Sure they may dress up policy in patriotic terms-being that they are also Plato-Straussians (lie to the people for their own good and let the elite govern)- but their actions are geared to one thing--the elimination of nations - of borders-and thus conflict. Yes, some are Jews-because a philosophy geared to the elimination of conflict based on ethnic or religious status would appeal to many Jews. The fear of the return of a nationalist fueled monster like Hitler animates the nightmares of the neocons. You see it in how they call all their enemies "Hitlers". Milosevic is Hitler, Saddam is Hitler, Osama is Hitler. Hell all that that Mad-Cow Albright did was talk about Munich's lessons as her justification for her policies in the Balkans against Serbia. Bill Clinton stated that WW2 began in the Balkans on national television-talk about neocon Freudian slips! (Poland by the way is nowhere near the Balkans).

Neocons, also betray their roots in how they attack those against them-calling them traitors, putting them on the defensive, etc. These denounciation tactics are a legacy of the leftists.

45 posted on 06/16/2003 11:19:45 PM PDT by Destro (Know your enemy! Help fight Islamic terrorisim by visiting www.johnathangaltfilms.com)
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To: Incorrigible
Forgot to ask--what are you not buying?
46 posted on 06/16/2003 11:20:22 PM PDT by Destro (Know your enemy! Help fight Islamic terrorisim by visiting www.johnathangaltfilms.com)
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To: ComtedeMaistre; dennisw; Black Agnes; rmlew; Clemenza
I can contend that any description of Irving Kristol as a Trotskyite as late as twenty years ago when he was one of my professors in graduate school (he was teaching at NYU at the time)is absurd. I may add that during that time I was in the midst of my transformation from being a Stalinist, and I can assure you a Stalinist can spot a Trotskyite a mile away. Kristol at the time was no Trotskyite. If anything he was a rabid Conservative and Reagan supporter.

What distinguishes Trotskyites is a belief in that absurd concept that Trotsky had of instantaneous proletariat revolution. Trotsky believed that the working class would engage in a spontaneous revolution once it determined it's class interest. A concept directly at odds with that of Lenin and yes Stalin's concept of the necessity of a revolutionary vanguard made up of professionals leading the proletariat who is incapable of knowing it's class interest. The Trotskyite position was closer to that of Bakunin and the anarchists.

That Trotsky must share in the crimes committed by Lenin during the evolutionary phase from 1917 on-wards there is no doubt and it is naive to absolve him from such crimes in which in excess of a million people died.

That someone is an ex something or order does not make one something in the present tense unless he has committed a crime. In which case, a murderer is always a murderer but an ex-democrat or liberal (much like Reagan) remains an ex unless he digresses and falls off the wagon.

47 posted on 06/16/2003 11:48:17 PM PDT by Cacique
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To: ComtedeMaistre
It is common knowledge, or at least I think it is on FR, that Irving Kristol was a Trotskyite. OTOH, so many people have so corrupted the original meaning of what a neo-con is/was, that yes,using their belaboured deffintion, Ronald Reagan WAS/ is a neo-con. So is any FRD loving, now seen the light Conservative.
48 posted on 06/16/2003 11:52:32 PM PDT by nopardons
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To: Cacique
Kristol was a Trotskyite in his college days. He's said so himself. He hasn't been one in so long, as to have been one before most, if not all of us on theis forum were born.

Otherwise, your post is 100% acurate.

49 posted on 06/16/2003 11:55:26 PM PDT by nopardons
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To: DPB101
That's all it is and some here are useful tools, denouncing anyone they disagree with as " neo-cons ".
50 posted on 06/16/2003 11:59:14 PM PDT by nopardons
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To: nopardons
I am not disputing the fact he was a Trotskyite in his youth. I simply stated that when he was my professor he had long abandoned such notions and certainly did not come across as still having been influenced by them.

The interesting thing is that many Trotskyites hold an untenable position is believing in 1. spontaneous revolution and 2. It occurring on a worldwide basis. Unless you are constantly in a drug induced stupor such a position flies in the face of reality.

The Stalinist position that the revolution had to be secured and protected in one country at all costs before it could be exported was a more logical one and was a direct extrapolation of Lenin's position. Trotsky eventually abandoned both positions. It should be noted that in the initial phase of the Bolshevik revolution Trotsky had supported the Mensheviks in the Duma against Lenin. It was only later when Lenin's Bolsheviks had attained initial success that he switched sides. He was always much closer to Bakunin and the anarchists than he was to lenin. But one must give him credit, he was an admirable war commissar and military commander in the civil war. Yet, by complicity he must share responsibility for the many hundreds of thousands who were executed during the consolidation phase of the revolution.

