Edition No. 901
EDITED BY PATRICE GREANVILLE
Nuggets of clarity, irony, humor and wisdom seen & overheard on the Net
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Dispatch first iteration Nov 30 2017 | Collated and edited by Patrice Greanville
MAIN COMMENTERS: • Luciana Bohne • Chris Driscoll • Gio Con
Trotsky
Luciana Bohne Leon Trotsky, 1937, bases conclusions on false premises. He asserts that the Popular Front's goal was to save capitalism. This is false: the goal was to defeat fascism.
This false premise is not simply "false" in the sense that T. makes a mistake of analysis. This false premise is conscious and deliberate.
Because the Popular Front was a policy assumed by the Comintern in 1935 in Moscow by the world communist parties with the explicit task of defeating fascism and T calls this policy a defense of capitalism, he can then implicate Stalin in the Popular Front's supposed devious plot to save capitalism.
So Trotsky portrays Stalin as the "gravedigger" of the revolution in Spain--as in Russia in 1917, he adds for good measure (it should be noted here that T became a Bolshevik in August 1917 and Stalin had been one from the beginning, had been paymaster of presses and party agents--knew them all personally--, had Lenin's trust, and organized a network of bank robberies to fund party activities).
The "socialist revolution" in Spain was in T's mind. It hadn't happened. In reality, Spain had effected a bourgeois "revolution" and the fascists had engineered a military coup against it. These were the MAJOR fronts of the Spanish Civil War.
Enjoy the last sentences: the petty ad hominem alone should alert you to Ts questionable personal "objectivity" and snobbery. Stalin could be accused of many social solecisms but not of having a sluggish mind. Neither FDR nor Churchill found him slow on the uptick.
Trotsky: "By setting itself the task of rescuing the capitalist regime, the Popular Front doomed itself to military defeat. By turning Bolshevism on its head, Stalin succeeded completely in fulfilling the role of gravedigger of the revolution.
It ought to be added that the Spanish experience once again demonstrates that Stalin failed completely to understand either the October Revolution or the Russian civil war. His slow moving provincial mind lagged hopelessly behind the tempestuous march of events in 1917-21. In those of his speeches and articles in 1917 where he expressed his own ideas, his later Thermidorean “doctrine” is fully implanted. In this sense, Stalin in Spain in 1937 is the continuator of Stalin of the March 1917 conference of the Bolsheviks. But in 1917 he merely feared the revolutionary workers; in 1937 he strangled them. The opportunist had become the executioner."
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I didn’t become a revolutionary until 1961, so I am not to be believed as a true one since I was not one before 1961. I probably even committed crimes against communism because I was born to a father who was a U.S. military man, and being his son must make me complicit in war crimes against all humanity. Of course, the testimonial letters by Lenin praising Trotsky and asking comrades to not place Stalin in his place are forgeries made by the CIA and Nazi Germany with the sly hand of Trotsky. Opps, the CIA came later, but there… Read more »
Oh, I must add. Now that I have written this witty bit, I will have to start everyone of my future writings with the confessional: “I am not a Trotskyist!”