mercredi, 11 janvier 2012
Julius Evola e la metafisica del sesso. Alcune osservazioni per una lettura attualizzata del pensiero del filosofo romano
Julius Evola e la metafisica del sesso. Alcune osservazioni per una lettura attualizzata del pensiero del filosofo romano
La mia intenzione non è quella di scrivere una recensione della Metafisica del Sesso di Julius Evola (peraltro ampiamente commentato e recensito nel susseguirsi delle varie edizioni), quanto piuttosto di mettere a fuoco alcuni aspetti salienti del suo pensiero in tema di sessualità e confrontarli con le esigenze ed i problemi dell’uomo del XXI secolo. Tale approccio si inserisce in un disegno più ampio, volto a confrontare il pensiero evoliano con la contemporaneità, per verificarne l’attualità.
Un primo aspetto da analizzare riguarda quella che il pensatore chiama la “Pandemìa del sesso” nell’epoca moderna. Evola evidenzia come – anche attraverso la pubblicità, l’influenza dei media e della televisione – il sesso sia divenuto una vera manìa, un’ossessione pervasiva, nel mentre se ne è perduto il significato profondo, realizzativo nel senso dell’“uomo integrale” nel quadro di quello che egli chiama il “mondo della Tradizione”. Tale fenomeno può leggersi come una reazione smodata al clima moralistico di estrazione cattolico-borghese, alla sessuofobia tipica di una certa educazione di matrice cattolica ma anche in opposizione al puritanesimo tipico di una certa cultura protestante. Dallo squilibrio di una educazione sessuofoba si passa all’eccesso di una manìa, entrambi i fenomeni avendo però in comune lo smarrimento del senso profondo del sesso e dell’amore, come superamento del senso dell’ego, integrazione delle complementarietà e riaccostamento a quel senso dell’unità primordiale adombrata nel mito dell’androgine riportato da Platone nel Simposio ed ampiamente citato da Evola nella sua opera. Peraltro tale ossessione banalizza il sesso ed attenua l’attrazione, poiché la fisicità femminile ed il nudo femminile divengono qualcosa di così ordinario ed abituale da perdere quella carica sottile di magnetismo, di fascinazione che sono fondamentali nell’attrazione fra i sessi.
Orbene, se confrontiamo questa analisi evoliana con la realtà contemporanea (ricordiamo che Metafisica del Sesso fu pubblicato, per la prima volta, nel 1957), notiamo che il fenomeno dell’ossessione del sesso si sia accentuato, anche per effetto della diffusione della telematica, della estrema libertà di pubblicazione che esiste su Internet e quindi della possibilità agevole per gli utenti di accedervi.
Peraltro si osserva nei rapporti fra i sessi una superficialità diffusa, una incapacità di comunicare su temi di fondo, una banalizzazione dei rapporti che coinvolge lo stesso momento sessuale, visto come una pratica scissa da qualsiasi aspetto profondo, di autentica comunione animica fra i sessi.
In ciò può cogliersi una vera e propria paura di fondo, la paura dell’uomo di entrare in contatto reale con se stesso e con gli altri, di doversi guardare dentro, di doversi magari mettere in discussione. L’uomo contemporaneo – come tendenza prevalente – rifugge dall’autoosservazione ed ha sempre più bisogno di “droghe” in senso lato, di evasioni, dal caos della metropoli a certe forme di musica che abbiano un effetto di stordimento, dal “rito”degli esodi di massa nei periodi di vacanza e nei fine-settimana alla dimensione di massa che hanno anche le villeggiature balneari, in una trasposizione automatica della dimensione della metropoli che risponde ad un bisogno di stordirsi e di perdersi comunque.
L’analisi evoliana, sotto questo aspetto, è pienamente attuale, presentandosi dunque come lungimirante nel momento in cui, oltre 50 anni orsono, veniva elaborata. La crisi dei rapporti fra i sessi e del senso stesso del sesso si inquadra così nel contesto generale della crisi del mondo moderno, del suo essere, rispetto ai significati ed ai valori della Tradizione, un processo involutivo, una vera e propria anomalìa. E qui veniamo ad un ulteriore aspetto fondamentale da considerare.
La metafisica del sesso evoliana può essere adeguatamente compresa solo nel quadro della morfologia delle civiltà e della filosofia complessiva della storia che il pensatore romano elaborò e sistematizzò nella sua opera principale, Rivolta contro il mondo moderno, peraltro preceduta e preparata con vari saggi di morfologia delle civiltà pubblicati, in età giovanile, su varie riviste, come, ad esempio, il famoso saggio Americanismo e bolscevismo, pubblicato sulla rivista Nuova Antologia nel 1929. Senza questo riferimento generale e complessivo, senza questa visione d’insieme, non si comprende il punto di vista evoliano nell’approccio alla tematica della sessualità, approccio lontano sia da impostazioni di tipo moralistico-borghese, sia da forme esasperate di “pandemìa del sesso”.
Centrale è quindi il significato che Evola conferisce a quello che chiama “mondo della Tradizione”, intendendo con questo termine un insieme di civiltà orientate “dall’alto e verso l’alto”, per citare una tipica espressione evoliana; si tratta di tutte quelle civiltà che, pur nella varietà delle loro forme non solo religiose ma soprattutto misteriche (cioé iniziatiche), hanno in comune una orientazione sacrale, nel senso che esse sono ispirate dal sacro e tendono verso il sacro, inteso e vissuto come dimensione trascendente e, al tempo stesso, immanente, ossia una sacralità che entra nella storia e nell’umano, che permea di sé i vari aspetti della vita individuale e sociale di una determinata civiltà. Ogni aspetto della vita, dall’amore al sesso alle arti ed ai mestieri, diviene, in questo particolare “tono” una occasione, una possibilità di aprire la comunicazione con il Divino, quindi una opportunità di elevazione e miglioramento personale.
In questo senso il mondo moderno, come mondo desacralizzato e materialistico, rappresenta un’anomalìa, peraltro denunciata da René Guénon ancor prima di Evola (illuminanti sono, al riguardo, le pagine di apertura del libro Simboli della Scienza Sacra, ripubblicato da Adelphi) , come anche da altri Maestri della Tradizione, come Arturo Reghini in Italia e da Rudolf Steiner nella Mitteleuropa del primo Novecento.
Il concetto di un tipo di società orientata dal terreno e verso il terreno, relegante alla fede privata individuale tutto ciò che possa avere il vago sentore di un anelito spirituale, è qualcosa che appartiene esclusivamente all’epoca moderna più recente, pressappoco da Cartesio in poi e soprattutto dall’illuminismo e dalla rivoluzione francese in avanti. Fino al Medio Evo l’orientazione sacrale della vita e della società era un dato centrale e normale, mentre ora prevale la secolarizzazione, l’essere immersi in modo esclusivo nel terreno e nella storia.
Sotto questo aspetto il conflitto fra mondo islamico e mondo occidentale, al di là di certe forme esasperate e terroristiche di antagonismo culminate con l’attacco dell’11 settembre 2001– che sono soltanto un aspetto del mondo islamico – è emblematico di un diverso modo di concepire la vita e il mondo e rappresenta la piena conferma del carattere anomalo del mondo moderno laico e secolarizzato.
In questo contesto “tradizionale” si colloca la concezione evoliana del sesso e dell’amore. Centrale è il riferimento al Simposio di Platone, quindi alla visione della polarità fra i sessi – maschile e femminile – come anelito, spesso inconsapevole, alla reintegrazione dell’unità primordiale dell’androgino, poi scissa nella dualità dei sessi. In origine, secondo il mito, esisteva una specie di essere che riassumeva in sé i due sessi, che poi si scinde nelle due sessualità che noi conosciamo come distinte e separate. L’amore e l’incontro sessuale è visto quindi come superamento dei limiti individuali, come completamento e superamento del senso dell’ego, come capacità di dono di sé, di apertura all’altro, di integrazione con l’altro e nell’altro.
Fondamentale è anche il riferimento all’archetipo di Afrodite, vista nei suoi vari aspetti e nei suoi vari gradi; L’Afrodite Celeste e l’Afrodite Pandémia simboleggiano due stati e gradi dell’amore, quello spirituale e quello sensuale, quest’ultimo essendo visto come un primo grado di approssimazione esperienziale all’amore in senso alto, come Amore per il divino, come slancio fervido e raccolto verso la nostra origine spirituale. E’ importante notare come, nella visione evoliana, non vi sia scissione fra i due piani, ma come essi rappresentino, in realtà, due fasi di un unico iter ascensionale, poiché il divino non è un quid lontano dal mondo, ma si manifesta nel mondo, pur non riducendosi ad esso. A tale riguardo, si può ricordare la concezione indiana della Shakti, ossia l’aspetto “potenza” e manifestazione del divino, cioé il suo aspetto femminile, dinamico che, non a caso, è definito nei test tantrici la “splendente veste di potenza del divino” su cui l’orientalista Filippani-Ronconi ha scritto pagine illuminanti nella sua opera Le Vie del Buddhismo. Non è marginale osservare che nello shivaismo del Kashmir, ossia nelle forme del culto di Shiva tipiche di quella regione dell’India nord-occidentale, la considerazione dell’aspetto shaktico del divino si riflette nella valorizzazione sociale della donna concepita come l’incarnazione terrena di quest’aspetto shaktico e, come tale, degna di rispetto e dotata di una sua dignità spirituale secondo le vedute delle scuole shivaite kashmire. Su questo punto si rinvia il lettore alle pagine molto illuminanti di Filippani Ronconi nel suo libro VAK. La parola primordiale dove l’Autore illustra un aspetto poco noto di alcune civiltà tradizionali, che Evola descrive sempre in chiave virile-solare e patriarcale.
Altro mito platonico cui il filosofo romano si richiama è quello di Poros e Penia, che spiega l’amore come perenne insufficienza, come continua privazione. E’ l’amore inteso come “sete inesausta”, come desiderio mai del tutto soddisfatto, come continuo anelito verso un completamento di sé mai del tutto realizzato e quindi fonte di perenne e nuovo desiderio. Qui si può cogliere il nesso fra lo stato esistenziale cui questo mito allude e l’amore sensuale, come tale sempre bramoso e sempre insoddisfatto.
L’insegnamento che la sacerdotessa Diotima (iniziata ai Misteri di Eleusi) tramanda a Socrate nel Simposio, in alcune pagine che sono fra le più belle del testo – l’essere cioé l’amore sensuale solo un primo grado per poi ascendere a forme più alte di amore secondo una scala ascensionale che ha una sua continuità di gradi di perfezionamento – ci offre la cognizione di un mondo che non demonizza il sesso ma lo valorizza nel quadro di una visione ascendente della vita umana in cui la sensualità ha una sua funzione ed un suo valore, perché è il primo momento di accostamento al bello, colto nelle sue manifestazioni fisiche più agevolmente percepibili per poi ascendere, gradualmente, al bello ideale e spirituale, all’idea del bello in sé secondo la filosofia platonica che, in realtà, riprende e sistematizza, sul piano speculativo, più antichi insegnamenti misterici, com’è dimostrato dalla connotazione sacerdotale e misterica di Diotima, non a caso introdotta ai Misteri di Demetra e Persefone-Kore, che sono i misteri della femminilità e della terra, della fecondità fisica e spirituale insieme.
Possono allora comprendersi certe forme cultuali del mondo antico inconcepibili secondo la visuale cristiana, quali, ad esempio, la prostituzione sacra, presente nel culto di Venus Erycina ed in quello di Venere Cupria. La sacerdotessa, quale incarnazione di una potenza sacra, si univa sessualmente con l’uomo devoto a quel culto, perché così il fedele entrava in contatto con la sacralità della dea Venus. L’atto sessuale era quindi un veicolo di comunicazione con il divino, un sentiero di contatto e di unione con la trascendenza. Si comprende allora anche la sacralizzazione del fallo, testimoniato dall’iconografia e dal culto del dio Priapo e dalle processioni in onore di Dioniso (le falloforie), dove si portavano in mostra le rappresentazioni falliche quali epifanie del dio, presenti del resto nella religione egizia, quali ierofanie di Osiride, nel quadro dei Misteri egizi isiaci ed osiridei. Ancora oggi, in Giappone, si celebra annualmente una ricorrenza religiosa in cui le rappresentazioni falliche come oggetti sacri sono portate in processione.
La sessualità era quindi vista come una manifestazione della potenza del divino, una irruzione della trascendenza nell’immanenza della vita terrena, un segno delle possibilità più alte presenti nell’uomo. Non è certo un caso che il neoplatonismo rinascimentale e, in particolare, Marsilio Ficino (nel suo Commento al Simposio di Platone), si sia richiamato a questa visione sacrale dell’amore, sebbene rimarcando un più netto iato fra materia e spirito, per effetto dell’influenza cristiana, ma comunque accogliendo l’idea generale di un accostamento per gradi al Bello, da quello fisico a quello spirituale.
Particolare attenzione è data dal pensatore romano alla sessualità nei Misteri antichi e, in particolare, in quelli di Eleusi, alle forme rituali di ierogamìa, di unione sessuale sacra fra un uomo e una donna nel quadro sacerdotale misterico così come molta attenzione è data alle forme ed alle procedure della magia sesssuale, soprattutto con riferimento alle scuole tantriche induiste e buddhiste, nelle quali la sessualità viene utilizzata, con diversità di metodiche fra una scuola e l’altra, per attivare una superiore integrazione della coscienza e quindi uno stato di illuminazione interiore che si desta nel momento in cui si ha il contatto reale con il Sacro. Evola avverte anche sui pericoli insiti in alcune metodiche tantriche e mette in guardia il lettore da certi atteggiamenti superficiali di imitazione di pratiche che si collocavano in un contesto ambientale e culturale molto diverso, anche sotto il profilo della carica energetica presente in certe confraternite antiche.
Il problema di fondo che si pone è se e come tale visione sacrale del sesso possa essere praticata e realizzata nel quadro del mondo moderno e post-moderno, nell’era della rivoluzione tecnologica, informatica e telematica, in un ambiente desacralizzato e laicizzato. Certe forme cultuali e rituali (ierogamie, procedure tantriche) presupponevano l’esistenza dei Misteri, dei collegi misterici, dei sacerdoti e dei maestri spirituali, che sono del tutto assenti nell’età oscura, nel kali-yuga dei testi indù.
Si ripropone quindi, in tema di sessualità, lo stesso problema che si presenta in linea generale per le possibilità di realizzazione spirituale che sono offerte nel mondo moderno ed in quello contemporaneo (distinguiamo i due termini perché il post-moderno si presenta come un’epoca con caratteri già diversi da quelli della modernità industriale dell’800 e del ’900), alla luce del processo di solidificazione materialistica che si è svolto , con ritmi sempre più accelerati, nell’uomo e nel mondo e di cui Guénon ci ha parlato nella sua opera Il regno della quantità ed i segni dei tempi.
Credo che occorra partire da un dato: venuti meno i supporti rituali e misterici delle civiltà antiche, con l’affermazione del cristianesimo in una chiave di esclusivismo fideistico, e con lo sviluppo scientifico e tecnico che parte da una visione materialistica del mondo, si sono avute tre conseguenze che così possiamo brevemente schematizzare:
- l’uomo è rimesso a sé stesso perché non ha più supporti per la sua realizzazione in senso esoterico;
- l’uomo percepisce se stesso come coscienza individuale e non più come parte di un tutto. L’uomo di una gens antica, per intenderci, o il giurista del diritto romano ancora in età imperiale, percepiva se stesso come parte integrante di una gens o di una tradizione religiosa e culturale; la sua percezione di sé era allargata ad un insieme sovraindividuale. Oggi prevale invece una autopercezione atomistica dell’uomo;
- il “mentale” dell’uomo moderno è molto più forte rispetto a quello dell’uomo delle civiltà tradizionali, in cui prevaleva uno stile di pensiero sintetico-intuitivo che si rifletteva anche nella maggiore concisione linguistica, come è il caso del latino, lingua celebre per la sua efficace capacità di sintesi. Ciò vuol dire che l’uomo tradizionale, col suo “astrale”, cioé col mondo delle emozioni, entrava in contatto col dominio spirituale senza la mediazione del mentale, o almeno tale mediazione era molto più attenuata, essendo la mente una mente immaginativa, cioé sintetico-intutiva.
In questo contesto e con tali condizioni, l’iniziazione, oggi, può essere solo una iniziazione moderna, ossia praticabile in forme adatte alle condizioni dell’epoca.
Una realizzazione spirituale può essere attualmente solo un percorso di consapevolezza, una via dell’anima cosciente, imperniata sulla disciplina e la semplificazione della mente e sull’armonia mente-cuore.
Un approccio di tipo ritualistico non sembra adatto alle condizioni del nostro tempo, o quantomeno quell’approccio può avere un senso solo se preceduto e seguito da un continuum di operatività interiore consapevole, di azione modificatrice su se stessi e in se stessi.
Il campo della sessualità si colloca nel medesimo ordine di idee. Al sesso banalizzato e brutalizzato o alla sessuofobia di certe tendenze religiose va posta come alternativa la sessualità vissuta come consapevolezza del suo senso pieno e profondo, quindi preparata, propiziata e integrata da determinate pratiche meditative di cui ci parla ampiamente l’esoterista Massimo Scaligero nella sua opera Manuale pratico di meditazione e che risentono chiaramente dell’influenza di certe forme meditative indiane e yogiche adattate alla mentalità occidentale, sulla base degli insegnamenti della “scienza dello spirito” tramandata e rielaborata da Rudolf Steiner.
La lezione evoliana apre orizzonti profondi sulla sessualità nel mondo della Tradizione e consente di prendere coscienza delle regressioni e dei limiti che, anche in questo campo, si sono verificati nel mondo moderno. Crediamo, però, che tale lezione vada affiancata e integrata dagli interventi di altri Maestri, per maturare in sé la prospettiva pragmatica e concreta di una via dell’anima cosciente.
* * *
Tratto, col gentile consenso dell’Autore, dal mensile Fenix, n°38, dicembre 2011, pagg. 86-90.
Stefano Arcella
00:05 Publié dans Traditions | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : tradition, traditions, sexualité, métaphysique, métaphysique du sexe, julius evola, italie | 
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mardi, 10 janvier 2012
La voix pertinente de la Hongrie
La voix pertinente de la Hongrie
Ex: http://synthesenationale.hautetfort.com/
Le gouvernement conservateur hongrois de Viktor Orbàn vient d’adopter une nouvelle Constitution qui vise à réduire considérablement l’influence des partis politiques, à maîtriser sa monnaie par sa mainmise sur sa banque centrale et en rappelant quelques principes identitaires fondamentaux. Pour Viktor Obàn, la démocratie n’est pas une panacée sans pour autant tomber dans les travers du bon vieux stalinisme d’hier, mais vu de droite. Evidemment le Système regimbe face à cet acte d’indépendance et Bruxelles, temple du politiquement correct, ne sait trop comment réagir. Mais la finance internationale et apatride veille au grain. Pourtant, Viktor Orbàn semble montrer une voie originale à ce que pourrait être une Europe enfin décidée à défendre ses intérêts et surtout son identité.
