"in place of finding myself face to face with a political chief who was directing the struggle for the liberation of the working class, I found myself before a man who desired nothing more than to satisfy his needs and desires of vengeance and of hate and who did not utilize the workers' struggle for anything more than a means of hiding his own paltriness and despicable calculations.
... in connection with this house, which he said very well had been converted into a fortress, I asked myself very often, from where had come the money for such work. . . . Perhaps the consul of a great foreign nation who often visited him could answer this question for us... .
It was Trotsky who destroyed my nature, my future and all my affections. He converted me into a man without a name, without country, into an instrument of Trotsky. I was in a blind alley. . . . Trotsky crushed me in his hands as if I had been paper."
Ramon Mercader, the man who saved the USSR from a fascist collaborator called Trotsky.
Reading an article by John Waters in the Irish Times recently criticising the activities of the Socialist Workers Party, I was surprised for once to find myself actually agreeing with him, but for all the wrong reasons. I can scarcely imagine ever having agreed with John Waters but I am glad to say that I do agree with him on this issue.
I was struck by the comment John made concerning the protests of the Socialist Workers Party, SWP outside the Dáil. I fully support protests but I do not,however, subscribe to the ‘ideology’ of the SWP. John, citing the work of Slavov Zizek, pointed out the paradox that radical demonstrations, far from being a critique of the bourgeois order, in fact, validate the freedoms granted under that order. There is a certain truth in this but Waters seems to think that the SWP advocates some form of radical revolutionary change. Waters, I believe, unwittingly, points at the central problem concerning the SWP, namely that it is as though capitalism itself had created the space for them to exist, that, far from offering a radical alternative to capitalism, the SWP are in fact a creation of capitalism itself.
Historically this is absolutely true. The key figure mentioned here by Waters is of course Leon Trotsky, the favourite counter-revolutionary of ‘Socialist Workers’. Leon Trotsky is perhaps one of the greatest liars in modern history and those political groups who still admire him, are tragically clinging on to a vicious falsification of left-wing history by claiming that Trotsky was the ‘true revolutionary’ and the ‘real successor to Lenin’. Lenin despised Trotsky and never ceased to point out his mistakes, his bumptious ego and his factional activity within the Bolshevik party in the former USSR. The usual phrase thrown out about Trotsky is that he was the ‘architect of the October Revolution’. This is indeed what Trotsky thought of himself but it bears no reflection on reality. Trotsky only joined the Bolshevik party when they were about to cease power in 1917. He was as Lenin described him an ‘opportunist’.
For years, he had vilified Lenin and the Bolsheviks, supporting every kind of right-wing policy disguised in left-wing jargon. Months before the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 while, Lenin , Stalin and others were working indefatigably at organising party activity, Trotsky was wining and dining in New York with the high and mighty of the capitalist world. The only contribution to the October Revolution by Trotsky was his command of the Red Army. The essence of a bourgeois army commander is to dictate and Trotsky was certainly a ruthless disciplinarian and dictator. In fact, most soldiers of the Red Army hated him for his dictatorial methods. He never ceased to criticise what he called the ‘Stalinist bureaucracy’ ignoring the fact that Lenin’s chief criticisms of Trotsky concerned his ‘tendency’ to couch right wing ideology in left wing slogans and that he devoted himself almost exclusively to ‘administrative matters’, in other words ‘bureaucracy’.
However, when it came to politics Trotsky, the disciplinarian and bureaucrat, refused to submit to the agreed rules of inter-party democracy. When his own right-wing ideas were defeated at party congresses, he reacted by forming his own faction, the so-called Trotsky-Bukharinite block.
