Re: OT - Bolsheviks V Trotskites

On Apr 5, 4:27 pm, clau...@xxxxxxxxx (Claude V. Lucas) wrote:
In article <1ira13hubjqnnpgorubvinc8ugu6vdt...@xxxxxxx>,
Bruce "Pee Wee" Morgen <edi...@xxxxxxxx> snivelled:


For some of us, the clock didn't stop.

Here in the new Millenium words mean whatever
you neo-Bolshevik traitors want them too, right?

A history lesson for ya Claude! You cute little Trotskyite.

Neoconservatism is a political movement, mainly in the United States,
which is generally held to have emerged in the 1960s, coalesced in the
1970s, and has had a significant presence in the administration of
George W. Bush.[1]

The prefix neo- refers to two ways in which neoconservatism was new.
First, many of the movement's founders, originally liberals, Democrats
or from socialist backgrounds, were new to conservatism. Also,
neoconservatism was a comparatively recent strain of conservative
socio-political thought. It derived from a variety of intellectual
roots in the decades following World War II, including literary
criticism and the social sciences.

Irving Kristol,[2] Norman Podhoretz[3] and others described themselves
as neoconservatives during the Cold War. In general, however, the
movement's critics use the term more often than supporters.[4][5]

Many associate neoconservatism with periodicals such as Commentary and
The Weekly Standard along with the foreign policy initiatives of think
tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Project for
the New American Century (PNAC), and the Jewish Institute for National
Security Affairs (JINSA). Neoconservative journalists, pundits, policy
analysts, and politicians, often dubbed "neocons" by supporters and
critics alike, have been credited with (or blamed for) their influence
on U.S. foreign policy, especially under the administration of George
W. Bush.[1]

"Social democracy is still here in all its variants, defining our
entire respectable political spectrum, from advanced victimology and
feminism on the left over to neoconservatism on the right. We are now
trapped, in America, inside a Menshevik fantasy, with the narrow
bounds of respectable debate set for us by various brands of Marxists.
It is now our task, the task of the resurgent right, of the paleo
movement, to break those bonds, to finish the job, to finish off
Marxism forever."

Rothbard foresaw our current predicament: We are trapped inside a
Menshevik fantasy, a nightmare world of perpetual war and growing
government power. (for info on Menshevik see
http://www.uea.ac.uk/his/webcours/russia/documents/rite-men.shtml)

In a review of Eric Hobsbawm's memoirs, Christopher Hitchens remarked
that Tony Blair is "at once the most radical and the most conservative
of politicians. Very many of Blair's tough young acolytes received
their political baptism in what I try to call the Marxist Right."

This ideological category-the Marxist right-is quite useful. It
explains not only the policies that plunder our purses and wreak havoc
on the world but the distinctly Soviet style of our rulers and their
Amen Corner, as they demonize their enemies and seek to silence them.

Many of the top chieftains of the War Party are ex-leftists of one
sort or another. They owe more to Hegel, Marx, and Leon Trotsky than
to Russell Kirk, Friedrich Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises. The
"godfather" of the neoconservative movement, Irving Kristol, was a
Trotskyite in his youth, and the kibitzing that went on in Cubicle B
at City College of New York has achieved the status of legend. The
official line, of course, is that this was all just a youthful
indiscretion and that any such allegiances have long since been put
away in a trunk somewhere. The reality, however, is quite different.

The collaboration between social democrats of the Blairite variety and
the official conservative movement represented by National Review has
been going on since the Reagan years. By that time, a group of ex-
Trotskyites associated with Max Shachtman-Trotsky's former chief
American lieutenant-had wormed its way into the good graces of the
American labor movement and into the office of Sen. Henry "Scoop"
Jackson, whose fulsome support for an interventionist foreign policy
won the heart of the fanatically anti-Soviet Shachtman.

Shachtman supported the Vietnam War and the Bay of Pigs Invasion yet
still kept his devotion to socialism intact. He took over the old
Socialist Party apparatus in the late 1950's and changed its name to
Social Democrats, USA. In this incarnation, the group had an influence
well beyond its small numbers-not on the left, which was going in a
different direction, but on the American right. During the Reagan era,
a number of top Social Democrat leaders and activists were given key
niches in the government bureaucracy, including Jeane Kirkpatrick, the
U.S. delegate to the United Nations; Elliott Abrams, a former staffer
for Senator Jackson, a major figure in the Iran-Contra affair, and
assistant secretary of state for Inter-American Affairs under Reagan;
Carl Gershman, the first president of the National Endowment for
Democracy; and Arch Puddington, who worked for the U.S. Information
Agency's Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

National Review celebrated May Day 2002 by publishing a report by
Joshua Muravchik on a kind of family reunion sponsored by SDUSA in
Washington:

"among those sponsoring or joining the evening's festivities-funded
mainly by the estate of the widow of Trotskyist icon Max Shachtman-
were, on the right, Jeane Kirkpatrick, former Christian Coalition
spokesman Marshall Wittmann, [and] former Secretary of Labor nominee
Linda Chavez."

