The Worst of Trotskyism and Aryanism - as expressed by Leon Trotsky and Oswald Spengler. Peter Myers, July 4, 2001; update April 19, 2010. My comments are shown {thus}.
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The intellectual brilliance of Leon Trotsky and Oswald Spengler was no barrier to their endorsing of barbaric policies.
(1) Leon Trotsky: quotes from his autobiography (2) Trotsky: quotes from his 1920 book The Defence of Terrorism (3) Dmitri Volkogonov, Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary (4) Frederick Engels articulated the authoritarian principle in Marxism (5) Oswald Spengler: quotes from his book The Hour of Decision (6) The "Requiremento"
(1) Leon Trotsky: quotes from his autobiography
The hardback edition is My Life: The Rise and Fall of a Dictator (Thornton Butterworth Limited, London 1930); the paperback edition is My Life (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1975).
Here is Trotsky's feeling about the soldiers he commanded, from his own autobiography:
{hbk p. 351, pbk p. 427} An army cannot be built without reprisals. Masses of men cannot be led to death unless the army-command has the death-penalty in its arsenal. So long as those malicious tailless apes that are so proud of their technical achievements - the animals that we call men - will build armies and wage wars, the command will always be obliged to place the soldiers between the possible death in the front and the inevitable one in the rear.
{Trotsky positioned special troops in the rear, behind his front-line troops, to shoot deserters and stop the front line retreating from battle; that's how the Civil War was won. See Volkogonov, below, on "blocking units".}
{hbk p. 405, pbk p. 494} 'Revolution is revolution only because it reduces all contradictions to the alternative of life or death.
{hbk p. 416, pbk p. 508} The weaker the trio {the triumvirate which succeeded Lenin: Kamenev, Zinoviev and Stalin} felt in matters of principle, the more they feared me - because they wanted to get rid of me - and the tighter they had to bolt all the screws and nuts in the state and party system. Much later, in 1925, Bukharin said to me, in answer to my criticism of the party oppression: "We have no democracy because we are afraid of you".
{hbk p. 208, pbk p. 249} After the October revolution, an enterprising New York publisher brought out my German pamphlet as an imposing American book. According to his own statement, President Wilson asked him, by telephone from the White House, to send the proofs of the book to him; at that time, the President was composing his Fourteen Points, and, according to reports from people who were informed, could not get over the fact that a Bolshevik had forestalled him in his best formulae.
{Leon Trotsky on Freemasonry, which he studied when in Odessa prison:}
{hbk p. 106, pbk p. 124} It was during that period that I became interested in freemasonry. ... {hbk p. 107} In the eighteenth century freemasonry became expressive of a militant policy of enlightenment, as in the case of the Illuminati, who were the forerunners of the revolution; on its left it culminated in the Carbonari. Freemasons counted among their members both Louis XVI and the Dr. Guillotin who invented the guillotine. In southern Germany freemasonry assumed an openly revolutionary character, whereas at the court of Catherine the Great it was a masquerade reflecting the {pbk p. 125} aristocratic and bureaucratic hierarchy. A freemason Novikov was exiled to Siberia by a freemason Empress. ...
{hbk p. 108, pbk p. 126} I discontinued my work on freemasonry to take up the study of Marxian economics. ... The work on freemasonry acted as a sort of test for these hypotheses. ... I think this influenced the whole course of my intellectual develop- {p. 127} ment. {end quotes}
(2) Trotsky: quotes from his 1920 book The Defence of Terrorism (also published as Dictatorship Vs. Democracy, and as Terrorism & Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky), a reply to Karl Kautsky's book Terrorism and Communism:
Trotsky's book originally had the same title as the book of Kautsky to which he was replying, i.e. Terrorism and Communism.
The book was published in London in 1920, by the Labor Publishing Company and George Allen & Unwin. These publishers gave it the title The Defence of Terrorism (DoT), to distinguish it from Kautsky's book.
A second English edition was published in 1935, with the same name, The Defence of Terrorism. The text remained the same, except for a new Introduction by Trotsky. This book includes a note, at the front, by Trotsky, explaining that the title was given by the publishers. The page numbering is the same as that of the 1920 edition.