Les principaux changements dans la Constitution :
- La «République de Hongrie» devient la «Hongrie».
- Les dirigeants de l’actuel Parti socialiste sont tenus rétroactivement responsables des «crimes communistes» commis jusqu’en 1989.
- «Dieu» fait son entrée dans la Constitution, tout comme le nombre de communautés religieuses, limité à 14.
- Le nouveau mode de scrutin fait la part belle au parti arrivant en tête.
- Les Hongrois de souche à l’étranger (minorités dans les pays voisins) bénéficient du droit de vote.
- Le mandat des titulaires de postes importants de l’appareil d’Etat (économie, justice, police et armée) est porté à neuf ou douze ans.
- L’impôt sur le revenu à taux unique de 16% et le niveau des retraites est fixé dans la Constitution.
- L’influence du gouvernement est renforcée dans la Banque centrale. Le président de cette institution ne peut plus choisir ses trois adjoints, nommés par le gouvernement. De plus, le Conseil monétaire passe de 7 à 9 membres. Ces deux membres supplémentaires sont choisis par le gouvernement.
- Le forint devient constitutionnellement la monnaie hongroise, bloquant pratiquement le passage à l’euro.
- La Constitution fait de l’embryon un être humain dès la conception.
- Le mariage n’unit qu’un homme et une femme.
- Les sans-abri peuvent être punis de peines de prison.
- La radio-télévision publique et l’agence de presse MTI sont chapeautées par un Conseil des médias, dirigé par le Premier ministre.
- L’unique radio d’opposition, Klubradio, perd sa fréquence.
- Le Parlement a par ailleurs adopté une modification de ses règles de fonctionnement, qui donne à la majorité la possibilité de modifier l’ordre du jour et faire passer ses lois sans débat.
00:05 Publié dans Actualité, Affaires européennes | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : hongrie, mitteleuropa, europe centrale, politique internationale, europe, affaires européennes | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
Le Qatar achète nos banlieues ou La diversité, cheval de Troie de l’islamisme
Le Qatar achète nos banlieues ou La diversité, cheval de Troie de l’islamisme
L’imprudence de nos dirigeants n’a décidément pas de limite; elle frôle, parfois, l’irresponsabilité. En plein débat sur le vote des étrangers aux élections locales, l’annonce de financements du Qatar dans certaines banlieues aurait du soulever bien des interrogations.
Le Qatar est, en effet, un émirat rigoriste qui achète tout: le sport, la culture. Pour améliorer son image. Mais il est aussi derrière tous les mouvements islamistes dans le monde arabe. Du Maroc à Damas, notre collègue algérien, Chems Eddine Chitour, l’a récemment rappelé dans nos pages. Il a été l’un des éléments moteurs de la guerre en Libye, derrière la France ou la poussant, selon les versions. Il finance tous les mouvements islamistes: au Maroc, en Tunisie ou en Egypte.
Le Qatar et la France : de l’amitié ?
Au Maroc, les islamistes ont remporté les élections, comme en Egypte et en Tunisie. La Syrie va connaître une guerre civile qui profitera aux religieux extrémistes. Il n’y a plus de Libye (BHL s’en félicite), mais des territoires soumis à l’autorité de chefs de guerre plus ou moins islamistes. Si un califat se constitue c’est, pour le moment, celui de Doha.
Le Qatar a pris la relève du wahhabisme saoudien dans l’exportation d’un Islam fondamentalisme qu’il fait coexister avec une économie dynamique et ultra moderniste, fondée sur l’or noir. Voilà les sauveurs des banlieues. Tout de même, cela ne choque-t-il personne ?
A quand les élus « qatari» de nationalité française?
“Le Qatar a créé un fonds d’investissement de 50 M€ pour financer des projets économiques portés par les habitants des banlieues de France”, a annoncé jeudi soir son ambassadeur à Paris, Mohamed Jahan Al-Kuwari.
L’Association nationale des élus locaux pour la diversité reçue par l’Emir du Qatar
Mais le financement des associations, l’aide aux élus de “la diversité” aura sans doute une contrepartie: la ré-islamisation, dans l’obédience, de nos banlieues. Nous aurons donc des élus « qatari» de nationalité française et des associations d’étrangers « qataris » qui pourront exiger des piscines non-mixtes et des repas halal partout, ainsi que le respect du port du voile…. Surtout, en cas d’obtention du droit de vote. Ce serait la coutume étrangère qui ferait la loi, dans les mairies par l’élection ou par pression.
Accepter le financement de nos banlieues à population immigrée, forte ou majoritaire, par le Qatar est absolument irresponsable. Que fait-on du principe de précaution ? Qui s’inquiète ou dénonce ce véritable danger d’ingérence religieuse par le canal économique ?
Ni les pouvoirs publics, qui étaient déjà restés étrangement silencieux lorsque, au printemps dernier, des membres de l’administration américaine avaient procédé avec une totale impudence à des manoeuvres d’instrumentalisation des “jeunes de banlieues” d’ascendance africaine. Ni la presse. Tétanisée par ses complexes anti-racistes, elle ne voie que l’encouragement à “la diversité”, se contente de retranscrire la communication quatari. « Des élus de banlieue rentrent du Qatar. Leur but : promouvoir les talents des quartiers dans un pays en plein essor, où la culture franco-arabe n’est plus un handicap. Un voyage qui fait suite à deux séjours aux Etats-Unis.”
Qu’en pensent les intéressés ? « Alors que l’Europe est en crise, le Qatar explose”, répond Fouad Sari, élu écologiste et professeur à Vigneux-sur-Seine (Essonne). “Dans nos quartiers, le nouveau propriétaire du PSG et organisateur de la Coupe du monde de football 2022 fait rêver les jeunes.» « Au Qatar, les compétences comptent plus que la couleur de la peau », ajoute Houaria Hadj-Chikh, adjointe (apparentée PC) à Marseille.
Derrière les talents de la diversité, l’uniformité de l’islamisme?
“Le Qatar ce n’est pas que des paroles. Il faut agir.” La bourse grande ouverte et ne cachant pas que les 50ME de l’émir n’était qu’un plancher, l’ambassadeur a été clair, devant la dizaine d’élus locaux des quartiers, tous originaires du Maghreb, en présence d’un journaliste de l’AFP “J’espère que ce partenariat sera noué très vite pour servir la relation entre le Qatar et la France“, pays “stratégique” et “très important pour nous“, a poursuivi l’ambassadeur. ”Les Français d’origine arabe peuvent nous aider dans notre partenariat avec la France“.
La France: objectif Qatari. Personne ne peut en douter. Attention, derrière les talents de la diversité, il peut se cacher l’uniformité de l’islamisme Qatari.
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Krantenkoppen - Januari 2012 (1)
http://www.trouw.nl/tr/nl/4720/Jodendom/article/detail/3104916/2012/01/04/Het-uitverkoren-volk-moet-perfect-zijn.dhtml#.TwTWZjm78lg.facebook
http://www.voltairenet.org/Would-the-US-be-defeated-in-the
For 5 hours Saturday, not a single warship, merchant... vessel or oil tanker ventured into the 30-mile wide Hormuz strait, waiting to hear from Tehran’ that the test was over. Instead, around 0900 local time, a senior Iranian navy commander Mahmoud Moussavi informed Iran’s English language Press TV that no missiles had been fired after all. (...) For 5 hours therefore, world shipping obeyed Tehran’s warning (...)."
http://www.voltairenet.org/Iranian-missile-spin-forces-Hormuz
https://rt.com/usa/news/us-troops-israel-iran-257/
http://www.dewereldmorgen.be/artikels/2012/01/04/wordt-griekenland-een-nieuwe-oliestaat
http://www.dewereldmorgen.be/artikels/2012/01/04/schaliegas-verandert-machtsverhoudingen-in-de-wereld
http://www.legrandsoir.info/+syrie-appel-a-l-aide-de-mere-agnes-maryam-de-la-croix-et-du-monastere-de-saint-jacques-l-intercis+.html
http://www.voltairenet.org/The-decision-to-attack-Syria-was
Het zionisme, de basisideologie van Israël, is om volgende redenen een te bestrijden politieke stroming:
2. Het zionisme creëerde een menselijk drama voor het Palestijnse volk.
3. Het vernietigde grotendeels de eigen identiteit van grote groepen niet-Europese joden.
4. Een laatste, kwalijk gevolg was de gelijkschakeling 'Israël' met 'jood'.
http://www.dewereldmorgen.be/artikels/2011/12/29/over-het-misbruik-van-de-term-antisemitisme
Das Heilige Land unseres Herrn ist im Besitz seiner Kreuziger":
http://www.kreuz.net/article.14417.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16358851
http://www.voltairenet.org/The-defeat-of-the-American-empire
http://www.voltairenet.org/JFK-and-RFK-The-Plots-that-Killed
http://www.geopolintel.fr/article438.html
https://rt.com/news/twitter-facebook-cia-watches-743/
http://www.standaard.be/artikel/detail.aspx?artikelid=DMF20111226_053
http://www.dewereldmorgen.be/artikels/2011/12/21/irak-het-minst-leefbare-land-van-de-planeet
http://www.dewereldmorgen.be/artikels/2011/12/20/irak-totale-vernietiging-door-invasie-en-bezetting
2 - CREATE PROBLEMS, THEN OFFER SOLUTIONS
3 - THE GRADUAL STRATEGY
4 - THE STRATEGY OF DEFERRING
5 - GO TO THE PUBLIC AS A LITTLE CHILD
6 - USE THE EMOTIONAL SIDE MORE THAN THE REFLECTION
7 - KEEP THE PUBLIC IN IGNORANCE AND MEDIOCRITY
8 - TO ENCOURAGE THE PUBLIC TO BE COMPLACENT WITH MEDIOCRITY
9 - SELF-BLAME STRENGTHEN
10 - GETTING TO KNOW THE INDIVIDUALS BETTER THAN THEY KNOW THEMSELVES
http://www.pauljorion.com/blog/?p=32179%3Fp%3D%3Cb%3EUN+VENT+D%E2%80%99ESPOIR+SE+L%C3%88VE+%21%3C%2Fb%3E
In such a uni-polar vision, Europe is considered the outskirts of America, the world capital, and as a bridgehead of the American West on the large Eurasian continent. Europe is seen as a part of the rich North, not a decision maker, but a junior partner without proper interests and specific characteristics of its own. (...) Being geographically a neighbour to regions with diverse non-European civilisations and with its own identity weakened or directly negated by the approach of the Global American Empire, Europe can easily lose its own cultural and political shape. (...)
The identity of Europe is much wider and deeper than some simplistic American ideological fast-food of the global Empire complex – with its caricaturist mixture of ultra-liberalism, free market ideology and quantitative democracy. (...)
The positive basis for a united West in the future is almost totally lacking. The social choice of European countries and states is in stark contrast of Anglo-Saxon (today American) option towards ultra-liberalism. Present-day Europe has its own strategic interests that differ substantially with American interests or with the approach of the Global West project. (...)
The only feasible alternative in present circumstances is to found in the context of a multi-polar world. Multi-polarity can grant to any country and civilisation on the planet the right and the freedom to develop its own potential, to organise its own internal reality in accordance with the specific identity of its culture and people, to propose a reliable basis of just and balanced international relations amongst the world’s nations. (...) Differences between civilisations do not have to necessarily culminate in an inevitable clash between them – in contrast to the simplistic logic of some American writers.
Concerning Europe directly, (..) we suggest, as a concretisation of the multi-polar approach, a balanced and open vision of a Greater Europe as a new concept for the future development of our civilisation in strategic, social, cultural, economic and geopolitical dimensions. (...) No country – except the USA – as things stand today, can afford and defend its true sovereignty, relying solely on its own inner resources. No one of them could be considered as an autonomous pole capable of counterbalancing the Atlantist power. So multi-polarity demands a large-scale integration process. (...)
We imagine this Greater Europe as a sovereign geopolitical power, with its own strong cultural identity, with its own social and political options – based on the principles of the European democratic tradition – with its own defence system, including nuclear weapons, with its own strategic access to energy and mineral resources, making its own independent choices on peace or war with other countries or civilisations – with all of the above depending on a common European will and democratic procedure for making decisions.
In order to promote our project of a Greater Europe and the multi-polarity concept, we appeal to the different forces in European countries, and to the Russians, the Americans, the Asians, to reach beyond their political options, cultural differences and religious choices to support actively our initiative, to create in any place or region Committees for a Greater Europe or other kinds of organisations sharing the multi-polar approach, rejecting uni-polarity, the growing danger of American imperialism and elaborating a similar concept for other civilisations. If we work together, strongly affirming our different identities, we will be able to found a balanced, just and better world, a Greater World where any worthy culture, society, faith, tradition and human creativity will find its proper and granted place."
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The Moscow Trials in Historical Context
The Moscow Trials in Historical Context
Kerry Bolton
Ex: http://www.wermodandwermod.com/
Abstract
There is a subject that generally seems to be “no go” among academe: a critical attitude towards Trotsky and a less than slanderous attitude towards his nemesis, Stalin. Submission of papers on the subject is more likely to elicit responses of the type one would expect from outraged Trotskyite diehards than those of a scholarly critique. However, the battle between Trotsky and Stalin is not just one of theoretical interest, as it laid the foundations for outlooks on Russia and strategies in regard to the Cold War. The legacy continues to shape the present era, even after the implosion of the USSR. The following paper is intended to consider the Stalinist allegations against Trotsky et al in the context of history, and how that history continues to unfold.
Introduction
Trotsky had received comparatively good press in the West, especially since World War II, when the wartime alliance with Stalin turned sour. Trotsky has been published by major corporations,[1] and is generally considered the grandfatherly figure of Bolshevism.[2] “Uncle Joe,” on the other hand, was quickly demonized as a tyrant, and the “gallant Soviet Army” that stopped the Germans at Stalingrad was turned into a threat to world freedom, when in the aftermath of World War II the USSR did not prove compliant in regard to US plans for a post-war world order.[3] However, even before the rift, basically from the beginning of the Moscow Trials, Western academics such as Professor John Dewey condemned the proceedings as a brutal travesty. The Moscow Trials are here reconsidered within the context of the historical circumstances and of the judicial system that Trotsky and other defendants had themselves played prominent roles in establishing.
A reconsideration of the Moscow Trials of the defendants Trotsky et al is important for more reasons than the purely academic. Since the scuttling of the USSR and of the Warsaw Pact by a combination of internal betrayal and of subversion undertaken by a myriad of US-based “civil societies” and NGOs backed by the likes of the George Soros network, Freedom House, National Endowment for Democracy, and dozens of other such entities,[4] Russia – after the Yeltsin interregnum of subservience to globalisation –has sought to recreate herself as a power that offers a multipolar rather than a unipolar world. A reborn Russia and the reshaping of a new geopolitical bloc which responds to Russian leadership, is therefore of importance to all those throughout the world who are cynical about the prospect of a “new world order” dominated by “American ideals.” US foreign policy analysts, “statesmen” (sic), opinion moulders, and lobbyists still have nightmares about Stalin and the possibility of a Stalin-type figure arising who will re-establish Russia’s position in the world. For example, Putin, a “strongman” type in Western-liberal eyes at least, has been ambivalent about the role of Stalin in history, such ambivalence, rather than unequivocal rejection, being sufficient to make oligarchs in the USA and Russia herself, nervous. Hence, The Sunday Times, commenting on the Putin phenomena being dangerously reminiscent of Stalinism, stated recently:
Joseph Stalin sent millions to their deaths during his reign of terror, and his name was taboo for decades, but the dictator is a step closer to rehabilitation after Vladimir Putin openly praised his achievements.
The Prime Minister and former KGB agent used an appearance on national television to give credit to Stalin for making the Soviet Union an industrial superpower, and for defeating Hitler in the Second World War.
In a verdict that will be obediently absorbed by a state bureaucracy long used to taking its cue from above, Mr Putin declared that it was “impossible to make a judgment in general” about the man who presided over the Gulag slave camps. His view contrasted sharply with that of President Medvedev, Russia’s nominal leader, who has said that there is no excuse for the terror unleashed by Stalin.
Mr Putin said that he had deliberately included the issue of Stalin’s legacy in a marathon annual question-and-answer programme on live television, because it was being “actively discussed” by Russians.[5]
While The Times’ Halpin commented that Putin nonetheless gave the obligatory comments about the brutality of Stalin’s regime, following a forceful condemnation of Stalin by Medvedev on October 9, 2009, it is worrying nonetheless that Putin could state that positive aspects “undoubtedly existed.” Such comments are the same as if a leading German political figure had stated that some positive aspects of Hitler “undoubtedly existed.” The guilt complex of Stalinist tyranny, having its origins in Trotskyite Stalinophobia, which has been carried over into the present “Cold War II” era of a bastardous mixture of “neo-cons” (i.e., post-Trotskyites) and Soros type globalists, often working in tandem despite their supposed differences,[6] is supposed to keep Russian down in perpetuity. Should Russia rise again, however, the spectre of Stalin is there to frighten the world into adherence to US policy in the same way that the “war on terrorism” is designed to dragoon the world behind the USA. Just as importantly, The Times article commented on Putin’s opposition to the Russian oligarchy, which has been presented by the Western news media as a “human rights issue”:
During the television programme, Mr Putin demonstrated his populist instincts by lashing out at Russia’s billionaire class for their vulgar displays of wealth. His comments came after a scandal in Geneva, when an elderly man was critically injured in an accident after an alleged road race involving the children of wealthy Russians in a Lamborghini and three other sports cars. “The nouveaux riches all of a sudden got rich very quickly, but they cannot manage their wealth without showing it off all the time. Yes, this is our problem,” Mr Putin said.[7]
This all seems lamentably (for the plutocrats) like a replay of what happened after the Bolshevik Revolution when Stalin kicked out Trotsky et al. Under Trotsky, the Bolshevik regime would have eagerly sought foreign capital.[8] It is after all why plutocrats would have had such an interest in ensuring Trotsky’s safe passage back to Russia in time for the Bolshevik coup, after having had a pleasant stay with his family in the USA as a guest of Julius Hammer, and having been comfortably ensconced in an upmarket flat, with a chauffeur at the family’s disposal.[9] In 1923 the omnipresent globalist think tank the Council on Foreign Relations, was warning investors to hurry up and get into Soviet Russia before something went wrong,[10] which it did a few years later. Under Stalin, even Western technicians were not trusted.[11]
Of particular note, however, is that well-placed Russian politicians and academics are still very aware of the globalist apparatus that is working for what is frequently identified in Russia as a “new world order,” and the responsibility Russia has in reasserting herself to lead in reshaping a “multipolar” world contra American hegemony. This influences Russia’s foreign policy, perhaps the most significant manifestation being the BRIC alliance,[12] despite what this writer regards as the very dangerous liaison with China.[13]
What is dismissed as “fringe conspiracy theory” by the superficial and generally “kept” Western news media and academia, is reported and discussed, among the highest echelons of Russian media, politics, military, and intelligentsia, with an analytical methodology that is all but gone from Western journalism and research. For example the Russian geopolitical theorist Alexander Dugin is a well-respected academic who lectures at Moscow State University under the auspices of the Center for Conservative Studies, which is part of the Department of Sociology (International Relations)[14] The subjects discussed by Professor Dugin and his colleagues and students feature the menace of world government and the challenges of globalism to Russian statehood. The movement he inspired, Eurasianism, has many prominent people in Russia and elsewhere.[15]
Perhaps the best indication of Russia’s persistence in remaining resistant to globalist and hegemonic schemes for world re-organization is the information that is published by the Ministry of International Affairs. Despite the disclaimer, the articles and analyses are a far cry from the shallowness of the mainstream news media of the Western world. Articles posted by the Ministry as this paper is written include a cynical consideration of the North African revolutions and the role of “social media;”[16] and an article pointing to the immense socio-economic benefits wrought by the Qaddafi regime, which is now being targeted by revolts “backed by Western intelligence services.”[17] Political analyst Sergei Shashkov theorizes that:
Recent events perfectly fit into the US-invented concept of “manageable chaos” (also known as “controlled instability” theory). Among its authors are: Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Polish American political scientist, Gene Sharp, who wrote From Dictatorship to Democracy, and Steven Mann, whose Chaos Theory and Strategic Thought was published in Washington in 1992, and who was involved in plotting “color revolutions” in some former Soviet republics.[18]
The only place one is going to get that type of analyses in the West is in alternative media sources such as The Foreign Policy Journal or Global Research. What Western government Ministry would have the independence of mind to circulate analyses of this type? Russians have the opportunity to be the most well-informed people in the world in matters that are of real importance. Westerners, on the other hand, do have that essential freedom – to watch US sitcoms and keep abreast of the tittle-tattle of movie stars and pop singers. Clearly, Russia is not readily succumbing to the type of post-Cold War world as envisaged by plutocrats and US hegemonists, expressed by George H W Bush in his hopes for a “new world order” after the demise of the Soviet bloc.[19] Beginning with Putin, Russia has refused to co-operate in the establishment of the “new world order” just as Stalin did not go along with similar schemes intended for the post-World War II era.
