Comrades, the above video shows Noam Chomsky speaking in 1989 in answer to an audience question about Lenin, Trotsky, Socialism and the Soviet Union. His main point is that once in power, Lenin and Trotsky moved the Soviet Union quickly away from socialism in the direction of totalitarianism. He also explains why although Lenin and Trotsky's regime destroyed socialism in the USSR, both the Soviets and the Western regimes, for their own very different reasons, were happy to go along with the fiction that the USSR was practicing socialism. All this wisdom, though, was wasted on one of Chomsky's brightest young acolytes, one Christopher Eric Hitchens.
Christopher (like his brother Peter) is well known as a former Trotskyist and, as his Wikipedia entry has it, "he continues to regard both Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky as great men and the October Revolution as a necessary event in the modernization of Russia." But on the other hand, Hitch doesn't much care for Russia in its modernized form either. All in all, he's a difficult man to please. As late as 2006, he was still sufficiently enamored of Comrade Trotsky to choose him as his "great life" when he was invited onto the BBC's Radio 4 programme of that name. This led to what has been described by the blogger Sean Hanley as "fireworks" when his sentiments were opposed by two other participants in the discussion.
Although no longer a man of the left apparently, Hitchens wanted Trotsky as his great life and wanted to discourse effusively about him in plumy tones pretty much from the perspective of his student days in the International Socialists.
Presenter and ex-Tory MP Matthew Parris and historian Robert Service did not, however, let him get with this, quickly raising the issue of Trotsky’s endorsement of state terror and his chilling view of men as violent apes without tails, a remark that de Maistre would have been proud of. Quite true, said Hitchens and terror was well, sort of necessary in the circumstances etc - a tired old far left defence, both morally and politically dubious, although I wasn’t clear if at and at what point his endorsement of Bolshevik regime want and whether he thought the suppression of the Kronstadt uprising a turning point or not.
When Hitchens sought to avoid addressing Trotsky’s contradictory attitude towards the Soviet regime and the question of what a Trotsky-led USSR of 1920s been like (bureaucratic and repressive, but with slower industrial development, a small private section, a smaller gulag and decent literary criticism, I suspect) Hitchens waffled about the importance of a programme and certain political generation etc. Why then, they, asked why he had chosen to speak on Trotsky at all if his personal qualities and views were of no real interest? Here Hitchens lost his cool and seemed about to walk out. However, they then they then cut the tape and finished the programme with a short, uncomfortable edited-in final exchange.
Interestingly, given his pro-intervention stance on Iraq Hitchens briefly mentioned the Trotskyist pedigree of leading US neo-cons, but didn’t unfortunately discuss the linkage between enthusiasm for world socialist revolution and the neo-cons later enthusiasm for that other great project of historical optimism: global democratic revolution. Does it inform his own view? Sadly no one asked.
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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