sábado, 19 de agosto de 2006

Sobre o mensageiro e criador (um acto de génio) do "Islamo-Fascismo": Stephen Schwartz

O ex-trotskysta-new-born-muslim-neo-con-anti-fassista

Ou a National Review como palco de discussão das nuances ideológicas intra-comunistas, que resumidamente resultaram no cisma entre o realismo Estalinista de "Socialismo num país" versus o idealismo Trotskista da revolução internacional (eu diria, que felizmente, o fundador do Exército Vermelho perdeu, e foi assassinado pela outra linha).

Mas observar uma tal discussão na National Review é o que se pode dizer de, refrescante. Talvez Pacheco Pereira o queira documentar na sua história do comunismo.

TROTSKY, STRAUSS, AND THE NEOCONS War Party's leftist and elitist roots exposed (Justin Raimundo)

"
Arnold Beichman was next up at bat, with his own nominee: in any discussion of the neocons and their influence, he wants any reference to Leon Trotsky or the influence of Trotskyism to be strictly verboten. Writing in National Review Online, Beichman is outraged at Jeet Heer's National Post piece detailing the Trotskyist roots of leading neocons, whose cocktail party chatter evidently includes abstruse references to Max Shachtman and the factional history of the Fourth International.(...)

Apparently in response to ex-Trotskyist-turned-neocon
Stephen Schwartz for affectionately referring to the killer of Kronstadt as "the old man" and "L.D.," Beichman launches a magnificent attack on the crimes of Trotsky(...)

Schwartz responded the next day in National Review with what I think is the last word on this subject: his article is the definitive text that proves how right we paleos have been all along about this troublesome sect known as the neocons. Schwartz denounces "a group of neofascists" who supposedly claim that "neoconservatives are all ex-Trotskyists," but defends Heer's piece as serving another aim, that of describing "the very real evolution of certain ex-Trotskyists toward an interventionist position on the Iraq war" – i.e., his own evolution and that of his friends and associates in the neocon movement.(...)

The point of Schwartz's rebuttal, however, is that he is proud of his Trotksyist past. He even gathers his co-thinkers together in proclaiming, in true Trotskyist fashion, that they constitute a semi-official faction, which some editor at NRO deemed "Trotsky-cons":

"The second issue at hand involves the actual ex-Trotskyists who engaged with the issue of the Iraqi war. I call this group, to which I belong, the 'three-and-a-half international,' which is an obscure reference I won't explain fully. But I use it to indicate three main individuals: Christopher Hitchens, myself, and the Iraqi intellectual Kanan Makiya, who all did indeed march under the Red Flag at some point…."

Here is where Schwartz descends into sheer hilarity, given that the best humor is always unintentional. He not only defends dear old Trotsky against Beichman's calumniations, but also red-baits Beichman, reminding him – and NRO's by this time utterly baffled readers – of Beichman's Stalinist past. Beichman was a fellow traveler of the Communist Party in the 1930s, when he worked for the pro-war, pro-FDR left-wing newspaper PM. It's all too funny, but one can only wonder what ordinary, garden-variety, un-prefixed conservatives think of all this sound and fury.

Here, after all, are the ex-Commies of yesteryear re-enacting the Stalin-Trotsky split in the pages of National Review – even as the magazine continues with its ridiculous campaign denying the very existence of neocons as anything but plain old vanilla conservatives.


The magazine's online readers, such as they are, may be mystified by Schwartz's argument that Trotsky has a lot to say to the neocons of today, because his analysis of the Moscow Trials somehow impacts on the neocon analysis of Peter Arnett. (Say, what?) But I, for one, particularly enjoyed Schwartz's contention that the Beichman jeremiad represented an effort to "exclude Hitchens and myself from consideration as reliable allies in the struggle against Islamist extremism," or, as he proudly avers:

"Because we have yet to apologize for something I, for one, will never consider worthy of apology. There is clearly a group of heresy-hunters among the original neoconservatives who resent having to give way to certain newer faces, with our own history and culture. These older neoconservatives cannot take yes for an answer, and they especially loathe Hitchens. But nobody ever asked Norman Podhoretz [um dos principais ideólogos neocons ] to apologize for having once written poetry praising the Soviet army. Nobody ever asked the art critic Meyer Schapiro, who was also a Trotskyist, to flog himself for assisting illegal foreign revolutionaries at a time when it was considered unpatriotic, to say the least. Nobody ever asked Shachtman or Burnham, or, for that matter, Sidney Hook, or Edmund Wilson, or a hundred others, to grovel and beg mercy for inciting war on capitalism in the depths of the Great Depression."

Holding that Red Banner high, Schwartz declares war on the ex-Stalinists in the neocon movement – of which there are plenty, as he correctly points out – and proclaims his "Third and a Half International." It is almost too farcical to be taken seriously, but then the "conservatism" upheld by National Review since the purge of John Sullivan has never been serious, and this just underscores the sheer absurdity of its claim to be some kind of final arbiter.

Schwartz raises a perfectly legitimate point: if the ex-Trotskyists have to apologize for importing their particular brand of militarism into the neocon movement, then why don't the ex-Stalinists have to "grovel," too? I say let them both apologize for supporting some variant of mass-murdering commie totalitarianism, or stop pretending to be "conservatives."

The ideas that energize the neoconservative movement have little if anything to do with traditional conservatism. That this suspicion is now widespread among traditional conservatives, as well as journalists, is not to be undone by lame accusations of alleged "anti-Semitism."

Paring down the permitted language of political debate is not going to work, either. It is clear beyond the need for further proof that the War Party bamboozled the American public into taking that first fateful step on the road to empire. We know who they are, and what they believe: it is not a "conspiracy," as the detractors of this theory insist, because there is nothing secret about it – and because the same people are urging us onward, to Iran, Syria, and beyond.

The esoteric elitist Strauss, the Leninist elitist Trotsky, Schwartz and his mock-operatic "Third and a Half International" re-fighting the inter-Commie faction wars of the 1930s with a gaggle of ex-Stalinists – this is the official "conservative" movement of today!

No wonder Commissar Frum and his fellow neocons felt compelled to attack us antiwar, limited government types as "unpatriotic conservatives," [acusação feita por um Canadiano!] going so far as to declare that they "turn their backs" on us.

They turned their backs on authentic conservatism some time ago."

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