The purging of the USSR of Trotskyites and others by Stalin constituted the first significant move against plutocratic aspirations for Russia. The subsequent Russophobia that continues among American foreign policy and other influential circles has an ideological and historical framework arising to a significant extent therefore. The Moscow Trials, and the reaction symbolized by the Dewey Commission, gave primary impetus to a movement that was to metamorphose from Trotskyism to post-Trotskyism and ultimately to the oddly named “neo- conservatism,” and to leading NGOs such as the National Endowment for Democracy. The foundation for the present historical phenomena in regard to Russia was being embryonically shaped even within the Dewey Commission, certain of whose members ended up becoming Cold Warriors.
In the spirit of this legacy, the oligarchs, who were to be unleashed on Russia after the destruction of the USSR, are being upheld by their champions in the West as victims of neo-Stalinism, and their trials are being compared to those of Stalin’s “Moscow Show Trials.” Hence, American Professor Paul Gregory, a Fellow of the Hoover Institution, co-editor of the “Yale-Hoover Series on Stalin, Stalinism, and Cold War,” etc., writes of the trial of oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky:
When the history of Russian justice is written fifty years from now, two landmark court cases will stand out: The death sentence of Nikolai Bukharin in his Moscow show trial of March 1938 and the second prison sentence of Mikhail Khodorkovsky expected December 27, 2010. Both processes teach the same object lesson: anyone who crosses the Kremlin will be punished without mercy. There will be no protection in the courts for the innocent, and the guilty verdict and sentence will be already predetermined behind the Kremlin walls. It also does not matter how preposterous or ludicrous the charges. Vladimir Putin was born in 1952, only one year before Stalin’s death. But Stalin’s system of justice was institutionalized and survived Stalin and the collapse of the Soviet Union, for use by apt pupils such as Putin . . . [20]
If Russia continues to take a “wrong turn” (sic) as it is termed by the US foreign policy Establishment,[21] then we can expect the regime to be increasingly demonized by being compared to that of Stalin, just as other regimes ripe for “change,” (such as Milosovic’s Serbia, Saddam’s Iraq and Qaddafi’s Libya) according to the agenda of the globalists, are demonized. John McCain, stated on the Floor of the Senate, speaking of the “New START Treaty” with Russia, that the Khodorkovsky trial indicated that flawed nature of Russia, although McCain admitted that he was “under no illusions” that some of the gains of the oligarch might have been “ill-gotten.”[22] However, to those who do not like the prospect of a renewal of Russia influence, Khodorkovsky is a symbol of the type of Russia they hoped would emerge after the demise of the USSR, and the oligarchs are portrayed as victims of Stalin-like injustice. Old Trot Carl Gershman, the founding president of the Congressionally-funded National Endowment for Democracy, used the Khodorkovsky sentencing as the primary point of condemnation of Russia in his summing up of the world situation frordemocracy in 2010, when stating that:
As 2010 drew to a close, the backsliding accelerated with a flurry of new setbacks—notably the rigged re-sentencing of dissident entrepreneur Mikhail Khodorkovsky in Russia, the brutal repression of the political opposition in Belarus following the December 19 presidential election, and the passage of a spate of repressive new laws in Venezuela, where President Hugo Chavez assumed decree powers.[23]
One can expect “velvet revolutions” to break out in Belarus and Venezuela at any time now, although Russia will obviously take longer to deal with. Hence the vitriol will take on increasingly Cold War proportions, with the accusation of a Stalinist revival being used as prime propaganda material. It is against this background that the legacy of Stalin, including the Moscow Trials for which he is particularly condemned, should be examined.
Background of the Trials
The Moscow Trials comprised three events: The first trial, held in August 1936, involved 16 members of the “Trotskyite-Kamenevite-Zinovievite-Leftist-Counter-Revolutionary Bloc.” The two main defendants were Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev. The primary accusations against the defendants were that they had, in alliance with Trotsky, been involved in the assassination of Sergey Kirov in 1934, and of plotting to kill Stalin.[24] After confessing to the charges, all were sentenced to death and executed.
The second trial in January 1937 of the “anti-Soviet Trotskyite-Centre” comprised 17 defendants, including Karl Radek, Yuri Piatakov and Grigory Sokolnikov, who were accused of plotting with Trotsky, who was said to be in league with Nazi Germany. Thirteen of the defendants were executed, and the remainder died in labor camps.
The third trial was held in 1938 against the “Bloc of Rights and Trotskyists,” with Bukharin as the chief defendant. They were accused of having planned to assassinate Lenin and Stalin in 1918, and of having plotted to dismember the USSR for the benefit of foreign powers.
These trials have been condemned as “show trials” yet the very openness to foreign journalists and diplomats, as distinct from secret tribunals, is surely an approach that is to be commended rather than condemned. It also indicates the confidence the Soviet authorities had in their charges against the accused, allowing the processes to be subjected to foreign scrutiny and comment.
The world generally has come to know the Moscow Trials as a collective travesty based on torture, threats to families and forced confessions, with the defendants in confused states, declaring their confessions of guilt by rote, as if hypnotised. The trials are considered in every sense modern-day “witch trials.” For example, Prof. Sidney Hook, co-founder of the “Dewey Commission,” cogently expressed the widely held view of the trials many years later that, “The confessions, exacted by threats and torture, physical and psychological, whose precise nature has never been disclosed, consisted largely of alleged ‘conversations about conversations.’”[25] However the opinions of first-hand observers are not unanimous in condemning the methodology of the trials. The US Ambassador to the USSR, himself a lawyer, Joseph E Davies, was to write of the trials in his memoirs published in 1945 (that is, about seven years after the Dewey Commission had supposedly proven the trials to have been a travesty):
At 12 o’clock noon accompanied by Counselor Henderson I went to this trial. Special arrangements were made for tickets for the Diplomatic Corps to have seats. . . . [26] . . . On both sides of the central aisle were rows of seats occupied entirely by different groups of “workers” at each session, with the exception of a few rows in the centre of the hall reserved for correspondents, local and foreign, and for the Diplomatic Corps. The different groups of “workers,” I am advised, were charged with the duty of taking back reports of the trials to their various organizations.[27]
Davies stated that among the foreign press corps were the following representatives: Walter Duranty and Harold Denny from The New York Times, Joe Barnew and Joe Phillips from The New York Herald Tribune, Charlie Nutter or Nick Massock from Associated Press, Norman Deuel and Henry Schapiro from United Press, Jim Brown from International News, and Spencer Williams from The Manchester Guardian. The London Observer, hardly pro-Soviet, opined that: “It is futile to think the trial was staged and the charges trumped up. The Government’s case against the defendants is genuine.”[28] Duranty from The New York Times stated of the 1936 trial of Kamenev, Zinoviev, et al that:
. . . The writer knows beyond doubt that the assassin [of Kirov] was used as an instrument for the needs of political terrorism… No one acquainted with present European politics can fail to realize that, whereas the Soviet government is doing it utmost to maintain peace, there are certain so-called Trotskyist organizations that are trying to cause trouble…[29]
Of Soviet prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky, Davies opined that: “the prosecutor … conducted the case calmly and generally with admirable moderation.” Especially notable, given the subsequent claims that were made about the allegedly confused, brainwashed appearance and tone of the defendants, Davies observed: “There was nothing unusual in the appearance of the accused. They all appeared well nourished and normal physically.”[30] A delegation of the International Association of Lawyers stated:
We consider the claim that the proceedings were summary and unlawful to be totally unfounded. The accused were given the opportunity of taking counsels.... We hereby categorically declare that the accused were sentenced quite lawfully.[31]
In 1936 the British Labour Member of Parliament, D N Pritt KC, wrote extensively of his observations on the first Moscow Trial. In the lengthy article published in Russia Today, Pritt, after alluding to the apparently good condition of the defendants who, in accord with the observations of Davies, did not appear to have suffered under Soviet detention, wrote:
The first thing that struck me, as an English lawyer, was the almost free-and-easy demeanour of the prisoners. They all looked well; they all got up and spoke, even at length, whenever they wanted to do so (for the matter of that, they strolled out, with a guard, when they wanted to).
The one or two witnesses who were called by the prosecution were cross-examined by the prisoners who were affected by their evidence, with the same freedom as would have been the case in England.
The prisoners voluntarily renounced counsel; they could have had counsel without fee had they wished, but they preferred to dispense with them. And having regard to their pleas of guilty and to their own ability to speak, amounting in most cases to real eloquence, they probably did not suffer by their decision, able as some of my Moscow colleagues are.[32]
Pritt was struck by the informality of the proceedings, and commented on how the defendants could interrupt at will, in what seems to have been a freewheeling debate:
The most striking novelty, perhaps, to an English lawyer, was the easy way in which first one and then another prisoner would intervene in the course of the examination of one of their co-defendants, without any objection from the Court or from the prosecutor, so that one got the impression of a quick and vivid debate between four people, the prosecutor and three prisoners, all talking together, if not actually at the same moment—a method which, whilst impossible with a jury, is certainly conducive to clearing up disputes of fact with some rapidity. [33]
Pritt’s view of Vyshinsky is in accord with that of Davies, stating of the prosecutor: “He spoke with vigour and clarity. He seldom raised his voice. He never ranted, or shouted, or thumped the table. He rarely looked at the public or played for effect.”[34] Pritt stated that the fifteen defendants[35] “spoke without any embarrassment or hindrance.” Such was Pritt’s view of the proceedings that his concluding remark states: “But it is equally clear that the judicature and the prosecuting attorney of USSR have taken at least as great a step towards establishing their reputation among the legal systems of the modern world.”[36]
Although Pritt was a Labour Member of Parliament, and was not a communist party member, he was pro-Soviet. Was he, then, capable of forming an objective, professional opinion? Anecdotal evidence suggests he was. Jeremy Murray-Brown, biographer of the Kenyan leader Jomo Kenyatta, writing to the editor of Commentary in connection with the Moscow Trials, relates that he had had discussions with Pritt in 1970, in the course of which he asked Pritt about the trials:
His reply astonished me. “I thought they were all guilty,” he said, referring to Bukharin and his co-defendants. It was as simple as that; Pritt made no attempt at political justification, but reaffirmed what was for him a matter of clear professional judgment. …In terms of the Soviet Union’s own judicial system, Pritt said, he firmly believed the defendants in the Moscow trials were guilty as charged. It was an argument which came oddly from the man who defended Kenyatta.[37]
Kenyatta, whom Pritt went to Kenya to defend before a British colonial court, had been “evasive” under cross-examination, Pritt stated.[38] Pritt, despite his support for Kenyatta was able to judge the veracity of proceedings regardless of political bias, and had maintained his view of the Moscow trials even in 1970, when it would have been opportune, even among Soviet sympathizers, to conform to the accepted view, including the declarations of Khrushchev. Indeed, Sidney Hook, long since having become a Cold Warrior in the service of the USA, retorted:
In reply to Jeremy Murray-Brown: the significance of D N Pritt’s infamous defense of the infamous Moscow frame-up trials must be appraised in the light of Khrushchev’s revelations of Stalin’s crimes available to the public (outside the Soviet Union) long before Pritt’s avowals to Mr Murray-Brown. Pritt cannot have been unaware of them.[39]
Of course Pritt was not unaware of Khrushchev’s so-called “revelations.” Unlike many former admirers of Stalin, he was simply not impressed by their veracity, and it must be assumed that his scepticism was based on both his eminent judicial experience and his first-hand observations. Certainly, Sidney Hook’s leading role in the formation of the “Dewey Commission” for the exoneration of Trotsky on the pretext of “impartial” hearings, was itself a cynical travesty, as will be considered in this paper.
If there was a general consensus that the proceedings were legitimate, and a quite sceptical attitude towards the findings of the Dewey Commission, despite the eminence of its front man, Prof. John Dewey, what changed to result in such a dramatic and almost universal reversal of opinion? It was a change of perception in regard to Stalin in the aftermath of World War II, and not due to any sudden revelations about the Moscow Trials or about Stalin’s tyranny. The wartime alliance, which, it was assumed, would endure during the post-war era, instead gave way to the Cold War.[40] Such was the hatred of the Trotskyites for the USSR that they were willing to enlist in the ranks of the anti-Soviet crusade even to the extent of working for the CIA[41], and supporting the US in Korea and Vietnam to counter Soviet influence.[42] Their services, as experienced anti-Soviet propagandists, were eagerly sought. Hence the findings of the Dewey Commission, largely ignored in their own time, are now heralded as definitive. The nature of this “Dewey Commission” will now be considered.
“Preliminary Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials”
The so-called Dewey Commission, the full title of which was the “Preliminary Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials,” having a legalistic and even official sound to it, was convened in March 1937 on the initiative of the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky as a supposedly “impartial body.”[43] The purpose was said to be, “to ascertain all the available facts about the Moscow Trial proceedings in which Trotsky and his son, Leon Sedov, were the principal accused and to render a judgment based upon those facts.”[44] However, the composition of the Commission indicates that it was set up as a counter-show trial with the preconceived intention of exonerating Trotsky, and was created at the instigation of Trotsky himself.
The stage was set with the founding of the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky by Prof. Sidney Hook, who persuaded his mentor, Prof. John Dewey, to front for it. Just how “impartial” the Dewey Commission was might be deduced not only from its having been initiated by those sympathetic towards Trotsky, but also by a comment in a Time report at the occasion of Trotsky’s deportation from Norway en route to Mexico: “The American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky spat accusations at the Norwegian Government last week for its ‘indecent and filthy’ behavior in placing the Great Exile & Mme Trotsky on the Norwegian tanker Ruth…”[45]
The mock “trial” organised by the Dewey Commission was prompted by a “demand” from Trotsky from his new abode in Mexico, who “publicly demanded the formation of an international commission of inquiry, since he had been deprived of any opportunity to reply to the accusations before a legally constituted court.”[46] A sub-commission was formed to travel to Mexico and to allow Trotsky to give testimony in his defense under what was supposed to include “cross-examination.” The sub-commission comprised:
- John Dewey as chairman, described by Novack as America’s foremost liberal and philosopher;
- Otto Ruehle, a German Marxist and former Reichstag Deputy;
- Alfred Rosmer, former member of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (1920-21);
- Wendelin Thomas, leader of the sailor’s revolt in Germany in 1918 and a former Communist Deputy in the Reichstag; and
- Carlo Tresca, Italian-American anarchist.[47]
Other members, whose political orientations are not mentioned by Novack, were:
- · Benjamin Stolberg, American journalist;
- · Suzanne La Follette, American journalist;
- · Carleton Beals, authority on Latin-American affairs;
- · Edward A Ross, Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin;
- · John Chamberlain, former literary critic of the New York Times; and
- · Francisco Zamora, Mexican journalist.
Of these, Stolberg was a supporter of the Socialist Party, described by fellow commissioner Carleton Beals as being, along with other commissioners, thoroughly under Trotsky’s spell.[48] Suzanne La Follette was described by Beals as having a “worshipful” attitude towards Trotsky.[49] Edward A Ross, who had gone to Soviet Russia in 1917 had come back with a pro-Bolshevik sentiment, writing The Russian Bolshevik Revolution (1921) and The Russian Soviet Republic (1923). John Chamberlain, a Left-leaning liberal by his own description[50], was among those who became so obsessively anti-Soviet that they ended up as avid Cold Warriors in the US camp.[51] In 1946 Chamberlain and Suzanne La Follette, along with free market guru Henry Hazlitt, founded the libertarian journal The Freeman.[52] Both can therefore be regarded as among the many Trotsky-sympathizers who became apologists for American foreign policy,[53] and laid the foundation for the so-called “neo-conservative” movement. Chamberlain and La Follette continued to pursue a vigorous anti-Soviet line at the earliest stages of the Cold War.[54]
Trotsky’s lawyer for the Mexico hearings was Albert Goldman, who had joined the Communist Party of America on its founding in 1920. He was expelled from the party in 1933 for Trotskyism. Goldman was another Trotskyite who became a pro-US Cold Warrior.[55] The Dewey Commission’s “court reporter” (sic) was Albert M Glotzer, who had been expelled from the Communist Party USA in 1928 and with prominent American Trotskyite Max Shachtman, had founded the Communist League and subsequent factions, including the Social Democrats USA,[56] whose executive Secretary had been Carl Gershman, founding president of the National Endowment for Democracy. Glotzer had also served as Trotsky’s secretary in Turkey in 1931, and had met him on other occasions.[57] The Social Democrats USA provided particular support for the Cold War hawk, Sen. Henry Jackson, and has produced other foreign policy hawks such as Elliott Abrams.
Under the façade of an “impartial enquiry” and with a convoluted title that suggests a bona fide judicial basis, the Dewey Commission proceeded to Mexico to “interrogate” (sic) Trotsky on the pretence of objectivity;[58] an image that was to be quickly exposed by the resignation of one of the Commissioners, Carleton Beals.