51 posted on 06/17/2003 12:07:08 AM PDT by Cacique
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To: nopardons
It bugs liberals no end that "liberal" has become a dirty word and they can't use it when running for office. Bugs them even more that conservatives have no problem calling themselves "conservatives." They are attempting to rectify that disparity in nomenclature by calling all conservatives "neocons" and demoninzing the word.
52 posted on 06/17/2003 12:07:28 AM PDT by DPB101 ("I'll say this about Arthur, he'll never make the same mistake three times."--Max Frankel)
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To: Cacique
And I was agreeing with you and still do. You're spot on, with this post. Pity, that the ones here, calling everyone they don't agree with " neo-cons " don't know even the little, that you've posted in this one reply.

Thank you, for posting factual history, instead of the usual codswallop. :-)

53 posted on 06/17/2003 12:14:43 AM PDT by nopardons
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To: DPB101
Exactly so and some very misguided here are helping them.
54 posted on 06/17/2003 12:15:33 AM PDT by nopardons
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To: Reactionary
"Why is it that in order to be a critic one must assume that one knows the author better than he knows himself? "

Perhaps because Schwartz doesn't know who he is himself. He is a neo-con (convert). A convert to Islam and a proclaimed "Jew-for-Allah.

"That was the end of the affair as far as Frontpagemag.com is concerned. It is not the end of the story, however. The piquant twist is that Stephen Schwartz is a convert to Islam. He is a self-avowed "Jew-for-Allah" who has taken to calling himself Suleyman Ahmad, but he keeps this significant fact concealed from his readers. Why? He provides the answer, too:

'Since accepting Islam, I have proceeded carefully in informing my friends, neighbours, co-workers, and others . . . I want to proceed in a way that will do the most for the welfare of the Ummah and for better relations between all believers in la ilaha illallah.'

Since "the welfare of the Ummah" is his main motive, everything is allowed, including lies and slanders. His attack on me was part-and-parcel of Schwartz's second motive: to demonize any opposition to jihad along Europe's eastern rim (Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Cyprus). "I speak Albanian and was involved with the KLA struggle almost from the beginning," he even boasts, forgetting that in view of the KLA'a distinguished record such admission may make Schwartz interesting to the office of the prosecutor at The Hague war crimes tribunal.

Schwartz's attempts to promote the "tolerant," Turkish variety of Islam, as opposed to the "bad" Wahhabist variety was comprehensively demolished by Andrew Bostom in National Review Online. . . ChroniclesMagazine, Serge Trifkovic

ONe could easily just come to the conclusion that Mr. Schwartz is one mixed up dude. Former Trotskyite, former Jew, former intellectual.

yitbos

55 posted on 06/17/2003 1:38:02 AM PDT by bruinbirdman (Veritas Vos Liberabit)
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To: nopardons; Cacique
See #55
56 posted on 06/17/2003 1:43:08 AM PDT by bruinbirdman (Veritas Vos Liberabit)
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To: Cacique
What distinguishes Trotskyites is a belief in that absurd concept that Trotsky had of instantaneous proletariat revolution. Trotsky believed that the working class would engage in a spontaneous revolution once it determined it's class interest. A concept directly at odds with that of Lenin and yes Stalin's concept of the necessity of a revolutionary vanguard made up of professionals leading the proletariat who is incapable of knowing it's class interest. The Trotskyite position was closer to that of Bakunin and the anarchists.

Did I know all this? No way! Neither do 95% of neo conservatives in America. They just agree with the neo conservative ideas and don't know jack (and don't care jack) about Trotsky. No way was Trotsky the communist killer some are making him out to be on this thread. He had blood on his hands but nothing like a Stalin Hitler Mao Lenin Pol Pot and whoever killed tens of thousands of Vietnamese after our Vietnam war

57 posted on 06/17/2003 5:41:09 AM PDT by dennisw (What wit!)
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To: Dr. Frank
For you, it's Trotsky, he's a misunderstood pussycat cuz his hands got covered in the blood of thousands rather than millions (or whatever the perverted reasoning is... i see you take refuge in some quote of Marx, "quantity changes quality", as if it were holy writ).

So by your reasoning no difference between one who kills 10 people and someone who murders one. The dead would beg to differ and so would their loved ones. THUS: "quantity changes quality", 

......"quantity changes quality", as if it were holy writ).

Nope. Just common sense and giving credit where credit is due

58 posted on 06/17/2003 5:46:06 AM PDT by dennisw (What wit!)
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To: Destro
It seems that your thesis about the neocon operating principle: [Minimize nationalism, foist 'democracy' on recalcitrant regimes, thus end wars,] generally speaking holds water.

Interesting.
59 posted on 06/17/2003 6:05:56 AM PDT by ninenot (Joe McCarthy was RIGHT, but Drank Too Much)
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To: dennisw
He had blood on his hands but nothing like a Stalin Hitler Mao Lenin Pol Pot and whoever killed tens of thousands of Vietnamese after our Vietnam war

You're painting yourself into a logical corner with this argument.

It is far more important that Trotsky denounced his errors--and we hope that he denounced ALL of them, including the atheism implicit in Communism.

60 posted on 06/17/2003 6:12:50 AM PDT by ninenot (Joe McCarthy was RIGHT, but Drank Too Much)
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