Re(6): NSA Posted on June 4, 2003 at 17:34:21 by marineaquarist
I do think not many people post here. Others definately watch it because they post sometimes.
The liberals were in their youth communists - specifically Trotskyists who preached world revolution. The same applies to the Neoconservatives, like Irving Kristol. Since both have exporting western values in mind, its not surprising that many liberals want to enforce "regime change" by violence with the Neoconservatives.
Justin Raimondo has written about this and I have quoted him.
"But Shachtman remained a socialist until end of his life, albeit an unorthodox one. And he wasn't the only Trotskyist, as the folks over at WSWS.org are well aware, who took an identical path: the ex-Trotskyist turned ferocious cadre of the War Party is a veritable syndrome, by now. From Shachtman to Christopher Hitchens, the pattern is constantly repeating itself down through the years: Trotsky's errant children swell the ranks of the War Party; furthermore, their connections to their former comrades on the left were never really severed. How does the World Socialist Website explain this?"
"But what about the indirect influence of former Trotskyists, who became top leaders in the modern conservative movement? Goldberg cites James Burnham, and even details his early career as Trotsky's chief American intellectual disciple, but somehow fails to understand how the Trotskyist mindset could have influenced Burnham's later views. It is odd to see an alleged conservative deny the importance of history, directly contradicting Richard Weaver's famous dictum that "ideas have consequences."
"Yet Kristol himself did more than merely study Trotsky: he was a member of a dissident Trotskyist group, the Workers Party (later the Independent Socialist League), led by Max Shachtman. Goldberg quotes Kristol to the effect that he learned the art of argumentation as a young Trotskyist in "Alcove #1" and names a number of influential neocons who, like Irving Kristol, who had not only studied Trotsky, but followed him. In moving rightward, these people merely exchanged the golden calf of world socialism for the tin god of global "democracy."
"The irksome leftist ghosts who haunt the neocons' storied past rose up, coincidentally, to remind us of their existence just as Goldberg's piece was posted: the Social Democrats, USA held a national conference which saw neocons and the last of the right-wing democratic socialists joined at the hip. The headline in The Forward read: "Debs' Heir Reassemble to Seek Renewed Role as Hawks of Left."
("The evolution of the Social Democrats is largely a tale of slow half-steps to the right, from socialism to reformist social democracy to Cold War liberalism to neoconservatism and finally – why mince words? – to plain conservatism. One day you're on the party central committee with Michael Harrington, and the next you look across the table to see Pat Robertson. And somehow, through this long series of political half steps, ideological epiphanies and situational compromises, it all seems to make sense.")
"These political heirs of erstwhile Trotskyists-gone-haywire have always been an influential component of the War Party. Now they are proudly reasserting themselves, their leftist heritage, and their ideological and personal links to the neoconservatives – just in time, as it turns out, to show up Goldberg as a liar, and a bad one at that."
According to John Budis, Neoconservatism is
"What both the older and younger neoconservatives absorbed from their socialist past was an idealistic concept of internationalism. Trotskyists believed that Stalin, in trying to build socialism in one country rather than through world revolution, had created a degenerate workers' state instead of a genuine dictatorship of the proletariat. In the framework of international communism, the Trotskyists were rabid internationalists rather than realists and nationalists. In 1939, as a result of the Nazi-Soviet pact, the Trotskyist movement split, with one faction under James Burnham and Max Schachtman declaring itself opposed equally to German Nazism and Soviet communism. Under the influence of an Italian Trotskyist, Bruno Rizzi, Burnham and Schachtman envisaged the Nazi and Soviet bureaucrats and American managers as a new class. While Burnham broke with the left and became an editor at National Review, Schachtman remained. The neoconservatives who went through the Trotskyist and socialist movements came to see foreign policy as a crusade, the goal of which was first global socialism, then social democracy, and finally democratic capitalism. They never saw foreign policy in terms of national interest or balance of power. Neoconservatism was a kind of inverted Trotskyism, which sought to "export democracy," in Muravchik's words, in the same way that Trotsky originally envisaged exporting socialism. It saw its adversaries on the left as members or representatives of a public sector-based new class."
Replies:
Re(7): NSA - By Janis SchmidtJune 7, 2003 at 07:45:13
Re(8): NSA - By marineaquaristJune 7, 2003 at 11:31:30
Re(9): NSA - By Janis SchmidtJune 7, 2003 at 18:56:10
Re(10): NSA - By marineaquaristJune 7, 2003 at 21:37:50
Re(11): NSA - By Janis SchmidtJune 10, 2003 at 07:59:34
Re(12): NSA - By marineaquaristJune 10, 2003 at 13:51:29
Re(13): NSA - By Janis SchmidtJune 11, 2003 at 19:40:21
Re(14): NSA - By marineaquaristJune 12, 2003 at 03:22:55
Re(5): NSA - By Janis SchmidtMay 29, 2003 at 20:19:06
Re(6): NSA - By marineaquaristMay 30, 2003 at 05:19:11