"Trotsky's Pink Tea Party": The Beals Resignation
Although one would hardly suspect it now, at the time the Dewey Commission was perceived by many as lacking credibility. Time reported that when Dewey returned from Mexico the “kindly, grizzled professor” told a crowd of 3,500 in Manhattan that the preliminary results of the sub-commission justified the continuation of the Commission’s enquiries in the USA and elsewhere. Time offered the view that, “by last week the committee had proved nothing at all,” despite Dewey’s positive spin.[59] Time in referring to the resignation of Carleton Beals cited him as stating that the hearings had been “unduly influenced in Trotsky’s favor,” Beals having “resigned in disgust.”[60] The Dewey report appended a statement attempting to deal with Beals.[61] In a reply to Dewey, Beals wrote in The Saturday Evening Post that despite the publicly stated intention of the enquiry to determine the innocence or guilt of Trotsky the attitudes of the sub-commission members towards Trotsky were those of reverence:
“I want to weep,” remarks one commissioner as we pass out into the frowzy street, “to think of him being here.” All, including Doctor Dewey, chairman of the investigatory commission, join in the chorus of sorrow over Trotsky’s fallen star - except one commissioner, who sees the pathos of human change in less personal terms.[62]
Beals observing Trotsky in action considered that,
above all, his mental faculties are blurred by a consuming lust of hate for Stalin, a furious uncontrollable venom which has its counterpart in something bordering on a persecution complex - all who disagree with him are bunched in the simple formula of GPU agents, people “corrupted by the gold of Stalin.”[63]
It is evident from Beals’ comments - and Beals had no particular axe to grind - that the persona of Trotsky was far from the rational demeanour of a wronged victim. From Beals’ comments Trotsky seems to have presented himself in a manner that is suggestive of the descriptions often levelled against the Stalinist judiciary, making wild accusations about the supposed Stalinist affiliations of any detractors. Beals questioned Trotsky concerning his archives, since Trotsky was making numerous references to them to prove his innocence, but Trotsky “hems and haws.” While Trotsky denied that his archives had been purged of anything incriminating, important documents had been taken out. A primary insistence of Trotsky’s defense was his denial of having any communication with the accused after 1929. However Dr J Arch Getty comments:
Yet it is now clear that in 1932 he sent secret personal letters to former leading oppositionists Karl Radek, G. Sokol’nikov, E. Preobrazhensky, and others. While the contents of these letters are unknown, it seems reasonable to believe that they involved an attempt to persuade the addressees to return to opposition.[64]
Unlike virtually all Trotsky’s other letters (including even the most sensitive) no copies of these remain in the Trotsky Papers. It seems likely that they have been removed from the Papers at some time. Only the certified mail receipts remain. At his 1937 trial, Karl Radek testified that he had received a letter from Trotsky containing “terrorist instructions,” but we do not know whether this was the letter in question.[65]
It can be noted here that, as will be related below, Russian scholar Prof. Rogovin, in seeking to show that the Opposition bloc maintained an effective resistance to Stalin, also stated that a “united anti-Stalin bloc” did form in 1932, despite Trotsky’s claim at the Dewey hearings that there had been no significant contact with any of the Moscow defendants since 1929. Beals found it difficult to believe Trotsky’s insistence that his contacts inside the USSR had since 1930 consisted of no more than a half dozen letters to individuals. If it was the case that Trotsky no longer had a network within the USSR then he and the Fourth International, and Trotskyism generally, must have been nothing other than bluster.[66]
Beals’ less than deferential line of questioning created antagonism with the rest of the Commission. They began to change the rules of questioning without consulting him. Beals concluded by stating that either Finerty, whom he regarded as acting like Trotsky’s lawyer instead of that of the commission’s counsel, resign, or he would. Suzanne LaFollette “burst into tears” and implored Beals to apologise to Finerty, otherwise the “great historical occasion” would be “marred.” Beals left the room of the Mexican villa with the Commissioners chasing after him. Dewey was left to try and rationalize the situation with the press, while Beals countered that “the commission’s investigations were a fraud.”[67] In the concluding remarks of his article, with the subheading “The Trial that Proved Nothing,” Beals stated that:
- There had been no adequate cross-examination.
- The Trotsky archives had not been examined.
- The cross-examination was a “scant day and a half,” mostly taken up with questions about the Russian Revolution, relations with Lenin, and questions about dialectical theory.
- Most of the evidence submitted was in the form of Trotsky’s articles and books, which could have been consulted at a library.
The commission then resumed in New York, about which Beals predicted, “no amount of fumbling over documents in New York can correct the omissions and errors of its Mexican expedition,” adding:
From the press I learned that seven other commissions were at work in Europe, and that these would send representatives to form part of the larger commission. I was unable to find out how these European commissions had been created, who were members of them. I suspected them of being small cliques of Trotsky’s own followers. I was unable to put my seal of approval on the work of our commission in Mexico. I did not wish my name used merely as a sounding board for the doctrines of Trotsky and his followers. Nor did I care to participate in the work of the larger organization, whose methods were not revealed to me, the personnel of which was still a mystery to me.
Doubtless, considerable information will be scraped together. But if the commission in Mexico is an example, the selection of the facts will be biased, and their interpretation will mean nothing if trusted to a purely pro-Trotsky clique. As for me, a sadder and wiser man, I say, a plague on both their houses.[68]
As can be seen from the last sentence of the above, Beals was not aligned to either Trotsky or Stalin. He had accepted a position with the Dewey Commission in the belief that it sought to get to the matter of the accusations against the Moscow defendants, and specifically Trotsky, in a professional manner. What Beals found was a set-up that was predetermined to exonerate Trotsky and give the “Old Man” a podium upon which to vent his spleen against his nemesis, Stalin. It is also apparent that Trotsky attempted to detract accusations by alleging that anyone who doubted his word was in the pay of Stalin. Yet today the consensus among scholars is that Stalin contrived false allegations about Trotsky et al, and any suggestion to the contrary is met with vehemence rather than with scholarly rebuttal.[69]
The third session of the Mexico hearings largely proceeded on the question of the relations between Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev, and the formation of the Stalin-Kamenev-Zinoviev troika that ran the Soviet state when Lenin became incapacitated. The primary point was that Kamenev and Zinoviev were historically rivals of Trotsky and allies of Stalin in the jockeying for leadership. However, the Moscow testimony also deals with the split of the troika, when alliances changed and Zinoviev and Kamenev became allied with Trotsky. Trotsky in reply to a question from Goldman as to the time of the split, replied: “It was during the preparation, the secret preparation of the split. It was in the second half of 1925. It appeared openly at the Fourteenth Congress of the Party. That was the beginning of 1926.”
Trotsky was asked to explain the origins of the Zinoviev split with Stalin and the duration of the alliance with Trotsky. This, it should be noted, was at the time of an all-out offensive against Stalin, during which, Trotsky explains in his memoirs, “In the Autumn the Opposition even made an open sortie at the meeting of Party locals.”[70] At the time the “New Opposition” group led by Zinoviev and Kamenev aligned with Trotsky to form the “United Opposition.” Trotsky also stated in his memoirs that Zinoviev and Kamenev, despite being ideologically at odds with Stalin, tried to retain their influence within the party, Trotsky having been outvoted by the Bolshevik Party membership which had in a general referendum voted 740,000 to 4,000 to repudiate him:
Zinoviev and Kamenev soon found themselves in hostile opposition to Stalin; when they tried to transfer the dispute from the trio to the Central Committee, they discovered that Stalin had a solid majority there. They accepted the basic principles of our platform. In such circumstances, it was impossible not to form a bloc with them, especially since thousands of revolutionary Leningrad workers were behind them.[71]
It seems disingenuous that Trotsky could subsequently claim that there could not have been a further alliance with Zinoviev and Kamenev, given that alliances were constantly changing, and that these old Bolshevik idealists seem to have been thoroughgoing careerists and opportunists willing to embrace any alliance that would further their positions. Trotsky cited the report of the party Central Committee of the July 1926 meeting at which Zinoviev confessed his “two most important mistakes;” that of having opposed the October 1917 Revolution, and that of aligning with Stalin in forming the “bureaucratic-apparatus of oppression.” Zinoviev added that Trotsky had “warned with justice of the dangers of the deviation from the proletarian line and of the menacing growth of the apparatus regime. Yes, in the question of the bureaucratic-apparatus oppression, Trotsky was right against us.”[72]
During 1927 the alliance between Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev had fallen apart as Zinoviev and Kamenev again sought to flow with the tide. The break with Trotsky came just a few weeks before Trotsky’s expulsion from the Party, as the “Zinoviev group” wanted to avoid expulsion. However all the oppositionists were expelled from the party at the next Congress. Six months after their expulsion and exile to Siberia, Kamenev and Zinoviev reversed their position again, and they were readmitted to the party.
During 1927 Trotsky states that many young revolutionaries came to him eager to oppose Stalin for his having betrayed the Chinese Communists by insisting they subordinate themselves to Chiang Kai-shek. Trotsky claimed: “Hundreds and thousands of revolutionaries of the new generation were grouped about us… at present there are thousands of such young revolutionaries who are augmenting their political experience by studying theory in the prisons and the exile of the Stalin regime.”[73] With this backing the opposition launched its offensive against the Party:
The leading group of the opposition faced this finale with its eyes wide open. We realized only too clearly that we could make our ideas the common property of the new generation not by diplomacy and evasions but only by an open struggle which shirked none of the practical consequences. We went to meet the inevitable debacle, confident, however, that we were paving the way for the triumph of our ideas in a more distant future.[74]
Trotsky then referred to “illegal means” as the only method by which to force the opposition onto the Party at the Fifteenth Congress at the end of 1927. From Trotsky’s description of the tumultuous events during 1927 it seems clear that this was a revolutionary situation that the opposition was trying to create that would overthrow the regime just as the October 1917 coup had overthrown Kerensky:
Secret meetings were held in various parts of Moscow and Leningrad, attended by workers and students of both sexes…. In all, about 20,000 people attended such meetings in Moscow and Leningrad. The number was growing. The opposition cleverly prepared a huge meeting in the hall of the High Technical School, which had been occupied from within. The hall was crammed with two thousand people, while a huge crowd remained outside in the street. The attempts of the administration to stop the meeting proved ineffectual. Kamenev and I spoke for about two hours. Finally the Central Committee issued an appeal to the workers to break up the meetings of the opposition by force. This appeal was merely a screen for carefully prepared attacks on the opposition by military units under the guidance of the GPU. Stalin wanted a bloody settlement of the conflict. We gave the signal for a temporary discontinuance of the large meetings. But this was not until after the demonstration of November 7.[75]
In October 1927, the Central Executive Committee held its session in Leningrad, and a mass official demonstration was staged in honour of the event. Trotsky recorded that the demonstration was taken over by Zinoviev and himself and their followers by the thousands, with support from sections of the military and police. This was shortly followed by a similar event in Moscow commemorating the October 1917 Revolution, during which the opposition infiltrated the parades. A similar attempt at a parade in Leningrad resulted in the detention of Zinoviev and Radek, but Zinoviev wrote optimistically to Trotsky that this would play into their hands. However, at the last moment, the Zinoviev group backed down in order to try and avoid expulsion from the party at the Fifteenth Congress.[76] However Trotsky admitted to having conversations with Zinoviev and Kamenev at a joint meeting at the end of 1927. Trotsky then stated that he had a final communication from Zinoviev on November 7 1927 in which Zinoviev closes: “I admit entirely that Stalin will tomorrow circulate the most venomous “versions.” We are taking steps to inform the public. Do the same. Warm greetings, Yours, G. ZINOVIEV.”[77]
As stated by Goldman, Trotsky’s counsel at Mexico, the letter was addressed to Kamenev, Trotsky, and Y P Smilga. Trotsky explained that, “Smilga is an old member of the Party, a member of the Central Committee of the Party and a member of the Opposition, of the center of the Opposition at that time.” The following questioning then took place:
Stolberg: What do you mean by the center of the Opposition? The executive committee?
Trotsky: It was an executive committee, yes, the same as a central committee.
Goldman: Of the leading comrades of the Left Opposition?
Trotsky: Yes.’[78]
Trotsky stated that thereafter he had “absolute hostility and total contempt” for those who “capitulated,” and that he wrote many articles denouncing Zinoviev and Kamenev. Goldman read from a statement by prosecutor Vyshinsky at the January 28 session of the 1937 Moscow trial:
The Trotskyites went underground, they donned the mask of repentance and pretended that they had disarmed. Obeying the instruction of Trotsky. Pyatakov and the other leaders of this gang of criminals, pursuing a policy of duplicity, camouflaging themselves, they again penetrated into the Party, again penetrated into Soviet offices, here and there they even managed to creep into responsible positions of the state, concealing for a time, as has now been established beyond a shadow of doubt, their old Trotskyite, anti-Soviet wares in their secret apartments, together with arms, codes, passwords, connections and cadres.[79]
Trotsky in reply to a question from Goldman denied any further connection with Kamenev, Zinoviev or any of the other defendants at Moscow. However, as will be considered below, Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev had formed an “anti-Stalinist bloc in June 1932,”[80] a matter only discovered after the investigations in 1935 and 1936 into the Kirov murder.
One of the features of both the first Moscow Trial of 1936 and the Dewey Commission was the allegation that defendant Holtzman, when an official for the Soviet Commissariat for Foreign Trade, had met Trotsky and his son Leon Sedov, at the Hotel Britsol in Copenhagen in 1932. It is a matter that remains the focus of critique and ridicule of the Moscow Trials. For example one Trotskyite article triumphantly declares: “Unbeknown to the prosecutors, the Hotel Bristol had been demolished in 1917! The Stalinist investigators had not done their homework.”[81] Prominent historians continue to cite the supposed non-existence of the Hotel Bristol when Trotsky and his son were supposed to be conspiring with Holtzman, as a primary example of the crass nature of the Stalinist allegations. While Trotsky confirmed that he was in Copenhagen at the time of the alleged meeting, the Dewey Commission accepted statements that the Hotel Bristol had burned down in 1917 and had never reopened. The claim had first been made by the Danish newspaper Social-Demokraten shortly after the death sentences of the 1936 trial had been carried out.[82] In response Arbejderbladet, the organ of the Danish Communist Party, pointed out that in 1932 the Grand Hotel was connected by an interior doorway to the café Konditori Bristol. Moreover both the hotel and the café were owned by a husband and wife team. Arbejderbladet editor Martin Nielsen contended that a foreigner not familiar with the area would assume that he was at the Hotel Bristol.
However these factors were ignored by the Dewey Commission, and still are ingored. Instead the Commission accepted a falsely sworn affidavit by Esther and B J Field, Trotskyites, who claimed that the Bistol café was two doors away from the Grand Hotel and that there was a clear distinction between the two enterprises. Goldman, Trotsky’s lawyer, had stated at the fifth session of the hearings in Mexico that despite the statements that Holtzman was forced to make at the 1936 Moscow trial that he had met Trotsky at the Hotel Bristol, and was “put up” there, “…immediately after the trial and during the trial, when the statement, which the Commissioners can check up on, was made by him, a report came from the Social-Democratic press in Denmark that there was no such hotel as the Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen; that there was at one time a hotel by the name of Hotel Bristol, but that was burned down in 1917…”
Goldman sought to repudiate a claim by the publication Soviet Russia Today that stated that the Bristol café is not next to the Grand Hotel, and used the Field affidavit for the purpose, and that there was no entrance connecting the two, the Fields stating,
As a matter of fact, we bought some candy once at the Konditori Bristol, and we can state definitely that it had no vestibule, lobby, or lounge in common with the Grand Hotel or any hotel, and it could not have been mistaken for a hotel in any way, and entrance to the hotel could not be obtained through it.[83]
The question of the Bristol Hotel was again raised the following day, at the 6th session of the Dewey hearings. Such was – and is – the importance attached to this in repudiating the Stalinist allegations as clumsy. In 2008 Sven-Eric Holström undertook some rudimentary enquiries into the matter. Consulting the 1933 street and telephone directories for Copenhagen he found that – the Field’s affidavit notwithstanding - the Grand Hotel and the Bristol café were located at the same address.[84] Furthermore, photographs of the period show that the street entrance to the hotel and the café were the same and the only signage from the outside states “Bristol.”[85] Again, contrary to the Field affidavit, diagrams of the building show that there was a lobby and internal entrance connecting the hotel and the café. Anyone walking off the street into the hotel would assume, on the basis of the signage and the common entrance that he had walked into a hotel called “Hotel Bristol.” Getty states that Trotsky’s papers archived at Harvard show that Holtzman, a “former” Trotskyite, had met Sedov in Berlin in 1932 “and gave him a proposal from veteran Trotskyist Ivan Smirnov and other left oppositionists in the USSR for the formation of a united opposition bloc,”[86] although Trotsky stated at the Dewey hearings on questioning by Goldman that he had never had any “direct or indirect communication” with Holtzman.
If the statements of Trotsky at to the Dewey Commission and his statements in My Life are considered in the context of the allegations presented by Vyshinsky at Moscow, a number of conclusions might be suggested:
- From 1925 there was a Trotsky-Zinoviev-Kamenev bloc, or an “Opposition center,” which Trotsky states had an “executive committee; which functioned as an alternative party ‘central committee.’”
- Although Zinoviev and Kamenev were aligned for a time with Stalin in a troika, they repudiated this in favour of a counter-revolutionary alliance with Trotsky, and spoke at mass demonstrations, along with others such as Radek.
- Trotsky subsequently condemned Kamenev, Zinoviev et al as “contemptible” for “capitulating,” but Zinoviev, on Trotsky’s own account, was writing to him in November 1928 and warning of what he expected to be Stalin’s attacks.
- Was the vehemence with which Trotsky attacked Kamenev, Zinoviev and other Moscow defendants a mere ruse to throw off suspicion in regard to a united Opposition bloc, which, according to Rogovin,[87] had been formalized as an “anti-Stalinist bloc” in 1932?
- On Trotsky’s own account he and Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek, et al had been at the forefront of a vast counter-revolutionary organization that was of sufficient strength to organize mass disruptions of official events in Moscow and Leningrad, which also had support among military and police personnel.
