[Marxism] THE AGE (Melbourne, Australia): Nuclear no nightmare, says unionism's new face

[glparramatta]

The smartarse anarchist at Slackbastartd has compiled this passable 
history of Howes' flit through the left on his way to the far-right and 
probably a parliamentary seat.

Would the real anarchists / Trotskyists... (Et cetera)
By @ndy
He left an unhappy home in the Blue Mountains for no fixed address in 
Sydney three months before he turned 15, bought a couple of copies of 
Green Left Weekly and began mixing with the radical fringes of the left 
while working as an ...
<http://slackbastard.anarchobase.com/?p=1017>

Norm

Louis Proyect wrote:
> David Picón Álvarez wrote:
>   
>> Well, I've read (don't know how true it is) that the intellectual core of 
>> neoconservatism is mostly constituted by ex-trotskyists. For whatever 
>> conjunctural reason (probably Franco's dictatorship didn't help) trotskyism 
>> never had much pull in Spain, so I think to this day I haven't yet met any 
>> in the flesh.
>>     
>
> Is there a connection between Leon Trotsky and Paul Wolfowitz?
>
> posted to www.marxmail.org on June 10, 2003
>
> (Jeet Heer is a Canadian journalist, who linked Trotsky to Paul 
> Wolfowitz in a National Post article recently. These are comments on 
> selected paragraphs from his piece that can be read in its entirety at: 
> http://www.nationalpost.com/search/site/story.asp?id=EC4AD553-8A1D-4324-8D37-A99B2DFF9F85)
>
> JEET HEER: As evidence of the continuing intellectual influence of 
> Trotsky, consider the curious fact that some of the books about the 
> Middle East crisis that are causing the greatest stir were written by 
> thinkers deeply shaped by the tradition of the Fourth International.
>
> In seeking advice about Iraqi society, members of the Bush 
> administration (notably Paul D. Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of 
> Defence, and Dick Cheney, the Vice-President) frequently consulted Kanan 
> Makiya, an Iraqi-American intellectual whose book The Republic of Fear 
> is considered to be the definitive analysis of Saddam Hussein's 
> tyrannical rule.
>
> As the journalist Christopher Hitchens notes, Makiya is "known to 
> veterans of the Trotskyist movement as a one-time leading Arab member of 
> the Fourth International." When speaking about Trotskyism, Hitchens has 
> a voice of authority. Like Makiya, Hitchens is a former Trotskyist who 
> is influential in Washington circles as an advocate for a militantly 
> interventionist policy in the Middle East. Despite his leftism, Hitchens 
> has been invited into the White House as an ad hoc consultant.
>
> COMMENT: If Makiya's "Republic of Fear" has anything to do with 
> Trotskyism, except the fact that the author spent some time in the 
> movement as a youth, then one presumes that Saul Bellow's racist screed 
> "Mr. Sammler's Planet" must also be linked with Leon Trotsky as well, 
> since Bellow also spent a brief time in the Trotskyist movement. For 
> that matter, one might link orthodox Judaism with Trotskyism since Isaac 
> Deutscher and I were both bar mitzvahed and ate kosher through adolescence.
>
> Other than the fact that Kanan Makiya spent five minutes or so in the 
> Fourth International, there is absolutely nothing to link him to the 
> intellectual and political traditions represented by Leon Trotsky. 
> Consider the interview he gave to an Argentine journalist on September 
> 23, 1938 in which he defended a "fascist" Brazil against a "democratic" 
> Great Britain?
>
> In order to understand correctly the nature of the coming events we must 
> first of all reject ... the false ... theory that the coming war will be 
> a war between fascism and "democracy." ... I will take the most simple 
> and obvious example. In Brazil there now reigns a semifascist regime 
> that every revolutionary can only view with hatred. Let us assume, 
> however, that on the morrow England enters into a military conflict with 
> Brazil. I ask you on whose side of that conflict will the working class 
> be? I will answer for myself personally -- in this case I will be on the 
> side of "fascist" Brazil against "democratic" Great Britain. Why? 
> Because in the conflict between them it will not be a question of 
> democracy or fascism. If England should be victorious, she will put 
> another fascist in Rio de Janeiro and will place double chains in 
> Brazil. If Brazil on the contrary should be victorious, it will give a 
> mighty impulse to national and democratic consciousness of the country 
> and will lead to the overthrow of the Vargas dictatorship.
>
> Or the letter wrote to an English comrade on April 22, 1936 which not 
> only defended feudal Ethiopia against capitalist Italy, but was full of 
> praise for the Negus, ie. Haile Selassie, who made Saddam Hussein look 
> like Martin Luther King Jr. by comparison, and contained the remarkable 
> formulation that "A dictator can also play a very progressive role in 
> history".
>
> Indeed, the Trotsky of history has much more in common with the reviled 