An American edition, titled Dictatorship vs. Democracy (DvD), was published in New York in 1922, by Workers Party of America. The page numbering is different from the English editions.
{DoT p. 58, DvD p. 55} But terror can be very efficient against a reactionary class which does not want to leave the scene of operations. Intimidation is a powerful weapon of policy, both internationally and internally. War, like revolution, is founded upon intimidation. A victorious war, generally speaking, destroys only an insignificant part of the conquered army, intimidating the remainder and breaking their will. The revolution works in the same way: it kills individuals and intimidates thousands. In this sense, the Red Terror is not distinguishable from the armed insurrection of which it is the direct continuation.
{DoT p. 59, DvD p. 56} The terror of Tsardom was directed against the proletariat. The gendarmerie of Tsardom throttled the workers who were fighting for the Socialist order. Our Extraordinary Commissions shoot landlords, capitalists, and generals who are striving to restore the capitalist order. Do you grasp this ... distinction? Yes? For us communists it is quite sufficient.
{DoT p. 59, DvD p. 56} During war all constitutions and organs of the State and of public opinion become, directly or indirectly, weapons of warfare. This is particularly true of the Press. No government carrying on a serious war will allow publications to exist on its territory which, openly or indirectly, support the enemy. Still more so in a civil war. The nature of the latter is such that each of its struggling sides has in the rear of its armies considerable circles of the population on the side of the enemy. In war, where both success and failure are repaid by death, hostile agents who penetrate into the rear are subject to execution.
{DoT p. 61, DvD p. 58} We are fighting. We are fighting a life-and-death struggle. The Press is a weapon not of an abstract society, but of two irreconcilable, armed and contending sides. We are destroying the Press of the counter-revolution, just as we destroyed its fortified positions, its stores, its communications, and its intelligence system.
{DoT p. 61, DvD p. 58} But Kautsky goes further to develop his theme. He complains that we suppress the newspapers of the S.R.s {Socialist Revolutionaries} and the Mensheviks, and even - such things have been known - arrest their leaders. Are we not dealing here with "shades of opinion" in the proletariat or the Socialist movement? The scholastic pedant does not see facts beyond his accustomed words. The Mensheviks and S.R.s for him are simply tendencies in Socialism, whereas, in the course of the revolution, they have been transformed into an organization which works in active co-operation with the counter-revolution and carries on against us an open war.
{DoT p. 63, DvD p. 60} As for us, we were never concerned with the Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-Quaker prattle about the "sacredness of human life". We were revolutionaries in opposition, and have remained revolutionaries in power. To make the individual sacred, we must destroy the social order which crucifies him. And that problem can only be solved by blood and iron.
{DoT p. 64, DvD p. 61} The man who recognizes the revolutionary historic importance of the very fact of the existence of the Soviet system must also sanction the Red Terror. {end quotes}
Not for Trotsky, turning the other cheek, the forgiveness of enemies of Nelson Mandela. In the Kronstadt massacre and in his espousal of Terror, Trotsky showed that he was as coldblooded as Stalin, even if his early expulsion gave him less opportunities for killing. The Kronstadt massacre was not just some minor mistake that Trotsky made, as portrayed by Trotskyist writers; on the contrary it was the crucial way of impressing on the whole country that, although the local soviets (workers' councils) had been used to seize power, henceforth power would not belong to the soviets, that it would instead be wielded by the centre: the "democratic" centre; it meant that the union of "Soviet" socialist republics was a myth right from the start.
The Soviet Union was supposed to be based on workers "taking control" of the workplace, but the Kronstadt massacre, ordered by Trotsky, put an end to that illusion: kronstadt.html.
Trotsky's failure to attend Lenin's funeral: stalin.html.
(3) Dmitri Volkogonov, Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary, tr. & ed. Harold Shukman, HarperCollinsPublishers, London 1996.
