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Posted by me to Marxmail in 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.
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 has latched on to in the course of moving to the Balkans
to rediscover his Jewish identity. 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…"
--
Subsequent exchange with Jeet Heer
Jeet Heer wrote:
Dear Louis Proyect,
Thank you for your detailed and thoughtful response to my article.
However, I have to say that I think you mis-understood my intent with
this article. I wasn't trying to say that all Trotskyist become
apologist for American imperialism or that there is a direct link
between Trotsky and the Iraq War. In fact, I explicitly quoted from
Chrisopher Phelps so that readers would understand that the trajectory
of people like Shachtman can be seen as a "rupture" and an "abandonment
of the left." This article is part of a series I'm doing on pro-war
intellectuals. In previous articles I dealt with neo-Imperialists and
Straussians. I thought it was worth noting that some of the pro-war
intellectuals come from a Trotskyist background and explain the
historical roots of this tendency. Also, in interviewing people like
Berman and Schwartz I found that they themselves believe that their are
aspects of the Left Opposition tradition that go into their support for
the war. BUT by including the voice of Phelps, I hoped to indicate that
there is nothing inevitable about this tendency. As I wrote to someone
else, if I had more room I would have discussed people like James
Cannon, Julius Jacobson or Hal Draper, who avoided the trap of
supporting Washington. I regret not mentioning such people but as it
stands, I think my article did an adequate job of explaining an
important and interesting political tendency, one which the left should
spend time studying and opposing. Jeet Heer
Well, look, Jeet. I can understand all this if we simply ignored the
body of your article and relied on the boneheaded title assigned it by
some editor:
"Trotsky's ghost wandering the White House; Influence on Bush aides:
Bolshevik's writings supported the idea of pre-emptive war"
I've seen this tendency at work at places like the NY Times where some
honest reporter files a report from benighted 3rd world country about
rapidly escalating infant mortality rates only to discover that an
editor had pasted a title like "Situation Improving in Frajistan" upon it.
But these are your exact words:
"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."
So what work of Trotsky was an intellectual influence on the dreadful
Kanan Makiya? Could it have been 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 might it be 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 Missle "leftists" you
falsely linked him with.
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