I’m not sure who ‘we’ are in the statement quoted below. I don’t
believe *I* work out of that frame intentionally, even though many of ‘our’ mainstream journalists do (usually the most reactionary ones). I suspect (or rather hope) that serious writers and analysts would avoid ‘framing’ the discourse in the binary terms you set out here:

“The lesson of the 20th century is that the left-right frame we put on
it using the economic question is only one way of looking at it. when
you reframe it a split between, say, internationalists and
universalists, versus nationalists and self-determinists, then the
Trots and the neo-cons appear on one side, and the paleo-conservatives
and the Maoists on the other. … “

Regards
Warwick

sorry if i misunderstood you. but you werent fully clear on your objections

to the best of my knoweldge Paddy never was a member of the CPA, he was a Push-anarchist (though he once worked for the Narodny bank in London).

what’s interesting in the transitions from left to right is the way that Trotskyism attracted a certain type of intellectual who then found a similar style of politics - global, transformative, to hell with restraint on means, give history a shove - on the right. The lesson of the 20th century is that the left-right frame we put on it using the economic question is only one way of looking at it. when you reframe it a split between, say, internationalists and universalists, versus nationalists and self-determinists, then the Trots and the neo-cons appear on one side, and the paleo-conservatives and the Maoists on the other.

I suspect some Trots find the ease with wihich so many of their number found an expression of radical transformative politics on the right rather than the left, to be a bit disconcerting

On the whole I learned much from your article. I just questioned your use of Hitchens as an exemplary Trotskyist.

Cheers
Warwick

I’ve come to see Hitchens as a Derryn Hinch with brains i.e. it doesn’t matter what he says, just as long as it’s reported. Stories by him such as claiming that he was being beaten up by street thugs for making a public political statement in “wherever’, don’t ring true. I’m awaiting his “neocon monkey who lectures in Hebrew down on the farm’ piece.

PS: my apologies to all monkeys for associating them with Hitchens & Hinch (the latter ‘unaffectionately’ known as “Darrel Cringe’ in his time at 7 in the late ‘80’s).

Jeff, Trotsky’s point against Stalinism (and then Maoism) was that you had to keep pushing for international revolution, not the development of socialism in one country. No Trots didnt have much time for Guevera’s adventures, but a bunch of them fought for Castro in Cuba.

People like Hitchens have transferred that internationalist enthusiasm to american adventures in iraq etc, to give it the appearance of a radical move.

The ur-for of he joke is ‘a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged’ - all the others are variations on this most basic theme

As for the fatuous comments of Jeff - I suggest he read Che Guevara’s diaries, and some of the writings of Sandinista and FMLN guerillas about what motivated them to take up armed struggle. Omar Cabeza’s account (in English, “Fire from the Mountain”) suggest that he himself didn’t do it for ‘fun’ trivial, or romantic reasons, that the armed struggle was highly informed with moral values (yes - the ‘M’ word), and taken on reluctantly because the ‘liberal humanist’ values had been at the very best ignored, and at the accepted levels of privileged societies, trampled upon. The ‘civil war’ in El Salvador was not a communist or trotskyist, or Soviet plot - it was a recognition of the ‘state of play’ after Archbishop Romero was assassinated by US trained and sponsored Death Squads, and the youth of that generation reluctantly realised that they had no alternative but the armed struggle. (And there were only three violations of the Geneva Convention on the part of the FMLN in the whole 12 years of the ‘civil war’)

It wasn’t a Trotskyist or ‘communist’ plot or consp. It was a simple recognition that ‘enough is enough’. Sure, the ‘networks’ supported that, but I say it again - it is fatuous to seize upon the rhetoric of ‘exported revolution’. It is in the nature of revolutions that they occur when people say they’ve had enough. (Look at what is happening in Honduras)

Christopher Hitchens is a furfy in a ditch. Let’s just leave him there.

cheers

Wf

I heard it differently, Robert. As I recall, a liberal is a conservative that just got beat up by the cops.

One ‘weird’ assertion that piqued my interest though - how is Christopher Hitchens part of the ‘Trotskyist’ paradigm? To me, it is a bit like saying Paddy McGuiness is (was) a Communist ! (Like Philip Adams, he laid constant claim to the fact that he was once a ‘member of the Australian Communist Party - usually to introduce an attack on some ‘leftist’ issue - to enforce a spurious authority or credential to make some fatuous remark about ‘the left’).

Christopher Hitchens is a total, absolute pariah to the Left, left, international or otherwise, and even progressive liberals !

I wouldn’t mention Christopher Hitchens in the same sentence as ‘Trotskyist’, if I were you, Guy. You might get away with Healey, but not Hitchens.

cheers

warwick

I could witter about the detail of some of the analysis - but on a subject and timeline this scale it’d be churlish.

This is the sort of article I subscribe to Crikey for.