From his exile in Siberia in 1928, Trotsky on his own account, despite the ever-watchful eye of the GPU, made his home the center of opposition activities.[88] Trotsky had been treated leniently in Siberian exile, and was asked to refrain from opposition activities, but responded with a defiant letter to the All-Union Communist Party and to the Executive Committee of the Communist International, in which he referred to Stalin’s “narrow faction.” He refused to renounce what he called, “the struggle for the interests of the international proletariat...” In the letter to the Politburo dated 15 March 1933, Trotsky warned in grandiose manner:
I consider it my duty to make one more attempt to appeal to the sense of responsibility of those who presently lead the Soviet state. You know conditions better than I. If the internal development proceeds further on its present course, catastrophe is inevitable.[89]
As a means of saving the Soviet Union from self-destruction Trotsky advocated that the Left Opposition be accepted back into the Bolshevik party as an independent political tendency that would co-exist with all other factions, while not repudiating its own programme:[90]
Only from open and honest cooperation between the historically produced fractions, fully transforming them into tendencies in the party and eventually dissolving into it, can concrete conditions restore confidence in the leadership and resurrect the party.[91]
With the failure of the Politburo to reply to Trotsky’s ultimatum, he published both the letter and a statement entitled “An Explanation.”[92] Trotsky then cited his “declaration” in reply to the “ultimatum” he had received to forego oppositionist activities, to the Sixth Party Congress from his remote exile in Alma Ata. In this “declaration” he stated what could also be interpreted as revolutionary opposition to the regime, insofar as he considered that the USSR under Stalin had become a bureaucratic state composed of a “depraved officialdom” that was working for “class interests hostile to the proletariat”:
To demand from a revolutionary such a renunciation (of political activity, i.e., in the service of the party and the international revolution) would be possible only for a completely depraved officialdom. Only contemptible renegades would be capable of giving such a promise. I cannot alter anything in these words ... To everyone, his due. You wish to continue carrying out policies inspired by class forces hostile to the proletariat. We know our duty and we will do it to the end.[93]
The lack of reply from the Politburo in regard to Trotsky’s ultimatum to accept him back into the Government resulted in Trotsky’s final break with the Third International and the creation of the Fourth International in rivalry with the Stalinist parties throughout the world. Trotsky declared that the Bolshevik party and those parties following the Stalinist line, as well as the Comintern now only served an “uncontrolled bureaucracy.”[94] That his aims were something other than mass education and the acceptance of a “tendency” within the Bolshevik party became clearer in 1933 when he wrote that, “No normal ‘constitutional’ ways remain to remove the ruling clique. The bureaucracy can be compelled to yield power into the hands of the proletariat only by force.”[95] What he was advocating was a palace coup that would remove Stalin with minimal disruption. This meant not “an armed insurrection against the dictatorship of the proletariat but the removal of a malignant growth upon it…” These would not be “measures of a civil war but rather the measures of a police character.”[96] The intent was unequivocal, and it appears disingenuous for Trotsky and his apologists to the present day to insist that nothing was meant other than for Trotskyism to be accepted as a “tendency” within the Bolshevik party that could debate the issues in parliamentary fashion.
If Trotsky was less than honest with the fawning Dewey Commission, the farcical “cross examination” by the Commission’s counsel was not going to expose it. Heaven forbid that Trotsky could lie to serve his own cause, and that he could be anything but a saintly figure. Certainly a less than deferential attitude toward Trotsky by Beals was sufficient to set the one objective commissioner at loggerhead with the others. Of the lie as a political weapon, Trotsky was explicit. Trotsky had written in 1938, the very year of the third Moscow Trial, an article chastising a grouplet of German Marxists for adhering to “bourgeoisie” notions of morality such as truthfulness. He stated, “that morality is a product of social development; that there is nothing invariable about it; that it serves social interests; that these interests are contradictory; that morality more than any other form of ideology has a class character.”[97]
Norms “obligatory upon all” become the less forceful the sharper the character assumed by the class struggle. The highest pitch of the class struggle is civil war which explodes into mid-air all moral ties between the hostile classes. … This vacuity in the norms obligatory upon all arises from the fact that in all decisive questions people feel their class membership considerably more profoundly and more directly than their membership in “society”. The norms of “obligatory” morality are in reality charged with class, that is, antagonistic content. … Nevertheless, lying and violence “in themselves” warrant condemnation? Of course, even as does the class society which generates them. A society without social contradictions will naturally be a society without lies and violence. However there is no way of building a bridge to that society save by revolutionary, that is, violent means. The revolution itself is a product of class society and of necessity bears its traits. From the point of view of “eternal truths’ revolution is of course “anti-moral.” … It remains to be added that the very conception of truth and lie was born of social contradictions.[98]
Given the lengthy ideological discourse on the value of the lie and the relativity of morality, it is absurd to rely on any statement Trotsky and his followers make about anything. He lied and obfuscated to the Dewey Commission in the knowledge that he was among friends.
Kirov's Murder
The year after Trotsky’s ultimatum to the Politburo (1934) the popular functionary Kirov was murdered. Trotsky’s view of Kirov was not sympathetic, calling him a “rude satrap [whose killing] does not call forth any sympathy.”[99] The consensus now seems to be that Stalin arranged for the murder of Kirov to blame the opposition as justification for launching a murderous purge against his rivals. For example Robert Conquest states that Kirov was a moderate and a popular rival to Stalin, whose murder was both a means of eliminating a rival and of launching a purge.[100] Not only Trotskyites and eminent historians such as Conquest share this view, but also it was implied by Khrushchev during his 1956 “secret address” to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party.[101] After Stalin’s death several Soviet administrations undertook investigations to try and uncover definitive evidence against him.
The original source for the accusations against Stalin regarding Kirov seems to have been an anonymous “Letter of an Old Bolshevik” published in 1937.[102] It transpired that the “Old Bolshevik” was a Menshevik, Boris Nicolaevsky, who claimed that his information came from Bukharin when the latter was in Paris in 1936. In 1988 Bukharin’s widow published a book on her late husband in which she denied that any such discussions had taken place between Bukharin and Nicolaevsky, and considered the “Letter” to be a “spurious document.”[103]
In 1955 the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party commissioned P N Pospelov, the Secretary of the Central Committee, to investigate Stalinist repression. It had been the opinion of the party by this time that Stalin had been behind the murder of Kirov. Another commission of enquiry was undertaken in 1956. Neither found evidence that Stalin had a hand in the Kirov killing but the findings were not released by Khrushchev, former foreign minister Molotov remarking of the 1956 enquiry: “The commission concluded that Stalin was not implicated in Kirov’s assassination. Khrushchev refused to have the findings published since they didn’t serve his purpose.”[104] As recently as 1989 the USSR was still making efforts to implicate Stalin, and a Politburo Commission headed by A Yakovlev was set up. The two year enquiry concluded that: “In this affair no materials objectively support Stalin’s participation or NKVD participation in the organisation and carrying out of Kirov’s murder.”[105] The findings of this enquiry were not released either.
J Arch Getty writes of the circumstances of the Kirov murder that the OGPU and the NKVD had infiltrated opposition groups and there had been sufficient evidence obtained to consider that the so-called Zinovievites were engaged in dangerous underground activity. Stalin consequently regarded this group as being behind the assassin, Nikolayev. Although their former followers were being rounded up, Pravda announced on December 23, 1934 that there was “insufficient evidence to try Zinoviev and Kamenev for the crime.”[106] When the trial against this bloc did occur two years later it was after many interrogations, and was therefore no hasty process. From the interrogations relative to the Kirov assassination Stalin found out about the continued existence of the Opposition bloc that focused partly around Zinoviev. Vadim Rogovin, a Professor at the Russian Academy of Sciences, wrote that Kamenev and Zinoviev had rejoined Trotsky and formed “the anti-Stalinist bloc in June 1932,” although Trotsky had maintained to the Dewey Commission and subsequently, that no such alliance existed and that he had nothing but contempt for Zinoviev and Kamenev. Rogovin, a Trotskyite academic having researched the Russian archives, stated:
Only after a new wave of arrests following Kirov’s assassination, after interrogations and reinterrogations of dozens of Oppositionists, did Stalin receive information about the 1932 bloc, which served as one of the main reasons for organizing the Great Purge.[107]
In 1934 Yakov Agranov, temporary head of the NKVD in Leningrad, had found connections between the assassin Nikolayev and leaders of the Leningrad Komsomol at the time of Zinoviev’s authority over the city. The most prominent was I I Kotolynov, whom Robert Conquest states “had, in fact, been a real oppositionist.”[108] Kotolynov, a “Zinovievite,” was among those of the so-called “Leningrad terrorist center” found guilty in 1934 of the death of Kirov. The investigation had been of long duration and the influence of Zinoviev’s followers had been established. However, there was considered to be insufficient evidence to charge Zinoviev and Kamenev.[109]
In 1935 other evidence came to light showing that Zinoviev and Kamenev were aware of the “terrorist sentiments” in Leningrad, which they had “inflamed.”[110] While several trials associated with the Kirov killing took place in 1935, in 1936 sufficient evidence had accrued to begin the first of the so-called “Moscow Trials,” of the “Trotsky -Zinoviev Terrorist Center,” including Trotsky and his son Sedov, who were tried in absentia. The defendant Sergei Mrachovsky testified that at the end of 1932 that a terrorist bloc was formed between the Trotskyites and the Zinovievites, stating:
That in the second half of 1932 the question was raised of the necessity of uniting the Trotskyite terrorist group with the Zinovievites. The question of this unification was raised by I N Smirnov… In the autumn of 1932 a letter was received from Trotsky in which he approved the decision to unite with the Zinovievites… Union must take place on the basis of terrorism, and Trotsky once again emphasised the necessity of killing Stalin, Voroshiloy and Kirov... The terrorist bloc of the Trotskyites and the Zinovievites was formed at the end of 1932.[111]
Despite the condemnation that such testimony has received from academia and media, this at least precisely accords with the relatively recent findings of the Trotskyite academic Prof. Rogovin, and the letter from Trotsky sent to Radek et al, in 1932, referred to by J Arch Getty. The Kirov investigations, which were a prelude to the Moscow Trials, were carefully undertaken. When there was still insufficient evidence against Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev et al, this was conceded by the party press. When testimony was obtained implicating the leaders of an opposition bloc, this testimony has transpired to have conformed to what has come to light quite recently in both the Kremlin archives and the Trotsky papers at Harvard.
Rogovin’s Findings
The reality of the Opposition bloc in relation to the Moscow Trials was the theme of a lecture by Prof. Rogovin at Melbourne University in 1996. The motive of Rogovin was to present Trotskyism as having been an effective opposition within Stalinist Russia, and therefore he departs from the usual Trotskyite attitude of denial, stating:
. . . This myth says that virtually the entire population of the Soviet Union was reduced to a stunned silence by the terror, and either said nothing about the repression, or blindly believed in and supported the terror. This myth also claims that the victims of the repression were completely innocent of any crimes, including opposition to Stalin. They were, instead, victims of Stalin’s excessive paranoia. Since there was no serious opposition to the regime of Stalin, according to this myth, the victims were not guilty of such opposition.[112]
Rogovin alludes to anti-Stalinist leaflets that were being widely distributed in the USSR as late as 1938, calling for a “struggle against Stalin and his clique.” Rogovin also however states that there was much more to the opposition than isolated incidents of leaflet distribution:
Of course these are isolated incidents, but prior to the unleashing of the Great Terror there was a much more widespread, more serious, and well-organised opposition to Stalinism as a regime which had veered ever more widely away from the ideals of socialism.
This battle against Stalin began back in 1923 with the formation of the Left Opposition. The inner party struggle unfolded in ever sharper form throughout the 20s.
Thousands and thousands of communists took part in this opposition, openly in the early days and then, after opposition groups were banned, in illegal underground forms against the abolition of party democracy by the Stalinist party clique.
In 1932 the Opposition coalesced, “the old opposition groups” became more active, and “were joined by layers of newly-formed opposition groups.” Many representatives of the opposition groups that year began to discuss ways of uniting into an “anti-Stalinist bloc.” Rogovin states that the year previously Ivan Smirnov, one of the former leaders of the Left Opposition who had capitulated then returned to the opposition, went on an official trip to Berlin where he established contact with Trotsky’s son, Leon Sedov and discussed the need to “coordinate efforts between Trotsky and his son . . . .” What Rogovin states is in agreement with the supposedly forced confessions of the defendants at the Moscow Trials. J Arch Getty had also found similar material in the Trotsky Papers at Harvard, as previously referred to.
Rogovin states that it was only in 1935 and 1936, having assessed the information garnered from the Kirov investigation in 1934, that the secret police were able to find conclusive evidence on the existence of an anti-Stalinist bloc since 1932. “This was one of the main factors which drove Stalin to unleash the Great Terror,” states Rogovin, who also affirms the basis of the Stalinist accusations that “they did try to establish contact among themselves and fight for the overthrow of Stalin’s clique.”
Rogovin’s statements cannot be lightly dismissed. He was speaking as a sympathiser of Trotskyism, who had access to the Soviet archives in the writing of a six volume series on the political conflicts within the Communist Party SU and the Communist International between 1922 and 1940, of which Stalin’s Great Terror is volume four. On his sixtieth birthday in 1997, Rogovin received tribute from Trotskyite luminaries from Germany, Britain and the USA.[113]
Moscow Trials and the Comintern Pact
These events occurred at a time when the USSR was being encircled by hostile powers. War seemed inevitable, and the opposition bloc was of a type that any state in times of conflict could not afford to tolerate. The Anti-Comintern Pact was signed in 1936 between imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, forming an alliance of aggressive intent specifically aimed at the Soviet Union. While German expansion was ideologically based on annexing Russian territories,[114] the Moscow Trials and accusations against the Opposition bloc of complicity with foreign powers were taking place at a time when there was a likelihood of Japan also directing her expansion towards the USSR. The Japanese attacked the USSR in July 1938 and were halted at the Battle of Lake Khasan,[115] and although defeated, then moved in May 1939 into Mongolia up to the Khalkin Gol River.[116] The decisive victory of Russia here was enough to persuade the Japanese only then to re-direct their expansion into China and the Pacific.
From 1936, with the possibility of a two front war from expansionist powers which had joined in an overtly aggressive alliance, a more tolerant attitude by the Soviet regime against those who were advocating defeatism and discord, albeit couched in dialectical semantics about “defence of the degenerated workers’ state,” seems unrealistic, and was not even expected from the Western democracies in wartime, which went as far as classifying segments of their own populations as “enemy aliens” and interning them.[117]
Trotsky hoped that war would undermine the Stalinist regime and lead to a coup, just as World War I had produced a revolutionary situation. It is therefore disingenuous for Trotsky to insist that he was leading a “loyal opposition” that would defend a “degenerated workers’ state.” Trotsky had adopted a similar position in regard to World War I, contrary to the line insisted upon by Lenin,[118] in stating that he would support Russia’s continuation of the war against Germany, which made him the focus of British efforts via R H Bruce Lockhart, special agent to the British War Cabinet, to secure his support.[119] As Trotsky’s duplicity during World War I, and his close association with British Intelligence via R H Bruce Lockhart shows, Stalinist accusations of Trotskyite association with “foreign powers” was at least based on hard experience. Trotsky had shown himself willing to work with British intelligence during World War I in order to secure his own position to the point of defying Lenin.
Another important Moscow defendant, Karl Radek, had previously been an avid promoter of dialogue with the German extreme Right. Given that he was the living stereotype of an anti-Semitic caricature of what a “Jewish Bolshevik” was portrayed as being, there is nothing outlandish about the Stalinist allegation of oppositionists seeking alliances with Japan and Germany. Trotsky had been openly stating that a fascist war against the USSR would provide the revolutionary situation that would enable a coup against the Stalinist regime. Radek had eulogised before the Executive Committee of the Comintern in 1923, the “German Fascist” Schlageter, who had been executed by the French because of his resistance to the Ruhr occupation. Radek’s Bolshevik pitch was for an alliance with German “Fascism”: “We shall do all in our power to make men like Schlageter, who are prepared to go to their deaths for a common cause, not wanderers into the void, but wanderers into a better future for the whole of mankind…”[120] Given the situation confronting the Soviet Russia, form Japan and Germany, Stalin could not be complacent given the past actions of Radek, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and the intrigues of Smirnov and Holtzman et al.
While Trotsky claimed that in the event of war he was advocating the “defence of the degenerated workers’ state” on account of its nationalized economy, from the viewpoint of the Soviet regime, the Soviet Union could ill afford dissent and anti-state propaganda in the midst of war. Trotsky, despite his outrage at the allegation that he could play any part in assisting fascist or capitalist powers to invade the Soviet Union, nonetheless advocated a strategy that was to take advantage of the war to propagandise and subvert the Soviet Union to foment a revolutionary situation even among the armed forces, as the Bolsheviks had done during World War I:
We do not change our orientation. But suppose that Hitler turns his weapons to the East and invades the territories occupied by the Red Army ...? The Bolshevik-Leninists will combat Hitler, weapons in hand, but at the same time they will undertake a revolutionary propaganda against Stalin in order to prepare his overthrow at the next stage...[121]
With an attitude of the character openly stated by Trotsky, how tolerant was Stalin expected to be, in the face of extreme provocation at the time of immense internal and external problems? As will be shown below, when Trotsky was in authority, he did not possess any degree of toleration towards rivals and threats, both real and imagined, and did not flinch from having someone killed if it served his own agenda. Trotsky continued to call for a “revolutionary uprising” that implies something more than ‘educating the masses,” using class struggle phraseology to identify Stalin’s bureaucracy as a “class enemy”:
The Fourth International long ago recognized the necessity of overthrowing the bureaucracy by means of a revolutionary uprising of the toilers. Nothing else is proposed or can be proposed by those who proclaim the bureaucracy to be an exploiting “class.” The goal to be attained by the overthrow of the bureaucracy is the reestablishment of the rule of the Soviets, expelling from them the present bureaucracy . . . [122]
This was the nature of Trotsky’s continual call for the overthrow of the Soviet state as it was then constituted. Trotsky explained his position unequivocally in stating what he meant by ‘defending the Soviet state”:
This kind of “defense of the USSR” will naturally differ, as heaven does from earth, from the official defense which is now being conducted under the slogan: “For the Fatherland! For Stalin!” Our defense of the USSR is carried on under the slogan: “For Socialism! For the world revolution! Against Stalin!”[123]
How far could it be expected that Stalin should tolerate subversion and calls for the overthrow of his regime in the event of war with Japan and/or Germany? It is not a matter that was extended even to pacifists by the Western democracies during World War II, even in countries such as New Zealand who were relatively far form the war theatres. Additionally, the Western democracies did not even grant those confined for their pacifism the benefit of any legal proceedings; in contrast to the Moscow defendants, who were given full and public legal procedures according to the system of justice they had helped to create.
Moscow Trials in Accord with Soviet System
If the Trotskyites and their liberal and social democratic allies, as well as historians generally, regard the Moscow Trials as a modern-day “witch hunt,” it was one that proceeded in accordance with the system that Trotsky and the other defendants had fought to implement. The real source of the outrage comes from Stalin having outmanoeuvred his rivals, many such as Zinoviev and Kamenev having been opportunists who became the victims of their own system. Trotsky when in authority was as vehement about the need to eliminate saboteurs, plotters and conspirators as Stalin. Trotsky had stated in 1918: “By suppressing the Constituent Assembly the Soviets first and foremost broke politically the backbone of the intelligentsia’s sabotage. . . .We have broken the old sabotage and cleared out most of the old officials . . . .[124]
At this early period of the Bolshevik regime Trotsky was already alluding to “counter-revolutionary” plots within his own Red Army, yet when the same situation was suggested twenty years later in regard to Trotsky et al at the Moscow Trials, Trotsky fumed that any such suggestion was a lie. When Trotsky had the power he spoke and acted in ways that he and others – including mainstream historians – would describe as “Stalinism.” Trotsky wrote of these “plots”:
Running on ahead somewhat, I must mention that certain of our own Party comrades are afraid that the Army may become an instrument or a focus for counter-revolutionary plots. This danger, in so far as there is some justification for it, must compel us as a whole to direct our attention to the lower levels, to the rank-and-file soldiers of the Red Army. Here we can and must create a foundation such that any attempt to transform the Red Army into an instrument of counter-revolution will prove fruitless . . . . [125]
Yet it was precisely a strategy of Trotsky to try and form cadres within the Red Army, in particular during the course of war with Germany, which would enable him to reassume authority through a “police action” or coup that would replace the Stalinist apparatus.
