This day in history: Leon Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Communist Party, leaving Joseph Stalin in undisputed control of the Soviet Union on this day in 1927. Many have wondered if Soviet Russia would have been better, and less violent under a Trotsky rule.
Historian Lesley Chamberlain wrote this in the Wall Street Journal in 2009, "We are left weighing a multiple tragedy, of a man so loyal to an ideology he died for it; of an ideology that in one form or another killed millions; and of a 20th century in which political radicals world-wide called themselves Trotskyists and believed that Lenin was good and Stalin bad, that even if the Soviet Union was a degenerate workers' state, the real thing could be established elsewhere. Trotsky had people killed. But . . . [he] was not a bad man."
To this, Ilya Somin responded: "Well, let's see. Trotsky was responsible for the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, helped mastermind the establishment of one history's worst totalitarian regimes, and broke with Joseph Stalin in the 1920s in part because he thought that Stalin wasn't going far enough in extending Soviet totalitarianism at home and exporting it abroad. Other than that, he was a helluva guy. If that record isn't enough to qualify you as a "bad man," I don't know what is." Source
Trotsky believed that Socialism can only be instituted by brute force: “It is quite clear that if our problem is the abolition of private property in the means of production, the only road to its solution lies through the concentration of state power in its entirety in the hands of the proletariat, and the setting up for the transitional period of an extraordinary regime…Dictatorship is necessary because this is a case not of partial changes, but of the very existence of the bourgeoisie. No agreement is possible on this basis. Only force can be the deciding factor…Whoever aims at the end cannot reject the means.” [The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), p. 738.]
Trotsky also supported the dissolution of the family: “The revolution made a heroic effort to destroy the so-called ‘family hearth’ — that archaic, stuffy and stagnant institution in which the woman of the toiling classes performs galley labor from childhood to death. The place of the family as a shut-in petty enterprise was to be occupied, according to the plans, by a finished system of social care and accommodation: maternity houses, creches, kindergartens, schools, social dining rooms, social laundries, first-aid stations, hospitals, sanatoria, athletic organizations, moving-picture theaters, etc. The complete absorption of the housekeeping functions of the family by institutions of the socialist society, uniting all generations in solidarity and mutual aid, was to bring to woman, and thereby to the loving couple, a real liberation from the thousand-year-old fetters.” [Revolution Betrayed]
Additionally, we have Trotsky to thank for the weaponized use of the term "Racism." "Trotsky did not ‘invent’ the word ‘racist or racism’. However, Trotsky certainly popularized the word(s) and made ‘liberal’ use of them in his two-volumed book ‘History of the Russian Revolution’. Perhaps more to the point here is that Trotsky was among the very first to ‘leverage’ the word ‘racist’ and his smearing definition or concept of it as useful means to his own political ends, which was not limited to but included fomenting dissent and sparking division amongst the populations. Trotsky was one of the first to ‘weaponize’ the word ‘racist’, using it (s) as propaganda; as tool of mass manipulation and as a way of smearing and silencing opposition. In doing so, Trotsky becomes a big reason why the definition of ‘racist’ or ‘racism’ is now so broad and so broadly applied—even ubiquitously—by today’s left, hence diluting it’s true power and meaning. By his cynical use of the word ‘racist’ and his opportunistic, amorphous over-application, we might even say Trotsky was the first to effectively denigrate the sad, ponderous depth and weight of the word’s true meaning as well as the tragedy of it’s consequences for history’s very real victims of actual racists."~Dan Kidd
Trotsky was murdered with an ice pick in Mexico in 1940 by a fellow Communist. Perhaps his exile and his violent death should tell us all we need to know about the ideology he lived by and defended.
In 2005, the now-famous ice pick was slated to go to auction to be sold for the highest price. A proper Capitalist ending to a Socialistic disaster.
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