{p. 175} Repression was in Trotsky's view a component part of military structure, a method for educating both officers and men. A telegram he sent to the Revolutionary Military Committee of the Western Front in 1919 is characteristic: 'One of the most important principles of educating our army is never to leave a single crime or misdemeanour unpunished ... Repression must follow immediately upon a breach of discipline, for repression is not an end in itself, but is directed towards didactic, military aims ... Breaches of discipline and disobedience ... must be subjected to the harshest punishment.' It was Trotsky's belief that the threat of harsh punishment would compensate for the low level of awareness, conviction and training of the army rank and file. Curiously, like Lenin, Trotsky regarded consciousness as the foundation of discipline, yet he stressed that fear and arrest should be used to instil discipline.
He told his commanders to set an example in the field, but also to command with an iron fist and not to flinch from using their weapons to maintain order. When someone pointed out to him that not all commanders and commissars had revolvers, he at once cabled Lenin: 'The absence of revolvers creates an impossible situation at the front. It is impossible to maintain discipline without a revolver. I suggest Comrades Mironov and Pozern requisition revolvers from everyone who is not on active duty.' The threat of punishment gradually entered the structure and functioning of the army, and also entered people's minds as a moral norm, 'revolver law', the revolutionary imperative, proletarian necessity.
{p. 178} Former tsarist offficers continued to go over to the Whites, nevertheless. In response, Trotsky instituted hostage-taking. On 2 December 1918 he cabled the Revolutionary Military Council at Serpukhov:
{quote} I ordered you to establish the family status of former officers among command personnel and to inform each of them by signed reccipt that treachery or treason will cause the arrest of their families and that, therefore, they are each taking upon themselves responsibility for their families. That order is still in force. Since then there have been a number of cases of treason by former officers, yet not in a single case, as far as I know, has the family of the traitor been arrested, as the registration of former officers has evidently not been carried out at all. Such a negligent approach to so important a matter is totally impermissible. {end quote}
Similar reports and orders were sent by Trotsky to other army chiefs. To Kazan he cabled:
{quote} 11th Division has revealed its utter uselessness. Units are still surrendering without a fight. The root of the evil is in the command staff. Obviously, the [Regional Military Commissar] has concentrated on the combat and technical side and forgotten about the political. I suggest a strict watch be kept on recruited personnel and that command responsibilities be given only to those former officers whose families reside within Soviet borders, and that they be informed by signed receipt that they are responsible for the lives of their families. {end quote}
{p. 179} Former officers themselves were also held as hostages, and many would be shot when one of their fellow ex-officers went over to the Whites. Trotsky asked Dzerzhinsky to let him know whether there were 'still any former officers who had been taken hostage in concentration camps and prisons. If so, where are they and how many?' Any method was appropriate, in Trotsky's view, if it prevented the disintegration of the Red Army. He formulated the hostage policy in an order of 2 November 1919: 'Families of traitors must be arrested at once. Traitors themselves must be registered in the army's black book, so that after the imminent and final triumph of the revolution, not a single traitor can escape punishment.' In 1920 he ordered that 'families found guilty of aiding Wrangel will be deported beyond the Baikal'.
When on 25 October 1918, however, Trotsky proposed at the Central Committee that all officers being held hostage be set free, it was decided that only those 'who did not belong to the counter-revolution' would be released. 'They will be recruited into the Red Army, at which time they will submit the names of their family and be told that the family will be arrested, should they go over to the White Guards.' According to Denikin, however, rumours about treason and treachery were exaggerated. In two years, he received reliable information from a former general of the Soviet headquarters staff that only one case of material significance had occurred for certain.�� The most difficult category to make fight was the rank and file. Trotsky relied particularly on Communists and commissars, and on the whole his expectations were fulfilled, although not invariably. There were cases when entire units abandoned their positions and fled the field of battle. With Moscow's approval, Trotsky took the major decision of placing blocking units behind unreliable detachments, with orders to shoot if they retreated without permission. Thus, when Stalin applied this policy in 1941-42, he was merely applying the experience of the civil war under new conditions.
