ADMIRING THE PEBBLE GARDEN OUT BACK
[My Dearest] Felix:
When your Trotskyite party is formed, launches a revolution, and follows its namesake's lead in strategy and tactics, I hope you are thrown into the front lines against extremely determined reactionaries—in short, given the choice of possibly being shot by your enemies vs. certainly being shot by your own cadres to the rear. It was how Trotsky won the Russian civil war.
Trotsky's losing to Stalin and ultimately getting Ramon Mercader's ice pick stuck in into his vicious, bloodthirsty head is proof that God probably heard some Russian's prayers for mercy on his country. Given how Trotsky ran his forces in the Russian Civil War, he would have machine-gunned recalcitrant Russian peasants or, to spare bullets, threatened his troops with shooting while they bashed in heads with shovels had he won the power struggle with Stalin. A Trotskyite Russia probably would have been Democratic Kampuchea on a large scale.
Yes, Trotsky was an incorruptible, sterling idealist—just the sort of man who never, never, ever thinks he could possibly be wrong, and that since her serves a great ideal, whatever means he uses to reach it are justified.
Also, I doubt a Trotskyite Party would be any bulwark at all against radical Islam. All Marxists at this time seem to see the Furor Islamicus as a wonderful weapon to turn against the decadent Western bourgeoisie (and are too blind to see that they themselves are part of the decadent Western bourgeoisie now in radical Islam's sights).
Indeed, all Trotskyites I've known seem to share the common Marxist disease—an intense, nihilistic hatred at the civilization that reared them that explodes into a great, black f@5t of rage that leaves the victorious "revolution" squatting in a slum surrounded by desert. Indeed, in this, Marxism is a lot like Islam.
As for the Wobblies, how much luck will an exploited working class will have once there's only one employer—the Nomenklatyura who control the state? I mean, even in Democratic Kampuchea, some were still more equal than others. I suspect the only reason why the exiled Trotsky rediscovered his youthful egalitarianism was because he lost the perks of being part of the new Soviet elite. The Wobblies' descendants should be grateful that their forefathers lost.
Now, as a fan of the late Saul Bellow, let me say that I DO NOT think that the only good Trotskyite is a dead one. An ex-one is fine by me.
Still, the only thing I have to say about Marxism, whether Stalinist, Trotskyite, Maoist, Gramscian, or whatever, is that I hope I live to see the day when anyone talking about Marx will hear the reply, "Which Marx? Groucho, Harpo, Chico, or Beppo?"
—Kepha
We just had to repost that wonderful smackdown of the Felix who was whingeing on about political matrices he obviously had not quite grasped. But Kepha was not finished. His coup de grace, reposted below, adroitly sums up our position here at the Bellicose Augur, so we thank him for his beautiful and concise prose:
It does not do to demonize either the Serbs or the Croats. All of them had the unhappy lot of living at the fault lines of several civilizations.
Further, the Yugoslav experiment further underscores the fatuousness of even "independent" Marxism. Had the erstwhile Croat Austro-Hungarian master sergeant Josef Broz Tito truly fostered a national identity, the knives would not have come out the minute his corpse turned cold.
As for the bombing of the Serbs being part of corporate or political America's drive for hegemonism, I disagree. It was a strictly reactive action taken when our European allies were clamoring for us to "do something", and it just so happened that the propaganda that reached us was about Bosniaks and Kosovars being victims of Serb ethnic cleansing. Wall Street loves money, not blood; and, much as I dislike the Clintons, I give them credit for having pacifist instincts (why, it even takes something like the 9/11 attack to get a Texas cowboy like Dubya Bush to call out the troops—and this after he ran a campaign about getting us out of nation-building overseas!).
The rest of the world looks on us Americans as war mongering barbarians chiefly because they're always trying to figure out ways to get us to protect them from themselves or their neighbors; and secondarily because their intellectualoids swallowed the Marxist kool-aid which has to blame someone else when The Revolution fails to unleash the promised productive forces or when the newly victorious liberated masses of Viet Nam and Kampuchea decide to have a go at each other.
