[nopardons]

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.

[Cacique]

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.