Trotsky e Russel Kirk

"You may not be interested in war but war is interested in you." - Leon Trotsky

Não sei como ainda não li esta na National Review ou na Weekly Standard, com tantos editorialistas a fazer jus do seu ex-marxismo trotskista internacionalista e anti-estalinista. Por exemplo, aqui temos Stephen Schwartz, na NRO (será uma revista de direita? É que não parece...):

Trotskycons? Pasts and present

"To my last breath I will defend the Trotsky who alone, and pursued from country to country, and finally laid low in his own blood in a hideously hot little house in Mexico City, said no to Soviet coddling of Hitlerism, to the Moscow purges, and to the betrayal of the Spanish Republic, and who had the capacity to admit he had been wrong about the imposition of a single-party state, as well as about the fate of the Jewish people. To my last breath, and without apology. Let the neofascists, and Stalinists in their second childhood, make of it what they will."

Para uma breve explicação desta influência no pensamento Neo-Conservador:

DO NEOCONS EXIST?

"As many of the original neocons were ex-Trotskyists, or independent left-wing critics of Stalinism – whose Russian colleagues were sent to the gulag, and whose leader met his end on Stalin's orders – their foreign policy monomania is best understood as Trotsky's revenge. The founder of the Red Army had wanted to carry the struggle into Poland, and Germany, after the 1917 Revolution, and this later developed into a comprehensive critique of Stalin's policy of "socialism in one country." Throughout the cold war era, Trotsky's renegade followers called for "rolling back" their old enemies, the Stalinists – but even the implosion of the Soviet empire did not calm their crusading instincts.

All this is ancient history, Boot and his fellow crusaders complain. Yet "benevolent world hegemony," the fatuous phrase in which William Kristol and Robert Kagan summed up the goal of a neocon post-cold war foreign policy, has a positively Soviet ring to it. The idea that the U.S. government must "export democracy" at gunpoint all around the world is a frankly revolutionary program, profoundly alien to the American conservative ethos that considers hubris a sin and distrusts power in the hands of imperfect men. The idea of democratism in one country – that constitutional republicanism can thrive only in the West, because of cultural and historical factors – is anathema to these militant internationalists. The neoconservative anomaly is that they have succeeded in redefining "conservatism" as Trotskyism turned inside out."

Mas já antecipando os tempos de hoje, podiamos ler no "THE POLITICS OF PRUDENCE"-"The Error of Ideology" do Conservador Russel Kirk:

“Ideology is inverted religion, denying the Christian doctrine of salvation through grace in death, and substituting collective salvation here on earth through violent revolution”

“I suggested that some Americans, Conservative-inclined ones among them, might embrace an ideology of Democratic Capitalism, or New World Order, or International Democratism”

“I am not of the opinion that it would be well to pour the heady wine of a new ideology down the throats of the American young…what we need to impar tis political prudence, not political belligerance. Ideology is the disease, not he cure. All ideologies, uncluding the ideology of vox populi vox dei, are hostile to enduring order and justice and freedom. For ideology is the politics of passionate unreason.”

Foi Russel Kirk, biógrafo de Edmund Burke, que escreveu, a seguir à queda do muro, que a hegemonia soviética não devia ser substituída pela hegemonia americana. Mas hoje temos a força militar nas mãos de ideólogos - a corte do Estado moderno.