In Brief: The Trotsky Quote
Recently there has been an upsurge in the use of a particular quote that has been attributed to the leading jewish Bolshevik Leon Trotsky. (1) This quote is as follows:
‘We must turn Russia into a desert populated by white negroes upon whom we shall impose a tyranny such as the most terrible Eastern despots never dreamt of. The only difference is that this will be a left-wing tyranny, not a right-wing tyranny. It will be a red tyranny and not a white one.
We mean the word 'red' literally, because we shall shed such floods of blood as will make all the human losses suffered in the capitalist wars quake and pale by comparison. The biggest bankers across the ocean will work in the closest possible contact with us. If we win the revolution, we shall establish the power of Zionism upon the wreckage of the revolution's funeral, and we shall became a power before which the whole world will sink to its knees. We shall show what real power is. By means of terror and bloodbaths, we shall reduce the Russian intelligentsia to a state of complete stupefaction and idiocy and to an animal existence... At the moment, our young men in their leather jackets, who are the sons of watchmakers from Odessa, Orsha, Gomel and Vinnitsa, know how to hate everything Russian! What pleasure they take in physically destroying the Russian intelligentsia - officers, academics and writers!’ (2)
We should first remark that this quote is obviously very similar to what I have termed the Selenkov quotation; which I have previously discussed, that runs as follows:
‘We must create a climate of anti-nationalism and anti-racialism amongst Whites. We must reduce patriotism and pride of race to meaningless abstractions and make racialism a dirty word.’ (3)
In my discussion of the Selenkov quotation I pointed out that there was no reason to regard it as genuine as the wording makes no sense from an avowedly Marxist-Leninist perspective and to claim a Bolshevik leader would talk in a fashion more akin to the radical right than their own radical left language was nonsensical unless the quotation could be substantiated evidentially. We can see that this supposed Trotsky quotation suffers from the same basic problem in that it uses the language of the radical right rather than the radical left, which stems from the apparent inability of the originator(s) to use Marxist-Leninist phraseology and replacing this way of thinking and arguing with how their own ideology (in this case something to do with the Russian far right) interprets what Marxism-Leninism is really saying.
For example the Trotsky quotation makes the considerable mistake of claiming; in effect, that Trotsky was a Zionist when Marxism-Leninism and Zionism were (often violently) competing ideologies among the jews in Russia and the early Soviet Union; in which Trotsky played a not inconsiderable role, went so far as to provide a counter to the Zionist tendency by assigning jews their own oblast or autonomous region. Indeed Trotsky spent a considerable portion of his early career fighting and speaking against Zionism as a competing self-solution to the jewish question!
The Trotsky quotation also makes the mistake of asserting that Trotsky knew that the Bolshevik revolution would fail and that in its wake he would somehow create a new; and largely undefined, Zionist state, which by implication rule the Russian people as cattle. This is utterly undermined by Trotsky’s own behaviour after his removal from power and exile from the Soviet Union under Stalin’s auspices. After all if Trotsky had been planning something along these lines then he should have immediately repudiated some of his professed beliefs and then go on to join the flourishing Zionist movement rather than founding his own breakaway Bolshevik faction: the Fourth International. Indeed Trotsky spent the remainder of his life until his assassination writing and arguing for another Bolshevik revolution in what he perceived to be the spirit of Lenin rather than that of Stalin (i.e. the doctrine of
‘permanent revolution’ as opposed to
‘socialism in one country’). (4)
We should also note that the Trotsky quotation gives us a quite obvious clue to the fact that it is probably entirely made-up in so far as it asserts that its young acolytes should
‘know how to hate everything Russian’. This is not something that a Marxist-Leninist would say: given that although national identity is technically irrelevant in Marxism-Leninism it is however of importance to the infant revolution not to preach such doctrines as they would work directly against the feelings of the Russian people as maybe simply demonstrated by pointing out that in 1941: Stalin was able and had to call; after 24 years of Bolshevism, on nationalist and religious sentiment in order to get the recruits he needed for the Red Army.
Now if Trotsky was so absurdly silly as to argue that such sentiment was irrelevant at some undefined; but likely very early, point during the Soviet Union then he would not have succeeded in convincing those around him to fight as they did. After all the single most important component of Marxist-Leninist cadre is to
‘do anything to further the interests of the revolution’ and causing massive opposition is hardly furthering the interests of the revolution!
However to a Russian nationalist then it would be a point of ideology that both Bolsheviks and jews hated everything Russian; a-la the Protocols of Zion, (5) and sought to destroy it as a matter of priority with the implication that everything Russian is the be all and end all of importance.
We can confirm this probable authorship by pointing out that according to Stepin the quotation came from the first edition of
‘Russkoye Slovo’ (a copy of which I have been unable to locate) although a similar publication;
‘Novoye Russkoye Slovo’, was an American anti-Bolshevik Russian émigré periodical that began life in 1910. (6)
We can deduce from this that
‘Russkoye Slovo’ was either an émigré or indigenous Russian periodical with strong anti-revolutionary and anti-jewish tendencies; as to whether it was anti-Judaism or anti-Semitic we have no clue but the former is the more likely, that was probably in operation before 1910. However that presents us with a considerable problem in that Trotsky was not of any particular prominence in the revolutionary movement in Russia before 1917 and if we are to believe the quotation’s accuracy and the necessary deductions we have made about the originating publication then the publication itself was either very lucky or had considerable knowledge of how things would turn out. When we consider how secure the Tsarist regime seemed before the strain of war told on its population from 1916 to 1917 facilitating the February and October revolutions then we can only suggest that either the periodical had prophetical ability or the periodical did not exist.