> Ramsey Clark and WWP than he does with the Cruise Missile "leftists" 
> Heer falsely linked him with.
>
> JEET HEER: Other supporters of the Iraq war also have a Trotsky-tinged 
> past. On the left, the historian Paul Berman, author of a new book 
> called Terror and Liberalism, has been a resonant voice among those who 
> want a more muscular struggle against Islamic fundamentalism. Berman 
> counts the Trotskyist C.L.R. James as a major influence. Among 
> neo-conservatives, Berman's counterpart is Stephen Schwartz, a historian 
> whose new book, The Two Faces of Islam, is a key text among those who 
> want the United States to sever its ties with Saudi Arabia. Schwartz 
> spent his formative years in a Spanish Trotskyist group.
>
> COMMENT: Just because Paul Berman claims that CLR James was an 
> influence, there is no reason to take him at his word. By the same 
> token, George W. Bush claims that Jesus Christ influences his policies, 
> when any sensible person understands that the White House owes much more 
> to Joseph Goebbels. Berman is a rigid anti-Communist. During the 1980s 
> he used his Village Voice bully pulpit to castigate the Sandinista 
> government in terms similar to Oliver North. CLR James was a 
> revolutionary; Paul Berman was and is a liberal no matter who he 
> mistakenly thinks "influenced" him. In fact, his latest book simply puts 
> forward his liberal prejudices in unambiguous terms as the title 
> suggests: "Terror and Liberalism" (he is for liberalism).
>
> JEET HEER: To this day, Schwartz speaks of Trotsky affectionately as 
> "the old man" and "L.D." (initials from Trotsky's birth name, Lev 
> Davidovich Bronstein). "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." The yoking together of Paul 
> Wolfowitz and Leon Trotsky sounds odd, but a long and tortuous history 
> explains the link between the Bolshevik left and the Republican right.
>
> COMMENT: I would not take anything that Schwartz says seriously. There 
> is not a single political or religious sect that he has not dipped his 
> big toe in, from Trotskyism, anarchism, and "libertarian socialism" on 
> the left, to Buckleyite conservatism on the right. He is now a devout 
> Sufi Muslim, a faith that he discovered in the Balkans while writing 
> pleas on behalf of imperialist intervention. The old Jewish saying would 
> apply to Schwartz: "A chazer bleibt a chazer." (A pig remains a pig.)
>
> JEET HEER: To understand how some Trotskyists ended up as advocates of 
> U.S. expansionism, it is important to know something about Max 
> Shachtman, Trotsky's controversial American disciple. Shachtman's career 
> provides the definitive template of the trajectory that carries people 
> from the Left Opposition to support for the Pentagon.
>
> COMMENT: The rest of Heer's article spells out the connections between 
> people like Paul Berman and Max Shachtman, which of course has more than 
> a grain of truth. But this has less to do with Shachtman's connections 
> to Trotsky than his *break* with Trotsky. In a very real sense, 
> Shachtman is the spiritual and ideological father not only to those who 
> spent 30 seconds in the Trotskyist movement, but to Michael Berubé, Todd 
> Gitlin, Eric Alterman, Leo Casey, Stanley Aronowitz, and dozens of other 
> 1960s and 70s radicals and left-liberals who have learned to worship the 
> American flag since 9/11. But then again, the blame might not be put 
> totally on Shachtman's shoulders. It would probably make sense to 
> connect the Cruise Missile left to its true progenitors, namely the 
> trade union bureaucrats, intelligentsia and parliamentarians of the 
> Second International who backed their own bourgeoisie in WWI. Of course, 
> Lenin and Trotsky broke with these traitors back in 1914 and Trotsky 
> himself never betrayed his own principles until his death. In his fight 
> with Max Shachtman and James Burnham over how to characterize the USSR 
> after the Stalin-Hitler pact, Trotsky was faced with the same kind of 
> liberal prejudices and inability to think in class terms that was on 
> display when a large swath of the left, including some "Marxists" 
> cheered on NATO's war against the Serbs. His words seem as timely as ever:
>
> "It is necessary to call things by their right names. Now that the 
> positions of both factions in the struggle have become determined with 
> complete clearness, it must be said that the minority of the National 
> Committee is leading a typical petty-bourgeois tendency. Like any 
> petty-bourgeois group inside the socialist movement, the present 
> opposition is characterized by the following features: a disdainful 
> attitude toward theory and an inclination toward eclecticism; disrespect 
> for the tradition of their own organization; anxiety for personal 
> "independence" at the expense of anxiety for objective truth; 
> nervousness instead of consistency; readiness to jump from one position 
> to another…"
>
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