Muravchik, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and
former national chairman of the Young Peoples Socialist League-the
Shachtmanite youth group-was also in attendance.

This penetration of the conservative movement by ideologically alien
intruders extended into the ranks. Some years ago, a private
discussion club for conservative writers and activists in the San
Francisco Bay Area met at the Union Club. Participants included Bill
Rusher, former publisher of National Review; San Francisco Chronicle
columnist Debra Saunders; Stephen Schwartz; and myself. The young man
who organized the meetings told me how he had been recruited into the
SDUSA, and then into the conservative movement, because the Social
Democrats had come to his campus in support of Poland's Solidarity
movement. He described going to their meetings and feeling "weird"
when they opened and closed the proceedings by singing the
"Internationale." He explained that it was "only a tradition," but,
when he said it, he did not seem so sure.

We are now seeing the implementation of a long-standing
neoconservative ambition: the imposition of a world order-in effect,
an American Empire, with Washington, D.C., at its center. The
infiltration and co-opting of the conservative movement by the Marxist
right and its transformation into an instrument of an ideology that is
statist, globalist, and militantly expansionist was the first step on
the road to empire. Once the Marxist right had seized control of the
think tanks, magazines, and activist organizations of the American
right, they moved to exert control over the Republican Party.

Both the ideology and the methods of the Marxist left have been
imported into the conservative movement. Ideologically, the so-called
third-camp socialism of Shachtman and his followers has been
transmuted into the worship of "Democracy" as the be-all and end-all
of human development. The neocons have simply stood the old Trotskyism
on its head and said that the American system-like the old Soviet
system-cannot stand alone and isolated but must spread itself over the
earth or face defeat at the hands of its enemies.

The ideological framework of neoconservative ideology is deeply rooted
in the Marxist tradition. Francis Fukuyama, the boy wonder of the
neocons, even came up with an application of the Hegelian dialectic as
the ultimate rationale for American global hegemony in his famous
article on "The End of History." The Marxists, too, saw themselves as
agents of History, and they constantly evoked images of modernity to
justify their innumerable crimes against humanity. They came as
"liberators"-a favorite word of Red Army propagandists, and one that
our own Pentagon has since taken up with alacrity.

The neocons retain the methods as well as the ideology of the left:
party-line politics, periodic purges, and the nasty habit of smearing
their opponents rather than engaging them in debate. The neocon method
echoes that of its leftist progenitors: Once the party line is
established-Israel must be unconditionally defended, Iraq must be
utterly destroyed, Pat Buchanan must be smeared into silence-anyone
who deviates is demonized.

In an interview with Stephen Schwartz in Canada's National Post, Jeet
Heer showed just how deeply the Marxist right has burrowed into the
Bush administration:

To this day, Schwartz speaks of Trotsky affectionately as "the old
man" and "L.D." . . . "To a great extent, I still consider myself to
be [one of the] disciples of L.D.," he admits, and he observes that in
certain Washington circles, the ghost of Trotsky still hovers around.
At a party in February celebrating a new book about Iraq, Schwartz
exchanged banter with Wolfowitz about Trotsky, the Moscow Trials and
Max Shachtman. "I've talked to Wolfowitz about all of this," Schwartz
notes. "We had this discussion about Shachtman. He knows all that
stuff, but was never part of it. He's definitely aware."

"Ideology is political fanaticism, an endeavor to rule the world by
rigorous abstract dogmata," said Russell Kirk in a 1991 Heritage
Foundation lecture. "The dogmata of an abstract 'democratic
capitalism' may be as mischievous as the dogmata of Marx." I would add
only that these two "rival" dogmas are as intimately related as are
the offspring of the same parents.

"The yoking together of Paul Wolf-owitz and Leon Trotsky sounds odd,"
writes Heer, "but a long and tortuous history explains the link
between the Bolshevik left and the Republican right."

Defending his remarks in the National Post, Schwartz proudly
proclaimed his Trotskyite heritage on National Review Online and even
coined a term for this growing grouplet: Trotsky-cons!

The Bolsheviks of the left were eventually defeated, but it took half
a century to do it. If we face another 50 years of struggle against
the Bolsheviks of the right-well, then, so be it.

.