Blocking units appeared for the first time in August 1918 on the eastern front in 1st Army under the command of Tukhachevsky, who was the first to issue orders to shoot. In December 1918 Trotsky ordered the formation of special detachments to serve as blocking units. On 18 December he cabled: 'How do things stand with the blocking units? As far as I am aware they have not been included in our
{p. 180} establishment and it appears they have no personnel. it is absolutely essential that we have at least an embryonic network of blocking units and that we work out a procedure for bringing them up to strength and deploying them.' {end quotes}
David Ben-Gurion wrote, in his book Ben-Gurion Looks at the Bible, that this technique was used in the Israeli army of over 2000 years ago:
{quote} ... strict discipline was maintained in the army, and stern measures were taken against deserters from the battlefield "because the beginning of defeat is flight." As a result, they used to station, in front of the troops and behind them, "sentries armed with iron sledgehammers, authorized to beat anyone wanting to turn back."
{endquote; p. 39} More at bengur-bible.html .
(4) Frederick Engels articulated the authoritarian principle in Marxism, which led to the dictatorial methods of Leninism:
"A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets, and cannon - authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries" (On Authority, in Lewis S. Feuer, ed., Marx & Engels: Basic Writings on Politics & Philosophy, 1959, p. 485).
This is a far cry from Marx' answer to Bakunin's warnings about this in the 1870s: in private notes in his copy of Bakunin's article he had written that the workers' state would be no more authoritarian than a trade union election. The above article by Engels was used by Lenin in his essay The State and Revolution.
(5) Oswald Spengler: quotes from his book The Hour of Decision, George Allen & Unwin, London 1933; also published in the United States by Alfred A Knopf, New York 1934.
As callous as Trotsky is the brilliant German intellectual, Oswald Spengler. In his 1933 book The Hour of Decision, he called for a major struggle against the USSR and to conquer the East:
"Man is a beast of prey" (p. 21); "Something of the barbarism of past ages must still be present in the blood ... to save and to conquer. Barbarism is that which I call strong race, the eternal warlike in the beast-of-prey man" (p. 225); "the Viking ship was a State in itself ... When the ship grew into a fleet, states were founded on the strength of it ... as in Normandy, England, and Sicily" (p. 43). "The Nordic migrations, which had come to a standstill in Southern Europe a thousand years before, set in again on the grand scale on the discovery of America, taking oceans in their stride. Vigorous Spanish families, of predominantly Nordic origin, migrated in numbers to the new continent, where they could fight, explore, and rule" (p. 226).
Just as the Vikings converted to Catholicism, and through it adopted much of the culture inherited from the Roman Empire, so the Aryan invaders of India, having destroyed the urban civilisation of Harappa, gradually adopted much of the indigenous culture and religion. The same process is happening today; but Spengler warns derisively:
'The primeval barbarism which has lain hidden and bound for centuries under the form-rigour of a ripe Culture, is awake again now that the Culture is finished and the Civilization has set in: that warlike, healthy joy in one's own strength which scorns the literature-ridden age of Rationalist thought, that unbroken race-instinct, which desires a different life, from one spent under the weight of books and bookist ideals. In the Western European peasantry this spirit still abounds, as also on the American prairies and away in the great plains of northern Asia, where world-conquerors are born. ... Their forefathers in the time of the Great Migration and the Crusades were different. They condemned such an attitude as cowardly. It is from this cowardice in the face of life that Buddhism and its offshoots arose in the Indian Culture at the corresponding stage in time. These cults are now becoming fashionable with us. It is possible that a Late religion of the West is in process of formation - whether under the guise of Christianity or not none can tell, but at any rate the religious "revival" which succeeds Rationalism as a world philosophy does hold quite special possibilities of new religions emerging. People with tired, cowardly, senile souls seek refuge ...' (p. 19).
"The great historical question is whether the fall of the white powers will be brought about or not. ... What resources of spiritual and material power can the white world muster against this menace?" (p. 218). "The battle for the planet has begun. The pacifism of the century of Liberalism must be overcome if we are to go on living. How far in fact have the white nations advanced towards pacifism? Is the outcry against war an intellectual gesture or a serious abdication from history at the cost of dignity, honour, liberty? Yet life is war" (p. 227).
"What if, one day, class war and race war joined forces to make an end of the white world?... when the white proletariat breaks loose in the United States, the Negro will be on the spot, and behind him Indians and Japanese will await their hour. ... It would make no difference if the voice of Moscow ceased to dictate. It has done its work, and the work goes forward of itself" (pp. 228-9).