Trotsky when in a position of authority was full of dark forebodings about sabotage and counter-revolution. One of the more shameful episodes was Trotsky’s falsifying evidence and fabricating charges against the commander of the Baltic Fleet, Aleksei Shchatsny. With impending capture of Helsingfors by German and Finnish White forces, and the order from the Commissariat of Naval Affairs under Trotsky to comply with the terms of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, Shchatsny managed to get the Fleet to Kronstadt, a colossal achievement celebrated as the “Ice March of the Baltic Fleet.” Rabinowitch remarks of this: “Following this feat … He was now a popular hero, revered by the rank-and-file sailors as much as by his officers.”[126] However, the German threat to Kronstadt, Petrograd and the Baltic Fleet remained.[127] As German forces approached, there was a widespread belief that the Soviet authorities were complying with German demands and that Petrograd would be occupied. For the Soviet authorities in Moscow under Lenin and Trotsky the defence of Petrograd and of the Baltic Fleet were of secondary concern. [128]
Trotsky and Shchatsny were in conflict over Trotsky’s orders to scuttle the Baltic Fleet and demolish Fort Ino, “should the situation appear hopeless.” Shchatsny circulated Trotsky’s secret orders regarding the scuttling of the Fleet,[129] which put Trotsky in a poor light publicly. Trotsky protested indignantly at Shchatny’s trial, which he had instigated as a show trial against the acclaimed hero:
When, soon afterward, I received from Shchastny, who was at Kronstadt, a report that Fort Ino was, allegedly, threatened by a suddenly approaching German fleet, I replied, in conformity with my general directive, that, if the situation thus created became hopeless, the fort must be blown up. What did Shchastny do? He passed on this conditional directive in the form of a direct order from me for blowing up the fort, although there was no need for this to be done.[130]
Rabinowitch writes:
Information in Cheka and Naval archives indicates that Shchatsny was largely or wholly blameless in these matters, most importantly that he himself had prepared the fleet for demolition in the event of necessity and that his dissemination of Trotsky’s orders was less an effort to undermine Trotsky than a reflection of his close collaboration with the Baltic Fleet officer and sailor committees.[131]
Shchatsny submitted his resignation, but Trotsky refused it, ordered him to Moscow and,
set him up for arrest, and single-handedly organized an investigation, sham trial and death sentence on the spurious charge of attempting to overthrow the Petrograd Commune with the longer-term goal of overthrowing the Soviet republic.[132]
Trotsky condemned Shchatsny with allegations of “sowing panic,” “conspiracy,” having a “saviour” complex, and seeking power for himself:
Shchastny persistently and steadily deepened the gulf between the fleet and the Soviet power. Sowing panic, he steadily promoted his candidature for the role of savior. The vanguard of the conspiracy – the officers of the destroyer division – openly raised the slogan of a “dictatorship of the Baltic fleet.”
This was a definite political game – a great game, the goal of which was the seizure of power. When Messrs. Admirals and Generals start, during a revolution, to play their own personal political game, they must always be prepared to take responsibility for this game, if it should miscarry. Admiral Shchastny’s game has miscarried.[133]
Given the nature of Trotsky’s own agitation against the Stalinist regime, which includes a time when aggressive anti-Soviet powers were on the rise, a less deferential Dewey Commission might have asked of Trotsky, should he not “take responsibility for this game, if it should miscarry?” Trotsky in his own words had stated that his aim was the “seizure of power” through a palace coup, by infiltrating the police and armed forces. He had devoted years to agitating for the overthrow of the Soviet regime and creating a revolutionary organization for that purpose. Yet when faced with charges of the type that he had once trumped up against Shchastny in order to save have own position, Trotsky feigned great moral outage on the world stage, an outrage which extended beyond his own life and has had a permanent influence on the way much of the world perceives Russia, not only after the death of Stalin, but even after the demise of the USSR. Additionally, it appears that Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek, Bukharin, and the others had a fairer and more judicial hearing than that received by Shchastny; or the many summarily executed during the years when Trotsky had authority in the Soviet state.
What can also be said about the Moscow Trials was that the confessions of the defendants, which are generally criticized and ridiculed as being delivered by rote as if the product of intense brainwashing and even torture, were also completely in accord with Bolshevik methodology. The character of these confessions was not unique to the Stalinist regime, and was an innate part of the Bolshevik mentality. To admit guilt even in the most abject manner not only before the tribunal of the Soviets but before what many of the defendants regarded as the tribunal of history did not require torture or brainwashing. Of these abject confessions for example, during the 1936 trial Kamenev, stated:
For ten years, if not more, I waged a struggle against the Party, against the government of the land of Soviets, and against Stalin personally. In this struggle, it seems to me, I utilized every weapon in the political arsenal known to me - open political discussion, attempts to penetrate into factories and works, illegal leaflets, secret printing presses, deception of the Party, the organization of street demonstrations, conspiracy and, finally, terrorism.[134]
Zinoviev stated:
We entered into an alliance with Trotsky. We filled the place of the Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries and white guards who could not come out openly in our country. We took the place of the terrorism of the Socialist-Revolutionaries. Not the pre-revolutionary terrorism which was directed against the autocracy, but the Right Socialist Revolutionaries’ terrorism of the period of the Civil War, when the S-R’s shot at Lenin. My defective Bolshevism became transformed into anti-Bolshevism, and through Trotskyism I arrived at fascism. Trotskyism is a variety of fascism, and Zinovievism is a variety of Trotskyism.[135]
If these confessions are looked at on their own merits, there is nothing outlandish about them. Rogovin has shown that there was such an Opposition bloc, that there were illegal printing presses operative; and Trotsky himself records the extent of the opposition, in alliance with Zinoviev and Kamenev, to the extent that they were able to mobilize thousands to disrupt the official October parades. While the Bolsheviks, whether Leninists or Stalinists or Trotskyites were, and are, rather loose with the smear-word “fascism” that is levelled at their opponents, “through Trotskyism” many did arrive at what was called in the USSR “fascism,” or more accurately avid support for US foreign policy during and after the Cold War, to the present time; to the point of Trotsky’s widow, Natalya Sedova, supporting the USA in Korea; and the entire Shachtmanite movement metamorphosing into anti-Sovietism and eventually the “neo-con” movement. The Stalinist analysis was in principle correct and prescient. History shows that the Stalinists saw in Trotskyism a movement that would end up being aligned with the most anti-Soviet elements, and there is nothing bizarre about the suspicion that Trotskyites and other oppositionists would seek alliance with actual “fascist” powers at a time when those powers were looking at for lebensraum. In the historical circumstances it would have been foolish for Stalin to ignore these trends, and to given them a tolerance that was not even accorded to “Christian pacifists” during World War II by the Western democracies, including those that were not in danger of invasion.
The abject natures of the defendants’ final pleas before the Court are comprehensible if we examine the Bolshevik method of self-criticism. They are prompted by an intense sense of self-guilt or shame regarding recognition of their own invidiousness when confronted with facts. Such abjectivity is not unheard of by murderers and others in the West in the present day. This could be called “The Judas Syndrome,” in regard to the legend of Judas having hanged himself in remorse for his betrayal of Christ.[136] Since 1929 the Soviet Union had embarked on a method known as Sama Kritica (“self-criticism”), which has its equivalent in the West known by such terms as “group therapy,” “sensitivity training” or “group encounters,” that became popular since the 1960s among corporations and government departments, in the USA especially, and has been promoted as therapeutic by “humanistic psychology.”[137] In the USSR in 1929 the slogan first appeared: “through Bolshevist self-criticism we will enforce the dictatorship of the proletariat.”[138] The population was divided into “collectives” of ten to twenty, who held meetings set in a circle where participants face one another, and each would undertake self-criticism and the confession of faults. However ‘self-criticism” was part of the Soviet system which was endorsed by Trotsky himself when he was in a position of authority, when he stated: “Without any doubt we are passing through a period of internal confusion, of great difficulty, and, what is most important, of self-criticism, which, let us hope, will lead to an inner cleansing and a new upsurge of the revolutionary movement.”[139] The abject nature of the confessions and final pleas of the Moscow defendants is hence not reliant on alleged threats, promises, torture or brainwashing. Trotsky was an advocate of “Marxist self-criticism” as early as 1904, at a time when he was closer to the Mensheviks. Robert Services comments on this: “outraging many Mensheviks he called for ‘Marxist self-criticism’ instead of ‘orthodox self-satisfaction.’”[140]
Stalin addressed the matter of “self-criticism” as a key Bolshevik mechanism eight years before the Moscow Trials. Writing in Pravda Stalin stated: “…As to self-criticism in our Party, its beginnings date back to the first appearance of Bolshevism in our country, to its very inception as a specific revolutionary trend in the working-class movement.”[141] Stalin also alluded to self-criticism appearing as a mechanism in 1904 in the Social Democratic party, quoting Lenin as stating, “self-criticism and ruthless exposure of its own shortcomings”[142] was a party method.
Indeed, as previously cited herein, Zinoviev had before the party Central Committee in July 1926, indulged in self-criticism, when he confessed that he had been wrong to have opposed Lenin and the Bolshevik coup in 1917 and to have opposed Trotsky, whose critique of the regime was correct. Hence, there was nothing new about the character of Zinoviev’s abjectivity at the Moscow Trial. He was a Judas who had been publicly exposed, like other defendants. Khrushchev’s “secret speech” to the Congress of the Communist Party in 1956, was a large-ranging example of “self-criticism.”[143]
Conclusion
The Moscow “Show Trials” operated within a system that had been created by those who became its victims. Within context they were therefore perfectly legitimate. The trials were undertaken during a time when aggressive powers had formed an alliance specifically aimed at the Soviet Union, against a background of intrigue long in the making by the defendants; in particular Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev.
While it is disingenuous for Trotsky and his sympathisers to have the Moscow Trials viewed according to Western legal principles when they did not themselves subscribe to those principles, just as inadequate are the Western historians and writers who neglect to consider the historical background against which they were taking place.
There was indeed an Opposition bloc that was working to overthrow Stalin, and given the times and circumstances Stalin could ill afford to adopt a more “liberal” attitude when even the Western democracies later interned their dissidents during World War II as potential “fifth columnists,” including conscientious objectors, on the scantiest evidence at best.
With the prospect of a revived Russian super-power the spectre of Stalin is again being evoked by Western news media, politicians and academics, as are comparisons between the Moscow Trials and the present Russian trials of “dissident” oligarchs who are heralded in the West as the heirs to the like of Bukharin and as victims of a renascent Stalinism.
Notes:
[1] One of Trotsky’s publishers was Secker & Warburg, London, which published the Dewey Commission’s report, The Case of Leon Trotsky, in 1937. The proprietor, Fredric Warburg, was to become head of the British section of the CIA-sponsored, Cold War-era Congress for Cultural Freedom. (Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War : The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: The New Press, 2000), p. 111.
Trotsky’s Where is Britain going? was published in 1926 by George Allen & Unwin. His autobiography, My Life, was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1930. Stalin: an appraisal of the man and his influence, was published posthumously in 1946 by Harpers.
[2] The most salient example being the hagiographies by Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed (1954), and The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky 1921-1929 (1959), and The Prophet Outcast (Oxford University Press, 1963).
[3] K R Bolton, “Origins of the Cold War: How Stalin Foiled a New World Order,” Foreign Policy Journal, March 31, 2010,www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/origins-of-the-cold-war-how-stalin-foild-a-new-world-order/
Russian translation: “Origins of the Cold War,” Red Star, Russian Ministry of Defense, http://www.redstar.ru/2010/09/01_09/6_01.html
[4] K R Bolton, “Mikhail Gorbachev: Globalist Super-Star,” Foreign Policy Journal, April 3, 2011, http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2011/04/03/
mikhail-gorbachev-globalist-super-star/
Russian translation: “Mikhail Gorbachev: Globalist Super-Star,” Perevodika, http://perevodika.ru/articles/18345.html
[5] Tony Halpin, “Vladimir Putin Praises Stalin for Creating a Super Power and Winning the War,” The Sunday Times, London, December 4, 2009, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article6943477.ece
[6] K R Bolton, “The Globalist Web of Subversion,” The Foreign Policy Journal, February 7, 2011, http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2011/02/07/the-globalist-web-of-subversion/all/1
[7] Tony Halpin, op. cit.
[8] Armand Hammer, Witness to History (Kent: Coronet Books, 1987), p. 160. Here Hammer relates his discussion with Trotsky and how the Commissar wished to attract foreign capital. Hammer later laments that this all turned sour under Stalin.
[9] Richard B Spence, “Interrupted Journey: British intelligence and the arrest of Leon Trotsky, April 1917,” Revolutionary Russia, 13 (1), 2000, pp. 1-28.
Spence, “Hidden Agendas: Spies, Lies and Intrigue Surrounding Trotsky’s American Visit January-April 1917,” Revolutionary Russia, Vol. 21, No. 1., 2008.
[10] Peter Grosse, “Basic Assumptions,” Continuing The Inquiry: The Council on Foreign Relations from 1921 to 1996, (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 2006). The entire book can be read online at: Council on Foreign Relations: http://www.cfr.org/about/history/cfr/index.html
[11] The 1933 charges against employees of Metropolitan-Vickers, including six British engineers, accused of sabotage and espionage. M Sayers and A E Kahn, The Great Conspiracy Against Russia (London: Collett’s holdings, 1946), pp. 181-186.
[12] Brazil, Russia, India, China.
[13] K R Bolton, “Russia & China: An Approaching Conflict?,” The Journal of Social, Political & Economic Studies, Washington, Vol. 34, No. 2, Summer 2009.
[14] Center for Conservative Studies, Moscow State University, http://konservatizm.org/
[15] KR Bolton, “An ANZAC-Indo-Russian Alliance? Geopolitical Alternatives for New Zealand and Australia: Dugin’s ‘Eurasian’ Geopolitical Paradigm,” pp. 188-190, India Quarterly, Vol. 66, No. 2, 2010.
[16] Yuri Gavrilechk, “Days of anger: new era of revolutions,” International Affairs, April 1, 2011; http://en.interaffairs.ru/read.php?item=200
[17]Elena Ponomareva, “A strategy aimed at ruining Libya, International Affairs, March 21, 2011, http://en.interaffairs.ru/read.php?item=196
[18] Sergei Shashkov, “The theory of ‘manageable chaos’ put into practice,” International Affairs, March 1, 2011, http://en.interaffairs.ru/read.php?item=189
[19] George H W Bush, speech before US Congress, March 6, 1991.
[20] P Gregory, “ What Paul Gregory is writing about,” December 18, 2010, http://whatpaulgregoryisthinkingabout.blogspot.com/2010/12/stalin-putin-justice-bukharin.html
[21] Jack Kemp, et al, Russia’s Wrong Direction: What the United States Can and Should do, Independent Task Force Report no. 57(New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 2006) xi. The entire publication can be downloaded at: < http://www.cfr.org/publication/9997/>
[22] “Senator McCain on Khodorkovsky and US-Russia relations,” Free Media Online, December 18, 2010, http://www.govoritamerika.us/rus/?p=17995
[23] C Gershman, “The Fourth Wave: Where the Middle East revolts fit in the history of democratization—and how we can support them,” The New Republic, March 14, 2011. NED, http://www.ned.org/about/board/meet-our-president/archived-presentations-and-articles/the-fourth-wave
[24] “The Case of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Centre,” Heard Before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the U.S.S.R., Report of Court Proceedings, “Indictment,” Moscow, August 19-24, 1936.
[25] Sidney Hook, “Reader Letters: The Moscow Trials,” Commentary Magazine, New York, August 1984, http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-moscow-trials/
[26] Joseph E. Davies, Mission to Moscow (London: Gollancz, 1942), p. 26.
[27]. Ibid., p. 34.
[28] London Observer, August 23, 1936.
[29] Walter Duranty, “Proof of a Plot Expected,” New York Times, August 17, 1936, p. 2.
[30] Davies, op. cit., p. 35.
[31] Cited by A Vaksberg, Stalin’s Prosecutor: The Life of Andrei Vyshinsky (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991), p. 123.
[32] D N Pritt, “The Moscow Trial was Fair,” Russia Today, 1936-1937. Sloanhttp://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/
sections/britain/pamphlets/1936/moscow-trial-fair.htm
[33] Ibid.
[34] Ibid.
[35] Tomsky had committed suicide.
[36] Pritt, op. cit.
[37] Jeremy Murray-Brown, “The Moscow Trials,” Commentary, August 1984, http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-moscow-trials/
[38] Ibid.
[39] Sidney Hook, Commentary, ibid.
[40] K R Bolton, “Origins of the Cold War,” op. cit.
[41] Central Intelligence Agency, “Cultural Cold War: Origins of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1949-50,” https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/docs/v38i5a10p.htm#rft1
[42] For example, a position supported by leading US Trotskyite Max Shachtman, Shachtmanism metamorphosing into a virulent anti-Sovietism, and providing the impetus for the formation of the National Endowment for Democracy. Trotsky’s widow Natalya as early into the Cold War as 1951 wrote a letter to the Executive Committee of the Fourth International and to the US Socialist Workers Party (May 9) stating that her late husband would not have supported North Korea against the USA, and that it was Stalin who was the major obstacle to world socialism. “Out of the Shadows,” Time, June 18, 1951. “Natalya Trotsky breaks with the Fourth International,” http://www.marxists.de/trotism/sedova/english.htm
Given the many Trotskyites and Trotsky sympathizers such as Sidney Hook, who became apologists for US foreign policy against the USSR, it might be asked whether Stalin’s contention that Trotskyites would act as agents of foreign powers was prescient?
[43] George Novack, “‘Introduction,’ The Case of Leon Trotsky,” International Socialist Review, Vol. 29, No.4, July-August 1968, pp.21-26.
[44] Ibid.
[45] “Russia: Trotsky and Woe,” Time, January 11, 1937. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,757254,00.html
[46] Novack, op. cit.
[47] Descriptions by Novack.
See also: John Dewey, Jo Ann Boydston, John J McDermot, John Dewey: The Later Works, (Southern Illinois University, 2008) p. 640.
[48] Carleton Beals, “The Fewer Outsiders the Better: The Master Comes to Judgement,” Saturday Evening Post, 12 June 1937. http://www.revleft.com/vb/fewer-outsiders-better-t124508/index.html?s=37316b1a8beb93cba88ad37731a4779c&.