In the famous Moscow‘show trials’ of 1937, many members of Trotsky’s ‘Leningrad Centre’ faction were accused of having conspired with Nazi Germany and Imperialist Japan in order to form a fascist puppet regime after a joint Nazi-Japanese invasion of the USSR. Trotsky was, of course, living in exile; but his terrorist faction had been infiltrated by the NKVD, the state security police. The prosecution produced a plethora of documentary evidence to convict the men of treason. Realising that they were caught, they all confessed to their crimes, blaming their gang leader Trotsky for their treasonous plans. The trials were observed by many Western diplomats who all concluded that they had been conducted fairly and that there was no question concerning the men’s guilt, including US president Roosevelt’s ambassador to Moscow Joseph E Davies. The Nazi minister for propaganda, Josef Goebbels, later wrote in his dairies, ‘The Fuhrer is furious with himself for having let himself be fooled by the potential of reports from his Bolshevik agents’. Hitler was indeed fooled but his arche nemesis Stalin was not! The trails were only deemed to be show trails after Soviet dictator Nikita khrushchev’s infamous ‘Secret Speech in 1956. But he has subsequently been shown by a number of historians to have been part of the self-same treasonous gang! Professor Grover Furr and Vladimir Bobrov have proven that every single anti-Stalinist tirade in Khushchev's 'Secret Speech' was a complete lie.It would not be too difficult to see why Khrushchev wanted to demonise Stalin.His economic policies were clearly a restoration of capitalism and his method of governance was far more dictatorial than his predecessor. In fact, Stalin had never been a dictator. He was elected by the party to take decisions in accordance with consensus of the central committee, who had the power to remove him at any time. As the great Irish communist Neil Goold Verschoyle pointed out:
‘Under capitalism a dictator may have great power because the powerful capitalist interests in the country agree to sink their differences and hand over the state to the control of one man pledged to suppress the people. But the Soviet Union is not a capitalist state, there are no powerful organised private interests’
Stalin offered to resign from the position of general secretary of the party no less than 4 times and criticised the 'cult of personality'on numerous occasions, a cult fanatically promoted by traitorous sycophants like Khrushchev who would later use it to denounce Stalin and destroy socialism in the USSR.
Stalin's work 'Economic Problems in the USSR' would not be published until 1978 when the Soviet Union was already in terminal decline. Trotsky's pathetic lies about Stalin and the Soviet Union were easily refuted by communist intellectuals of Trotsky's time who had traveled to the Soviet Union themselves. Jr Campbell's book 'Soviet Policy and its Critics' refutes Trotsky's lies one after the other with consumate ease. In the Spanish Civil War, the Trots helped the fascists to seize power by attacking the popular front to defend the Republic. Soviet foreign policy was based on Marxist principles applied to concrete reality. It was not dogmatic Marxism, but rather creative Marxism, that is to say Marxism-Leninism. The concrete reality after the failed revolutions in Germany was that socialism was unlikely to spread to Europe for some time. The Soviet Governement therefore judged that the best way to promote revolution was to build up socialist structures in the Soviet Union and conduct friendly relations with all other countries. The revolution would be permanent but in stages.Socialism in one country would lead to socialism in others. This policy initiatlly adumbrated by Lenin and later developed by Stalin subsequently proved to be correct with the victory of Mao in China, another revolution which Trotsky failed to understand.
By the time of the Spanish civil war, European nations were divided between bourgeois democracies where communist parties could agitate, albeit in a limited form, and fascist states where all oppposition to capitalism was outlawed. The Soviets therefore judged that a popular front composed of communist parties and progressive bourgeois elements to defend the gains of formal bourgeois democracy over fascist degeneration was the correct position to support in their foreign policy. There were, however, two principal forces that attacked this popular front, the Trotskyists and the fascists, the treason of the former ultimately leading to the rise of the latter.
The Trotskyite myth of Stalinist villainy was taken up by British intelligence agent George Orwell and subsequently re-layed by the film director Ken Loach. Shame on you Ken! Only ignoramuses, reactionaries and poor philosophers fall for Trotskyism. Yet there is, sadly, a plethora of such 'theorisits' still ranting and raving about their outcast 'prophet'.
George Orwell was not a fool but he was unquestionably a vicious reactionary. His only knowledge of the Soviet Union came, as he admitted, from the bourgeois press and, of course, Trotsky! Working for British intelligence, he submitted lists of writers who had actually visited and studied the Soviet Union for censorship; people like Anna Louis Strong, Walter Duranty, Sidney and Beatrice Webb and others.Once the left was split by Trotsky and Stalin's personality slandered by the traitor Khrushchev, the cold war historians delivered the coup de grace to history's greatest revolutionary Josef Stalin.Nazi sources of disinformation became the norm rather than the exception. Robert Conquest, another British intelligence agent, is the most notorious of the cold war sham historians.Aledandrre Adler, who has close connections with the CIA, is perhaps his equivalent in France.
By whom, then, was the ‘revolution betrayed’ to borrow another one of Trotsky’s phrases? By none other than himself! Shame on you SWP for promoting a convicted and proven fascist agent!