When your Trotskyite party is formed, launches a revolution, and follows its namesake's lead in strategy and tactics, I hope you are thrown into the front lines against extremely determined reactionaries—in short, given the choice of possibly being shot by your enemies vs. certainly being shot by your own cadres to the rear. It was how Trotsky won the Russian civil war.
Trotsky's losing to Stalin and ultimately getting Ramon Mercader's ice pick stuck in into his vicious, bloodthirsty head is proof that God probably heard some Russian's prayers for mercy on his country. Given how Trotsky ran his forces in the Russian Civil War, he would have machine-gunned recalcitrant Russian peasants or, to spare bullets, threatened his troops with shooting while they bashed in heads with shovels had he won the power struggle with Stalin. A Trotskyite Russia probably would have been Democratic Kampuchea on a large scale.
Yes, Trotsky was an incorruptible, sterling idealist—just the sort of man who never, never, ever thinks he could possibly be wrong, and that since her serves a great ideal, whatever means he uses to reach it are justified.
Also, I doubt a Trotskyite Party would be any bulwark at all against radical Islam. All Marxists at this time seem to see the Furor Islamicus as a wonderful weapon to turn against the decadent Western bourgeoisie (and are too blind to see that they themselves are part of the decadent Western bourgeoisie now in radical Islam's sights).
Indeed, all Trotskyites I've known seem to share the common Marxist disease—an intense, nihilistic hatred at the civilization that reared them that explodes into a great, black f@5t of rage that leaves the victorious "revolution" squatting in a slum surrounded by desert. Indeed, in this, Marxism is a lot like Islam.
As for the Wobblies, how much luck will an exploited working class will have once there's only one employer—the Nomenklatyura who control the state? I mean, even in Democratic Kampuchea, some were still more equal than others. I suspect the only reason why the exiled Trotsky rediscovered his youthful egalitarianism was because he lost the perks of being part of the new Soviet elite. The Wobblies' descendants should be grateful that their forefathers lost.
Now, as a fan of the late Saul Bellow, let me say that I DO NOT think that the only good Trotskyite is a dead one. An ex-one is fine by me.
Still, the only thing I have to say about Marxism, whether Stalinist, Trotskyite, Maoist, Gramscian, or whatever, is that I hope I live to see the day when anyone talking about Marx will hear the reply, "Which Marx? Groucho, Harpo, Chico, or Beppo?"
—Kepha
We just had to repost that wonderful smackdown of the Felix who was whingeing on about political matrices he obviously had not quite grasped. But Kepha was not finished. His coup de grace, reposted below, adroitly sums up our position here at the Bellicose Augur, so we thank him for his beautiful and concise prose:
It does not do to demonize either the Serbs or the Croats. All of them had the unhappy lot of living at the fault lines of several civilizations.
Further, the Yugoslav experiment further underscores the fatuousness of even "independent" Marxism. Had the erstwhile Croat Austro-Hungarian master sergeant Josef Broz Tito truly fostered a national identity, the knives would not have come out the minute his corpse turned cold.
As for the bombing of the Serbs being part of corporate or political America's drive for hegemonism, I disagree. It was a strictly reactive action taken when our European allies were clamoring for us to "do something", and it just so happened that the propaganda that reached us was about Bosniaks and Kosovars being victims of Serb ethnic cleansing. Wall Street loves money, not blood; and, much as I dislike the Clintons, I give them credit for having pacifist instincts (why, it even takes something like the 9/11 attack to get a Texas cowboy like Dubya Bush to call out the troops—and this after he ran a campaign about getting us out of nation-building overseas!).
The rest of the world looks on us Americans as war mongering barbarians chiefly because they're always trying to figure out ways to get us to protect them from themselves or their neighbors; and secondarily because their intellectualoids swallowed the Marxist kool-aid which has to blame someone else when The Revolution fails to unleash the promised productive forces or when the newly victorious liberated masses of Viet Nam and Kampuchea decide to have a go at each other.
Labels: bourgeoisie, Kampuchea, Leon Trotsky, Marxism, Stalinist, West, Wobblies
posted by Gabriel Thy at 12:22 PM
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