Posted on 06/16/2003 5:03:58 PM PDT by ComtedeMaistre
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.
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.
Stephen Schwartz is a prominent neo-conservative. And apparently it's an aspect of Christopher Hitchens and Irving Kristol as well.
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.
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.
Otherwise, your post is 100% acurate.
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.
Thank you, for posting factual history, instead of the usual codswallop. :-)
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
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
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
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.
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