Aware that the militancy he advocated might meet resistance, Spengler wrote in this 1934 book, "We stand, it may be, close before a second world war" (p. xv); "the National Socialists believe that they can afford to ignore the world or oppose it, and build their castles-in-the-air without creating a possibly silent, but very palpable reaction from abroard" (p.7).
Surveying the East, he saw something Hitler could not: "The great industrial areas which are important to power-politics have one and all been built up east of Moscow, for the greater part east of the Urals as far as the Altai and on the south down to the Caucasus. The whole area west of Moscow ... could be sacrificed without a crash of the whole system. ... any idea of an offensive from the West has become senseless. It would be a thrust into empty space" (p. 61).
"Two really great revolutions in the conduct of war in world history have been brought about by a sudden increase in in mobility: the one was in the first centuries after 1000 B.C. when at some point in the wide plains between the Danube and the Amur the saddle-horse made its appearance. Mounted armies were far superior to foot-soldiers" (p. 51) to which the following footnote is appended: "as well as to war chariots, which were used only in the battle and not on the march. They came in about a thousand years earlier in the same region and proved, wherever they appeared, to be immensely superior to the existing mode of fighting in the field. They were adopted in China and India from about 1500, in the Near East somewhat earlier, and in the Hellenic world from about 1600 B.C. They soon came into general use, but disappeared when cavalry (even though as auxiliary to infantry) became a permanent arm" (p. 51n1).
The Nazis rejected him because he opposed the idea of Racial Purity:
"But in speaking of race, it is not intended in the sense in which it is the fashion among anti-Semites in Europe and America use it today: Darwinistically, materially. Race purity is a grotesque word in view of the fact that for centuries all stocks and species have been mixed, and that warlike - that is, healthy - generations with a future before them have from time immemorial always welcomed a stranger into the family if he had "race", to whatever race it was he belonged. Those who talk too much about race no longer have it in them. What is needed is not a pure race, but a strong one, which has a nation within it." (p. 219)
Although Christianity is a universalist religion, the Germanic tribes, and especially the Viking invasion of Europe, brought Aryanism back into Christian Europe.
Hugh Trevor-Roper, in his book The Rise of Christian Europe (Thames & Hudson, 1965) attributes the European "dark ages" largely to the expansion of Islam, which controlled the Mediterranean, the Middle East and Central Asia, reducing Western Europe to a mere supplier of raw materials, the way the Islamic block is now.
Between Christian Europe and the Islamic block, Vikings & Jews traded (pp. 90-93), being able to cross borders easily. One of the main items they traded was slaves - as Europe did the same when it expanded some centuries later.
Christian Europe, pressed by Islam to the South and South-East, Vikings sea-nomads to the North and North-East, and Eurasian land-nomads to the East, gave up its pacifism for Aryan militarism, copying the Persian Empire's development of an Aristocracy of mounted knights (pp. 75-97).
To repel Islam, Charles Martel took lands from the Church and gave them to a new body af mounted knights, as reward for their service. The Viking invaders later settled down as the Normans, and became the Aristocracy (the first estate); those they defeated became serfs, tenant farmers. The Church did a deal with the Normans: it sanctioned their power, they converted to Christianity. The Church joined the power structure as the second estate; this new structure was then used to launch the Crusades. In this new structure, Augustine's Pacifism gave way to Aquinas's theory of the Just War. When Europeans found the New World, it was this Aryan Christianity that they brought. Exposed by the New Left, it now calls itself the "White Christian Identity" movement.
(6) The "Requiremento"
Stephen A. Zarlenga, The Lost Science of Money, published by the� American Monetary Institute, Box 601, Valatie NY 12184; http://www.monetary.org
{p. 212} THE "REQUIREMENTO"
The {Spanish} conquerors were legally required to recite the "Requiremento" to any Indians they were about to slaughter:
"On the part of the King, (and)...Queen...we their humble servitors hereby...make known to you that the lord our God, living and eternal, created the Heavens and the Earth, and also one man and one woman, of whom you and we, and all mankind...are descendants...in the 5,000 year since the world was created...