Perhaps the best reason we can argue that the periodical did not exist is the more likely of the two situations is that with Trotsky being an obscure figure in the revolutionary movement and the Tsarist government seeming very secure: the periodical; which remember was likely published before 1910, would not have known that Trotsky was to become a major figure and that therefore any utterances he would have made would have been those of an obscure and rather marginal jewish revolutionary who had been effectively neutralised by the Tsarist secret police. So why on earth would the
‘Russkoye Slovo’ given such space to utterances from a marginal jewish revolutionary that are not even confirmable and would be surpassed by the claims and arguments of the readily available revolutionary émigré publications such as the
‘Iskra’.
So why give a revolutionary nobody such prominence in the first issue?
The answer is obvious: because it did not exist in the first place and the quote was manufactured after Trotsky had risen to prominence by his opponents.
Interestingly; by way of an addendum, a 1937 American anti-Semitic publication;
‘Trotsky and the Jews behind the Russian Revolution’, allegedly cryptically authored by
‘a former Russian Commissar’ tries to do something similar when it asserts; contrary to the biographers of Trotsky and Lenin, that Lenin
‘fronted’ from Trotsky who was the éminence grise of the Bolshevik movement. (7) The author of this occasionally clever diatribe against the overrepresentation of jews in the Russian Socialist movement in general makes a similar mistake to the author of Trotsky quotation when he talks about his supposed
‘insider knowledge’ of Trotsky in that he never once makes anything like a statement that one would attribute to someone who had had strong Marxist beliefs; which to be a Commissar one would have to have been, and often speaks with a strongly Orthodox Christian tone (8) more common to the Russian radical right (9) than to a repentant ex-Marxist. (10) This informs that this kind of writing; i.e. ascribing things to Trotsky which were patently not anything to do with, were common among the radical right at this time and the reason they ascribed them for Trotksy was that he was the most prominent of the jewish Bolsheviki; although later Lenin’s jewish origins were discovered he was generally considered a Russian at the time, much as German anti-Communists and anti-Semites focused on the activities of Karl Radek in connection with the jewish-dominated nascent KPD. (11)
References
(1) There are numerous biographies of Trotsky but perhaps the best of the pack are Isaac Deutscher, Ronald Segal and Robert Service’s offerings as each offers a different and somewhat credible perspective on him.
(2) As cited in Vladimir Stepin, 1993,
‘The Nature of Zionism’, which has been made available in English translation at the following address:
http://radioislam.org/zionism/.
(3)
http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot...quotation.html
(4) The ideological differences between Trotsky and Stalin have been rather overplayed in the literature on Marxism-Leninism as it has been conclusively shown that Stalin did believe in the doctrine of permanent revolution, but rather was more realistic about it than Trotsky was in that he wanted to build up the
‘forces of revolution’ rather than simply expect the
‘proletariat’ to join the masses of the Red Army when the latter invaded as both Lenin and Trotsky did. On this point please see Ernst Topitsch, A. Taylor (Trans.), 1987,
‘Stalin’s War: A Radical New Theory of the Origins of the Second World War’, 1st Edition, St. Martin’s Press: New York, pp. 11-62 and John Mosier, 2010,
‘Deathride: Hitler vs. Stalin: The Eastern Front, 1941-1945’, 1st Edition, Simon & Schuster: New York, pp. 57-115.
(5) To quote part of Protocol 15 with a similar message:
‘The principle guarantee of stability of rule is to confirm the aureole of power, and this aureole is attained only by such a majestic inflexibility of might as shall carry on its face the emblems of inviolability from mystical causes from the choice of God. Such was, until recent times, the Russian aristocracy, the one and only serious foe we had in the world, without counting the Papacy.’ (p. 193 in the 1934
‘Defender’ expanded edition of the Marsden translation). This obviously also assigns a similar role to Russia as the
‘main bulwark’ and
‘intellectual centre’ of the world against Bolshevism and the jews in much the same way as the Trotsky quotation does.
(6)
http://rbth.ru/articles/2010/05/13/n...100_years.html [Last Accessed: 09/01/2011]
(7) Anon., 1997, [1937],
‘Trotsky and the Jews behind the Russian Revolution’, 1st Edition, CPA Book Publisher: Boring, pp. 8-9
(8) Ibid, p. 13
(9) See for example Michael Kellogg, 2005,
‘The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Emigres and the Making of National Socialism 1917-1945’, 1st Edition, Cambridge University Press: New York, pp. 30-46
(10) For example compare to Freda Utley, 1940,
‘The Dream We Lost: Soviet Russia Then and Now’, 1st Edition, John Day: New York.
(11) For example see Nigel Jones, 2004,
‘A Brief History of the Birth of the Nazis’, 2nd Edition, Robinson: London, p. 61
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This was originally published at the following address:
http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot...sky-quote.html