[49] Ibid.
[50] John Chamberlain, A Life with the Printed Word, (Chicago: Regnery, 1982), p. 65.
[51] Veteran British Trotskyite Tony Cliff laments of this phenomena: “The list of former Trotskyists who in their Stalinophobia turned into hard-line Cold War liberals is much longer.” Tony Cliff, “The Darker the Night the Brighter the Star, 1927-1940,” http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1993/trotsky4/15-ww2.html
[52] The Freeman, August 13, 1951, http://mises.org/journals/oldfreeman/Freeman51-8.pdf
La Follette served as “managing editor,” (p. 2).
[53] K R Bolton, “America’s ‘World Revolution’: Neo-Trotskyist Foundations of U.S. Foreign Policy,” Foreign Policy Journal, May 3, 2010,
http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/
2010/05/03/americas-world-revolution-neo-trotskyist-foundations-of-u-s-foreign-policy/
[54] Ibid.
[55] In 1950 Goldman declared himself to be a “right-wing socialist.” In 1952 he admitted collaborating with the FBI, and stated, “if I were younger I would gladly offer my services in Korea, or especially in Europe where I could do some good fighting the Communists.” A M Wald, The New York Intellectuals, (New York 1987), p. 287.
[56] “British Trotskyism in 1931,” Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism Online: Revolutionary History, http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backiss/vol1/no1/glotzer.html Glotzer was another of the Trotskyite veterans who became an ardent defender of the USA as the bulwark against Stalinism. He was prominent in the Social Democrats USA, whose honorary president was Sidney Hook.
[57] Gershman gave an eulogy at the “Albert Glotzer Memorial Service” in 1999. http://www.ned.org/about/board/meet-our-president/archived-presentations-and-articles/albert-glotzer-memorial-service
[58] John Dewey, Jo Ann Boydston, John J McDermot, op. cit., p. 641. Dewey is also shown here to have been in communication with American Trotskyite luminary Max Eastman.
[59] “Trotsky’s Trial,” Time, International Section, May 17, 1937.
[60] It would be a mistake nonetheless to see Time as an amiable pro-Soviet mouthpiece. Several months previously a lengthy Time article was scathing in its condemnation of the 1937 Moscow Trial and the confessions. “Old and New Bolsheviks,” Foreign News Section, Time, February 1, 1937. See also: “Russia: Lined With Despair,” Time, March 14, 1938.
[61] J Dewey, et al., The Case of Leon Trotsky: Report of Hearings on the Charges Made Against Him in the Moscow Trials by the Preliminary Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made Against Trotsky in the Moscow Trials, “Point 6: The Resignation of Carleton Beals,” 1937. http://www.marxists.org/archive/
trotsky/1937/dewey/report.htm
[62] Carleton Beals, op. cit.
[63] Ibid.
[64] J Arch Getty, “Trotsky in Exile: The Founding of the Fourth International,” Soviet Studies, Vol.38, No. 1, January 1986, pp. 24-35.
[65] Getty, ibid., Footnote 18, Trotsky Papers, 15821.
[66] As will be shown below, Prof. Rogovin, a Trotskyite who has studied the Soviet archives, quite recently sought to show that the Trotskyites were the focus of an important Opposition bloc since 1932.
[67] Beals, op. cit.
[68] Ibid.
[69] K R Bolton, personal observations and experiences with academics.
[70] Leon Trotsky, My Life (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930), Chapter 42, “The Last Period of Struggle within the Party,” http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/mylife/ch42.htm
[71] Ibid.
[72] Verbatim Report of Central Committee, IV, p.33, cited by Trotsky at the “third session” of the Dewey Commission hearings. Trotsky alludes to this, writing: “Zinoviev and Kamenev openly avowed that the ‘Trotskyists’ had been right in the struggle against them ever since 1923.” Trotsky, ibid.
[73] Ibid.
[74] Ibid.
[75] Ibid.
[76] Ibid.
[77] The Case of Leon Trotsky, “Third Session,” April 12, 1937. http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1937/dewey/session03.htm
[78] Ibid.
[79] Vyshinsky, “Verbatim Report,” p. 464, quoted by Goldman, The Case of Leon Trotsky, op. cit.
[80] Vadim Rogovin, 1937: Stalin's Year of Terror ( Mehring Books, 1998), p. 63. Note: Mehring Books is a Trotskyite publishing house.
[81] R Sewell, “The Moscow Trials” (Part I), Socialist Appeal, March 2000, http://www.trotsky.net/trotsky_year/moscow_trials.html
[82] Social-Demokraten, September 1, 1936, p. 1.
[83] The Case of Leon Trotsky, “Fifth Session, April 13, 1937, http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1937/dewey/session05.htm
[84] Sven-Eric Holström, “New Evidence Concerning the ‘Hotel Bristol Question in the Fist Moscow Trial of 1936,” Cultural Logic, 2008, 6.2, “The Copenhagen Street Directory and Telephone Directory.”
[85] Ibid., 6.3, “Photographic evidence,” Figure 7.
[86] Getty, 1986, op. cit., p. 28.
[87] See: “Kirov Assassination” below.
[88] Trotsky, My Life, op. cit., Chapter 43.
[89] Trotsky, “A Letter to the Politburo,” March 15, 1933, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1932-33) (New York: Pathfinder Press) pp. 141-2.
[90] Ibid. “Renunciation of this programme is of course out of the question.”
[91] Ibid.
[92] “An Explanation,” May 13, 1933, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1932-33), ibid., p. 235.
[93] Trotsky, “Declaration to the Sixth Party Congress,” December 16, 1926, cited in Trotsky, My Life, op. cit., Chapter 44.
[94] Trotsky, “Nuzhno stroit' zanovo kommunistcheskie partii i International,” Bulletin of the Opposition, No. 36-37, p. 21, July 15, 1933.
[95] Trotsky, ‘Klassovaya priroda sovetskogo gosudarstava’, Bulletin of the Opposition, No. 36-37, October 1, 1933, pp. 1-12. At Moscow Vyshinsky cited this article as evidence that Trotsky advocated the violent overthrow of the Soviet state. The emphasis of the word “force” is Trotsky’s.
[96] Ibid.
[97] Trotsky, “Their Morals and Ours: In Memory of Leon Sedov,” The New International, Vol. IV, no. 6, June 1938, pp. 163-173, http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/
1938/morals/morals.htm
The New International was edited by Max Shachtman, whose post-Trotskyite line laid a basis for the “neo-con” movement and support of US foreign policy during the Cold War. It was a Shachtmanite, Tom Kahn, who established the National Endowment for Democracy, which proceeds with a US version of the “world revolution.” Another New International editor was James Burnham, who became a proto-“neo-con” luminary during the Cold War. Professor Sidney Hook, one of the instigators of the Dewey Commission, and a CIA operative who was instrumental in forming the Congress for Cultural Freedom, for which he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Freedom from President Reagan, was a contributor to The New International. (December 1934, http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/
hook/1934/12/hess-marx.htm; April 1936, http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/hook/
1936/04/feuerbach.htm).
Albert Goldman, Trotsky’s lawyer at the Mexico Dewey hearings, was also a contributor.
[98] Ibid.
[99] Trotsky, “Their Morals and Ours,” op. cit.
[100] R Conquest, Stalin and the Kirov Murder (London; 1989).
[101] N S Khrushchev, “Secret Address at the Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,” February 1956; Henry M Christman (ed.) Communism in Action: a documentary history (New York: Bantam Books, 1969), pp. 176-177.
[102] “Letter of an Old Bolshevik: The Key to the Moscow Trials,” New York, 1937.
[103] Anna Larina Bukharina, Nezabyvaemoe (Moscow, 1989); This I Cannot Forget (London, 1993), p. 276.
[104] A. Resis (ed.) Molotov Remembers (Chicago: Ivan R Dee, 1993), p. 353.
[105] A. Yakovlev, ‘O dekabr'skoi tragedii 1934’, Pravda, 28th January, 1991, p. 3, “The Politics of Repression Revisited,” in J. Arch Getty and Roberta T. Manning (editors), Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives (New York, 1993), p. 46.
[106] J Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered: 1933-1938 (Cambridge; 1985), p. 48.
[107] Vadim Rogovin, 1937: Stalin's Year of Terror ( Mehring Books, 1988), p. 64.
[108] R Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties (London, 1973), p. 86.
[109] J Arch Getty, op. cit., p. 209.
[110] The Crime of the Zinoviev Opposition (Moscow, 1935), pp. 33-41.
[111] Report of Court Proceedings: The Case of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Centre (Moscow, 1936), pp. 41-42.
[112] Vadim Rogovin, “Stalin’s Great Terror: Origins and Consequences,” lecture, University of Melbourne, May 28, 1996. World Socialist Website: http://www.wsws.org/exhibits/1937/lecture1.htm
[113] http://www.wsws.org/exhibits/1937/title.htm
[114] A Hitler, Mein Kampf (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1939), Ch. 9, “Germany’s Policy in Eastern Europe,” pp. 533-541.
[115] Alvin D Coox, Nomonhan: Japan Against Russia, 1939 ( Stanford University Press, 1990), p.189.
[116] Amnon Sella, “Khalkhin-Gol: The Forgotten War,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 18, no.4, October 1983, pp. 651–87.
[117] For example, those of Italian and German descent, including even German-Jewish refugees fleeing Germany, were interned on Soames Island, in Wellington Harbour, New Zealand, as potential “enemy aliens.” Conscientious Objectors, none of whom were “fascists,” but mostly Christian pacifists, were harshly treated and interned in New Zealand, in “military defaulters’ camps.” See: W J Foote, Bread and Water: the escape and ordeal of two New Zealand World War II conscientious objectors (Wellington: Philip Garside Publishing, 2000). In Britain under Regulation 18B around 800 suspected potential “fifth columnists” and pacifists were interned without charge or trial, including many ex-servicemen, some on active duty, including some prominent figures such as Admiral Sir Barry Domvile, and Capt. A H M Ramsay, Member of Parliament, for having opposed war with Germany or for campaigning for a negotiated peace. See: Barry Domville, From Admiral to Cabin Boy (London: Boswell Publishing, 1947). The USA had its own “show trial” in 1944 called the “Sedition Trial” which took over seven months and ended in a mistrial of a disparate collection of individuals who had in some manner opposed US entry into the war. See: Lawrence Dennis and Maxmillian St George, A Trial on Trial (Washington: National Civil Rights Committee, 1945).
[118] “Calls people war weary. But Leo Trotsky says they do not want separate peace,” New York Times, March 16, 1917.
[119] Lockhart said of Trotsky, whom he was seeing on a daily basis that, “He considered that war was inevitable. If the Allies would send a promise of support, he informed me that he would sway the decision of the Government in favour of war. I sent several telegrams to London requesting an official message that would enable me to strengthen Trotsky’s hands. No message was sent.” R H Bruce Lockhart, British Agent (London: G P Putnam’s Sons, 1933), Book Four, “History From the Inside,” Chapter 3. http://www.gwpda.org/wwi-www/BritAgent/BA04a.htm .
[120] K Radek, “Leo Schlageter: The Wanderer into the Void,” Speech at a plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, June 1923.
[121] Trotsky, “The USSR in the War” (September 1939), The New International, New York, November 1939, Vol. 5, No. 11, pp. 325-332.
[122] Trotsky, “The USSR in the War: Are the Differences Political or Terminological?,” ibid.
[123] Trotsky, “The USSR in the War: We Do Not Change Our Course!”, ibid.
[124] Trotsky, The Military Writings of Leon Trotsky, “How the Revolution Armed,” Volume 1, 1918, “The Internal and External Situation of the Soviet Power in the Spring of 1918, Work, Discipline, Order;” Report to Moscow City Conference of the Russian Communist Party, March 28, 1918. http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1918/military/ch05.htm
[125] Ibid.
[126] Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power: The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd (Indiana University Press, 2007), p. 238.
[127] Ibid., p. 238.
[128] Ibid., p. 242.
[129] Ibid., p. 243.
[130] Trotsky, The Military Writings of Leon Trotsky, Vol. 1, “The First Betrayal,” http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1918/military/ch16.htm
[131] Rabinowitch, op. cit., p. 243.
[132] Ibid., p. 243.
[133] Trotsky, The Military Writings of Leon Trotsky, Vol. 1, “The First Betrayal,” op. cit.
[134] The Case of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Centre, Heard Before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the U.S.S.R., “Last Pleas of Kamenev, Zinoviev, Smirnov, Olberg, Berman-Yurin, Holtzman, N. Lurye and M. Lurye,” August 23, 1936, (morning session). http://www.marxistsfr.org/history/ussr/government/law/1936/moscow-trials/index.htm
[135] Ibid.
[136] Matthew 27: 5.
[137] This “group therapy” and “sensitivity training” in the West has been described as an “institutional procedure of both coercive and informal persuasion.” Irving R Weschler and Edgar H Schein (ed.) Issues in Training, National Training Laboratories, National Education Association, Washington DC, 1962, Series 5, p. 47. The National Training Institute provided “sensitivity classes” for hundreds of State Department employees, including ambassadors, during the 1960s.
[138] William Fairburn, Russia – The Utopia in Chains, (New York: Nation Press Printing, 1931), p. 257.
[139] Trotsky, The Military Writings of Leon Trotsky, “How the Revolution Armed, op. cit.
[140] Robert Service, Trotsky: A Biography (London: Macmillan, 2009), p. 79.
[141] J V Stalin, “Against Vulgarising the Slogan of Self-Criticism,” Pravda, No. 146, June, 1928; J V Stalin Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954), Vol. 11, p. 133.
[142] Ibid.
[143] N S Khrushchev, op. cit.
Source: Foreign Policy Journal
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lundi, 09 janvier 2012
Syrie : une possible solution politique sous égide russe ?
Syrie : une possible solution politique sous égide russe ?
Voici un très intéressant article sur une possible « solution politique » de la crise syrienne sous égide russe. C’est notre ami et quasi-collaborateur Mohamed qui a assuré la traduction de ce texte signé du journaliste Sami Kleib et paru dans le périodique libanais Assafir. L’article est long, mais vaut la peine d’être lu.
Sami Kleib, en effet, est un homme du sérail en matière d’analyse géopolitique sur le Proche-Orient : un temps figure d’al-Jazeera dont il fut non seulement un journaliste mais un producteur, Kleib a claqué, comme pas mal d’autres, la porte de la chaîne qatarie à l’été 2011, dénonçant sa dérive islamiste et fondamentaliste. Kleib est aussi un collaborateur émérite du quotidien libanais al-Safir, et a été rédacteur en chef du service arabe de Radio France International. Asssafir (ou As Safir) est un quotidien généraliste libanais, fondé en 1974.
Et donc Sami Kleib décortique le fameux projet – ou contre-projet – de résolution russe présenté en décembre. Il montre comment ce texte, dans ses différents articles, constitue une réfutation des thèses et mensonges du bloc occidental sur le dossier syrien, notamment en insistant sur la responsabilité des groupes d’opposition dans la violence. Et en continuant de faire de Bachar al-Assad l’arbitre du calenndrier politique syrien.
On comprend mieux alors, pourquoi ce texte russe a suscité – entre autres- la colère d’un Alain Juppé. Mais Kleib souligne que le Quai d’Orsay s’est quelque peu isolé, par son intransigeance et son rejet, du reste de ses partenaires occidentaux qui, Américains en tête, ont accepté de prendre le texte russe pour une base nouvelle de discussions. Un texte qui pourtant épouse les positions fondamentales du gouvernement syrien, tout en proclamant la nécessité d’un dialogue inter-syrien effectif.
Sami Kleib passe en revue ensuite les divers événements diplomatiques et politiques étant intervenus ces toutes dernières semaines et qui ont modifié l’atmosphère et les rapports de force dans le dossier syrien : et de fait on peut dire que l’unanimité anti-syrienne de la Ligue arabe a fait long feu, les alliés ayant tenu bon, et des « glissements » s’observant dans l’autre camp, peut-être jusque chez les Séoudiens, qui voudraient tenir la bride à l’activisme qatari. Kleib souligne d’ailleurs que la Ligue a dû finalement lâcher du lest sur les conditions d’exercice de sa mission d’observation, acceptant certaines exigences du gouvernement syrien. Un examen de la situation intérieure syrienne, marquée à la fois par la radicalisation et la marginalisation de l’opposition radicale, et une mainmise intacte du régime sur ses forces militaires et policières, ainsi que sur l’administration, complète ce panorama de l’état des forces politiques syriennes au tournant de l’année.
Kleib conclut son long examen des tenants et aboutissants en posant la question essentielle : le régime est-il sauvé ? Il se montre évidemment prudent mais insiste sur le fait que le climat est en train de changer, certains secteurs occidentaux s’inquiétant tout de même d’une montée en puissance des forces islamistes à la faveur des révolutions arabes, et la plupart des parties prenantes à la crise syrienne étant conscientes que l’opposition n’a absolument pas les moyens, militaires et politiques, de renverser le régime. Dès lors, Bachar demeure l’interlocuteur n°1 de la crise. A la condition évidente qu’il continue le mouvement de réforme, un retour au passé n’étant plus possible.
Bref, Sami Kleib fait preuve d’un optimisme mesuré – mais argumenté : ces dernières semaines, un certain nombre de faits sont venus affaiblir les positions et l’unité du front anti-syrien, et ont renforcé d’autant celle du régime. C’est aussi notre sentiment.
La crise syrienne près d’une transaction made in Russia !
Les responsables russes sont à l’aise vis-à-vis de l’action russe au Conseil de Sécurité de l’ONU. Il est presque certain que Moscou, qui a formé un solide rempart, jusqu’à maintenant, contre toute résolution onusienne contre la Syrie, continue sa défense de ce pays, au milieu des importants développements survenus, dernièrement, dans la région, les Russes étant conscients que les choses évoluent vers une transaction politique plus large dans la région, du moment que l’explosion n’est pas possible.
Pourquoi donc les Russes ont-ils présenté un projet au conseil de sécurité?
Tout pousse les autorités syriennes à l’optimisme plutôt qu’à l’inquiétude, car la Russie – qui a eu des contacts de haut niveau avec Damas – détient la présidence tournante du Conseil de Sécurité, et aspire à un règlement historique, qui consisterait, d’une part, à sauver la face de l’Occident et des Arabes, puisque le dossier syrien sera déféré au Conseil de sécurité, mais sera préservé, d’autre part, de toute action internationale contre le régime syrien, alors que les Occidentaux avec certains Etats arabes ont voulu, depuis des mois, ouvrir les portes de la Syrie à une telle intervention.
A la lecture du texte de la résolution, on peut trouver qu’il est plus favorable à l’autorité syrienne qu’aux thèses de l’Occident et de certains Arabes, car « il appelle toutes les parties, en Syrie, à mettre fin à la violence, y compris l’usage disproportionné de la force par les autorités syriennes et condamne les activités des groupes extrémistes, y compris les attaques contre les institutions de l’Etat et les fonctionnaires du maintien de l’ordre ».
