Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Painting the White House Red by John Laughland

George W. Bush is not, of course, a closet Marxist. But many of his closest advisors, especially the neoconservatives, do have post-Trotskyite backgrounds. The original Marxist plan was for the socialist revolution to engulf the whole planet, and this plan was embraced by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky. It famously came up against the buffers of Stalin’s alternative proposal to build socialism in one country first. In exile, Trotsky kept the idea of world revolution going by setting up the Fourth International in 1938. Within two years, Irving Kristol—the man who was later to be the founding father of the neoconservative movement that so dominates the Bush administration—joined it. Irving Kristol never renounced or condemned his Trotskyite past: in 1983, he wrote that he was still proud of it. Likewise, in 1996, Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute—one of the leading ideologues of the war on terror—coined the phrase “global democratic revolution” in the subtitle of a book in which he attacked Bill Clinton for being a “counter-revolutionary.” The book’s title, Freedom Betrayed, is an obvious allusion to Trotsky’s own 1938 account of his break with Stalin, The Revolution Betrayed.

No comments:

opinions powered by SendLove.to