"Of all these nations God gave the charge to one man - St Peter...that he should be the head of all the human race...This office of St. Peter was called Pontifex Maximus, or the Pope. One of these Pontiffs who succeeded St. Peter as lord of the world...made donation of these Isles...and all contained therein to the atorementioned King Ferdinand and Queen Juana as is shown in certain writings upon the
{p. 213} subject, which writings you may examine if you wish...
"We ask and require you that you do consider what we have said to you and that you take the time that shall be necessary to...deliberate upon and that you do acknowledge the Church as the Mistress and superior of the whole World, and the high priest called the Pope, and in his name and stead the King Don Fernando and Queen Donna Juana, as sueriors and lords and Kings of these Isles and terra firma...
"If you do so, you will do well...But if you do not do this...I certify to you that with the help of God we shall forcibly enter into your country and shall make war against you in all ways and manners that we can ..and shall take you and your wives and children and shall make slaves of them...
"And we shall take your property, and shall do you all the injury and damage that we can...and we protest that the deaths and losses which shall accrue trom this are your fault...and to prove that we have proclaimed this to you ..the Imperial Notary will affix hereunto his certificate in writing."
The "Requiremento," which had been framed by the famous jurist Palacias Rubios, was normally read in Spanish to the trees, or mumbled by the attacking army. In one case it was actually translated to an Indian ruler, Atahualpa of Peru, in 1532:
"[Atahualpa] wondered, atter seeing that the Spaniards possessed glass, which he considered far more desirable than gold, why they had come so far and behaved so ill, for comparatively useless materials like gold and silver."
"Pizarro's Priest Vicente De Valverdo read the 'requiremento' to Atahualpa. After hearing it he said 'Your Pope must surely be a most extraordinary man to give so liberally of what does not belong to him.' He asked Vicente where he got his title to command of the Earth. 'In this book' replied the monk, presenting his breviary to the Emperor. Atahualpa took the book, examined it on all sides, fell a laughing and throwing it away added 'Neither this nor any other writing conveys a title to the Earth.'"
Pizarro murdered Atahualpa as soon as the Inca leader had a room filled with gold for his agreed upon ransom; totalling 185,000 ounces.
{end of quotes}
Despite being regarded as a forerunner of the Nazis, Spengler was shunned by the Nazi regime because he rejected their doctrine on race, specifically German domination of other Europeans. Like Nietzsche, he believed that a certain amount of assimilation was possible: a race should be "strong" rather than "pure".
The Catholic Hispanics and French intermarried with the "heathen" native peoples, creating the mestizos, and assimilated pagan gods as the Santo Nino & native Virgin Marys, whereas the Protestant invaders of North America, being more Jewish in their religion, did not.
Referring to the German Jewish writer Heinrich Heine, Werner Sombart wrote in his book The Jews and Modern Capitalism (1911):
'I would also record the words of Heine, who had a clear insight into most things. "Are not, " he asks in his Confessions, "Are not the Protestant Scots Hebrews, with their Biblical names, their Jerusalem, pharisaistic cant? And is not their religion a Judaism which allows you to eat pork?"
'Puritanism is Judaism.' (Sombart, The Jews and Modern Capitalism, p. 249).
More of Sombart at sombart.html.
Unlike Protestantism, the Jewish religion regards Tradition - the judgments of rabbis in the Talmud and other writings - as a primary and authoritative source of Revelation, independent of the Torah. Protestants, looking to the Old Testament (the Jewish Bible), reject the authority of Tradition in Rabbinic Judaism, just as they reject it in Catholicism. Judaism and Catholicism have a major similarity in this respect, yet their traditions of interpretation have diverged for 2000 years.
When Nietzsche praised both Judaism and Aryanism on account of their martial mentality, and condemned Christianity as Spengler condemned Buddhism, was he aware of the implications? nietzsche.html
Isaac Deutscher on Trotsky: deutscher.html.
Trotsky advocated the destruction of marriage, parental authority, and the family: trotsky.html.
Back to the Zionism/Communism Index: zioncom.html.
Write to me at contact.html.