Le 2ème article du projet russe signifierait, au cas où le Conseil de sécurité l’approuve, que la plus haute autorité internationale au monde, reconnaît, pour la première fois, l’existence de « groupes extrémistes » qui attaquent l’Etat. C’est un aspect que les Etats occidentaux et la Ligue des pays arabes, aussi, refusent de reconnaître, depuis le début de la crise, et font porter aux autorités syriennes la pleine responsabilité de ce qui se passe.
Le projet de résolution, dans son troisième article, appelle « les autorités syriennes » à punir tous les responsables des actes de violence, et à enquêter, rapidement, de façon indépendante et impartiale, sur « tous les cas de violation des droits de l’homme », c’est-à-dire qu’il restreint à l’Etat syrien la décision de punir, comme il ajoute, dans son troisième alinéa, l’invitation à compléter les enquêtes menées par la commission judiciaire syrienne, « dans tous les incidents dans lesquels ont été tués ou blessés des civils ou des éléments de la sécurité ».
Et, dans son quatrième article, le projet russe va encore plus loin puisqu’il exhorte tous les groupes de l’opposition syrienne de se distancer des extrémistes, et à accepter l’initiative de la Ligue arabe et d’entrer, sans conditions préalables, dans un dialogue politique avec les autorités syriennes ». Et, cette invitation a été réitérée aux membres du « conseil national » syrien, lors de leur visite à Moscou, et on dit même qu’ils ont entendu des propos encore plus durs, surtout quand ils ont dit aux Russes que le régime allait tomber et qu’il n’y avait pas de dialogue possible avec lui.
Par ailleurs, dans une claire référence à la position officielle syrienne, le projet russe exprime « sa grande préoccupation au sujet de la fourniture d’armes illégales aux groupes armés, en Syrie, et appelle les pays voisins et autres, à prendre les dispositions nécessaires pour empêcher ces opérations de fourniture », ce qui indique, pratiquement, que Moscou soutient la position syrienne, selon laquelle les armes entrent avec force à partir des pays voisins, et qu’il y a des « groupes armés et violents » en Syrie.
Et, en appuyant l’initiative de la Ligue arabe pour l’envoi d’observateurs, le projet russe assure, dans son premier alinéa, que la solution passe par « un processus politique global, sous direction syrienne », c’est-à-dire que c’est la direction actuelle, coiffée par Bachar al-Assad, qui va diriger ce processus, et cela est important, vis-à-vis des parties arabes : de fait, la Ligue des pays arabes n’a pas mis le président Bachar al-Assad sur la liste des personnes visées par les sanctions, laissant la porte ouverte pour qu’il conduise, personnellement, le processus du compromis politique et du dialogue.
Mais les Russes sont conscients du caractère délicat de leur position au Conseil de sécurité, et ils savent que leur projet ne peut passer s’ils soutiennent, uniquement, les autorités syriennes ; c’est pourquoi nous trouvons, au paragraphe trois du projet, une « invitation aux autorités syriennes à mettre un terme à l’interdiction du droit à la liberté d’expression, par ceux qui veulent exercer leurs droits »; de même ce texte exhorte les autorités syriennes, dans son deuxième alinéa, à alléger la situation humanitaire dans les zones de crise, et à permettre un accès rapide et sans entraves à l’aide humanitaire internationale dans les zones de crise, ainsi qu’aux aux médias internationaux, et à fournir une pleine coopération avec le bureau du Haut commissariat aux droits de l’homme, et garantir la libération de tous les détenus emprisonnés pour avoir exercé leur droit à la liberté d’expression ».
Quant aux termes du projet russe sur la nécessité « d’accélérer la progression vers le multipartisme politique par l’adoption d’une nouvelle loi électorale et des réformes constitutionnelles » et autres, ce sont ceux-là même que les autorités syriennes, elles-mêmes, ont approuvés dans leur projet de réformes. Et c’est pourquoi il est frappant de constater que le projet russe n’a pas précisé de dates pour la mise en œuvre de ces réformes et a, délibérément, omis d’exercer des pressions sur Damas, dans ce cadre.
Nous pouvons dire que les termes les plus durs, dans le projet de résolution russe, ont trait au rejet de toute intervention internationale. Le quatrième paragraphe affirme, littéralement, « la nécessité de résoudre la crise actuelle, en Syrie, paisiblement, sans aucune intervention militaire de l’étranger, et décide que rien dans la présente résolution ne peut être interprété comme une autorisation à aucune sorte d’intervention militaire en Syrie, (de la part de qui que ce soit) ». Autrement dit, même si le ministère syrien des affaires étrangères avait voulu présenter un projet de résolution équilibré, au conseil de sécurité, ils n’auraient pas fait mieux que ce qu’ont rédigé les russes, au milieu de pressions internationales, arabes et régionales énormes, actuellement, sur Damas.
Que veulent les Russes ?
De ce qui précède, il est clair que l’action russe est préventive : le projet est ancien, et a fait l’objet de consultations avec la Chine ; il est venu pour empêcher de présenter un projet de résolution occidental, surtout que ce texte russe a coïncidé avec un rapport humanitaire dur contre la Syrie, avant la réunion de la Ligue des pays arabes. Les Russes et les Chinois et certains pays amis de Damas sont conscients que le chemin sera épineux, et qu’un vif débat va avoir lieu au Conseil de sécurité avant d’atteindre une formule de compromis, qui va en prendre et en laisser du projet russe et lui ajouter des amendements occidentaux et arabes. Les Russes sont conscients de cela, il y a en face de puissantes nations avec à leur tête Washington, Paris et Londres, qui considèrent que le régime d’al-Assad « est fini », et le président Barack Obama s’est comporté, en fonction de cette analyse, il ne croyait pas, alors, que la Russie allait le défier jusqu’à ce point.
La position russe soutient avec force le régime syrien, et pour preuve, la dure déclaration présentée par le délégué russe, en réponse au rapport du commissariat aux droits de l’homme des Nations-Unies.
Dans cette déclaration, dont le journal Assafir a pu obtenir une copie originale de New York, le délégué russe s’est interrogé sur « la source des informations sur lesquelles s’est fondé le rapport, le commissariat ayant traité les plaintes comme étant des faits, alors qu’elles proviennent des militants eux-mêmes », et il s’est demandé « comment ce commissariat peut vérifier que le militant en ligne, se trouve effectivement à Homs et non pas en Nouvelle Zélande, par exemple », accusant le « rapport de partialité, parce qu’il ne fait pas référence aux actes de violence que commettent les groupes armés, en Syrie ». Le délégué est allé jusqu’à dire : « Nous avons dans notre pays (Russie) des citoyens syriens qui affirment l’inexactitude des informations sur le ciblage des manifestants par les autorités syriennes », soulignant que Moscou était au courant de l’existence de manifestations armées depuis le début des évènements en Syrie, et rappelant l’histoire de la jeune syrienne Zaïneb Al Hosni, que le Haut commissariat, lui-même, a cité comme étant violée et tuée, alors qu’il s’est avéré, deux mois plus tard, que ce n’était pas vrai, et le délégué russe s’est demandé pourquoi la commission n’a pas corrigé ce faux rapport.
Moscou a créé la confusion (chez l’adversaire)
Ces positions russes, – qui font suite à des déclarations de haut niveau – soutiennent Damas, et s’opposent à toute intervention internationale, condamnent l’usage des armes et les gens armés ; elles sont arrivées à leur « zénith » diplomatique par la présentation, par Moscou, de ce fameux projet de résolution au Conseil de Sécurité.
Il est clair que cette action a créé une grande confusion, pas seulement au conseil, mais dans les couloirs de la Ligue arabe, et dans les milieux de l’opposition.
La position américaine semble plus encline à discuter le projet : le ministre de la Défense américain, Leon Panetta, s’exprimant depuis Ankara, a décrit le projet comme étant une « étape importante », alors que les déclarations françaises ont varié entre la suggestion de l’acceptation du principe de la négociation autour du projet, et la tenue de propos stigmatisant le texte russe comme « creux et déséquilibré ». La position française a contredit l’accueil favorable des Européens, puisque Michel Mann, porte-parole du haut représentant pour la politique étrangère et la sécurité de l’Union européenne – Catherine Ashton – a dit que « le projet de résolution russe sur la Syrie est un pas dans le bon sens et que le texte, dans sa forme actuelle, est bon pour la discussion ».
Le secret de la fermeté russe et du recul arabe ?
Il faut s’arrêter sur l’ensemble des développements qu’a connus la région, dernièrement, et qui poussent à croire qu’un « règlement » ou une « transaction » commence à émerger derrière la crise, malgré la manipulation, la violence, l’oppression. Considérons plus particulièrement les éléments suivants :
- Les critiques occidentales sévères des récentes élections en Russie ont suscité un avertissement du Kremlin, dénonçant une atteinte au régime démocratique, et le chef du gouvernement russe, Vladimir Poutine (futur président russe en mars prochain, et ferme soutien de Bachar al-Assad), est allé jusqu’à adresser de sévères reproches aux Etats-Unis, disant notamment que « les gens en ont assez des diktats d’un Etat unique (…) Vous parlez de l’alliance avec les Etats-Unis, nous aussi nous voulons être des alliés avec eux, mais ce que je vois, et ce dont j’ai parlé à Munich, ce n’est pas une relation d’alliance, mais il me semble, parfois, que les Etats-Unis ne veulent pas d’alliés, mais des disciples et des serviteurs ».
- Les promesses européennes et internationales n’ont pas réussi, jusqu’à maintenant à rassurer la Russie sur le bouclier anti-missile. Le ministre russe de la défense Anatoli Serdioukov a averti, vendredi dernier, que le « déploiement du bouclier antimissile américain en Europe va bouleverser l’équilibre des forces stratégiques, et que la Russie va commencer à prendre des mesures pour répondre, après les premiers éléments de défense antimissiles, en Pologne ».
Le premier responsable militaire russe a révélé « des informations qui éclairent le plan des Etats-Unis pour déployer des missiles anti-missiles standard 3 en Pologne ». Il a averti que la Russie pourrait déployer des missiles Escanar sur le territoire de Kaliningrad. Propos importants après toutes les rencontres entre l’OTAN et la Russie.
Ces propos militaires russes « sont répétés par la bouche de la plus haute autorité politique russe, également » : le président Dimitri Medvedev a écrit, dans une correspondance adressée, le 30 novembre dernier, à l’assemblée fédérale russe : « Nous devons faire face dans la prochaine décennie à l’option suivante : soit parvenir à un accord au sujet du bouclier anti-missile et former un mécanisme conjoint de coopération ; soit commencer un nouveau cycle de course aux armements et alors nous aurons à prendre la décision de déployer de nouveaux moyens de frappe, dans le cas de notre incapacité à parvenir à un accord constructif ».
Mais celui qui lit en détail les actes du sommet euro-russe va découvrir une volonté d’arriver à une large transaction qui inclut, aussi, la Syrie. Le porte- parole de l’Union-Européenne a notamment indiqué : « Nous avons évoqué, au sommet, la nécessité d’adresser un message fort et unifié au régime syrien », et il faisait allusion, bien sûr, à la discussion à ce sujet avec les Russes.
De son côté, Medvedev a déclaré que « son pays est prêt à aider l’Europe à faire face à la crise financière qu’elle affronte. Lorsque le monde fait face à des tempêtes et des crises et que les choses en arrivent aux menaces et aux intimidations au sujet d’armements stratégiques, c’est que, souvent, le monde cherche à parvenir à des transactions, et peut-être que la position russe qui défend l’Iran et refuse de discuter des armes nucléaires ou stratégiques sur le territoire iranien, montre la capacité de Moscou à gérer de grandes négociations internationales. Et l’on ne peut s’attendre, dans ce genre de négociations, à ce que la Russie abandonne des alliés stratégiques actuels, tels l’Iran et la Syrie. Or un pays arabe a proposé cinq milliards de dollars à Moscou pour abandonner le régime syrien.
Quid de la Ligue arabe et de la Syrie
Dernièrement, un certain nombre d’initiatives diplomatiques ont montré que les Arabes reviennent sur leurs décisions et leurs diktats vis-à-vis du régime syrien.
Il semble que le Premier ministre qatari, Cheikh Hamad Bin Jaber Al Thani, se sente aujourd’hui, plus que quiconque, dans une position embarrassante. Il a été le premier à utiliser le langage des avertissements, vis-à-vis de Damas, qu’il a accusé d’atermoiements, et a avisé la communauté internationale que l’initiative arabe devait être appliquée, telle quelle, sans changement, et tout de suite. Ce qui est apparu comme impossible à appliquer, tandis que que le régime syrien continuait à gérer sa crise avec beaucoup de confiance en soi, sur la base d’une puissante action sécuritaire et d’un grand soutien russe et iranien.
Rappelons que la région et la Syrie ont connu, dernièrement, les évènements suivants :
- Le retrait américain, presque calme, de l’Irak, ce qui n’aurait pas pu se passer sans une coordination avec les autorités iraniennes, mais aussi, sans un feu vert indirect de la Syrie.
- La visite du ministre de la sécurité iranienne, Heidar Moslehi, à l’Arabie Saoudite et sa rencontre avec le prince héritier et l’homme fort, actuellement, du royaume, le prince Naef ben Abdelaziz, qui a échangé avec Bachar al-Assad des messages positifs ; et l’on dit que l’Arabie Saoudite veut diminuer le rôle du Qatar dans la région.
- La visite du Premier ministre irakien, Nouri Al Maliki, aux Etats-Unis, et ce qui s’en est suivi, puisque le président Al Assad a reçu le conseiller à la sécurité nationale irakienne Falah Al Fayad, en compagnie d’une délégation gouvernementale. Ali Al Moussaoui, le conseiller médiatique d’Al Maliki, a déclaré que « l’initiative irakienne vise à instaurer un dialogue entre le gouvernement syrien et l’opposition ». Et, abstraction faite de l’existence effective ou non d’une initiative irakienne, ce qui est certain c’est que la délégation irakienne a informé les Syriens des résultats des discussions d’Al Maliki à Washington, et les a assurés du soutien de l’Irak à la Syrie, ce qui est en soi une chose très intéressante, qui contredit, dans les faits, les thèses unanimistes de la Ligue arabe. Il faut signaler, dans ce contexte, que M. Moqtada Al Sadr (leader religieux chiite irakien) a qualifié la visite d’Al Maliki à Washington de « trahison envers l’autorité religieuse et les sentiments des musulmans dans les pays de la réticence, de l’opposition et de résistance », et de « faiblesse politique et soumission ». Ce qui peut être interprété comme un avertissement déguisé à Al Maliki pour l’empêcher d’être influencé par la politique américaine dans la région.
- La visite d’Al Maliki aux Etats-Unis et la visite du Vice-Président américain Joe Biden, avant, à Bagdad, ont révélé qu’il n’y avait pas de changement dans la position irakienne vis-à-vis de la Syrie, et pas d’acceptation des demandes nuisibles à l’Iran et à la Syrie, y compris la présence militaire aérienne américaine dans le ciel irakien.
- Le financement du TSL (tribunal spécial pour le Liban), chargé du jugement de l’affaire de l’attentat contre l’ancien Premier ministre libanais défunt, Rafiq Al Harir, avec un accord tacite du Hezbollah et une couverture syrienne et russe. A relier à l’échec de Jeffrey Filtman à remonter le moral des adversaires de la Syrie au Liban.
- L’explosion du convoi des forces internationales (FINUL) opérant dans le sud du Liban, qui a ciblé les militaires français, a été interprété (en France notamment) comme une réponse syrienne au fait que la France est à la tête des pays qui veulent renverser le régime syrien ; ce qui constitue une tentative d’impliquer davantage la Syrie, certains se précipitant pour l’accuser avec Hezbollah, d’être responsable de l’attentat. C’est ce qu’a démenti le Hezbollah, arguments précis à l’appui, et d’ailleurs présentés aux Français.
- Le guide suprême iranien s’est impliqué personnellement dans le dossier syrien, et a pris la décision fondamentale de défendre la Syrie et son régime, à tout prix, coupant court ainsi à certaines hésitations iraniennes, qui considéraient qu’il fallait traiter le dossier syrien de façon ouverte sur toutes les éventualités, y compris la chute du régime.
- L’organisation par la Syrie d’exercices militaires de tirs par missiles, publiques, cette fois, sous appellation de « projet », qui a dans le langage militaire une dimension plus importante et plus vaste que la simple « manœuvre ».
- L’organisation d’élections locales, sans incidents importants, et l’échec de la grève générale à laquelle avait appelé l’opposition.
- L’information donnée par le Hamas aux dirigeants syriens, selon laquelle elle n’a pas l’intention de quitter Damas, et que le départ de familles de certains responsables du Hamas est dû uniquement à l’inquiétude quant à la situation sécuritaire et non à une raison politique. Et l’on dit que c’est Khaled Mechaal, en personne, qui a adressé plus d’un message d’amitié, dernièrement, à Bachar al-Assad ; et certains dirigeants du Hamas ont révélé que de grandes pressions ont été exercées sur eux pour abandonner la Syrie, et même certains membres du Hamas ont informé Damas de la volonté de certains frères musulmans de négocier.
- Le mouvement de la Jordanie orientale et des courants de l’opposition jordanienne contre toute ingérence dans les affaires syriennes, soutenu par la position des militaires et des services de renseignements jordaniens, et le mouvement simultané de certaines parties turques s’opposant à toute intervention et refusant les aventures d’Erdogan, dans le dossier syrien.
Qu’en est-il de la situation en Syrie ?
Les développements précités ont coïncidé avec des événements frappants en relation avec la situation intérieure syrienne, et concernant tant le régime que l’opposition, et en particulier :
- Les progrès enregistrés par des actions militaires importantes à Jabal Zaouia et autour de Homs, et la prédisposition effective pour entrer dans la troisième ville du pays, une fois la décision politique prise ; il est clair que ce qui empêche les forces de sécurité d’intervenir pour ramener la situation à Homs à la normale, ne relève pas uniquement de la forte présence de groupes armés, bien organisés, et pas d’avantage d’un manque de capacités, mais surtout la volonté des autorités syriennes de ne pas heurter les positions arabes et de ne pas embarrasser la Russie aux Nations-unies et au Conseil de sécurité. Des sources sécuritaires indiquent que la solution est possible, une fois que la décision politique sera prise, et on dit qu’un plan militaire, bien ficelé, a été élaboré pour empêcher les groupes et les terroristes de se déplacer dans une autre zone ; la décision d’en finir avec cette situation s’impose, et elle peut être prise à n’importe quel moment, mais les responsables veulent d’abord ménager l’opportunité dégagée par les efforts russes, et aussi faire réussir l’initiative arabe, malgré le peu de conviction qu’a la direction syrienne de son utilité.
- Pour la journée de protestation du vendredi placée par l’opposition sous le thème « La Ligue arabe nous tue » (31 décembre), le nombre de manifestants s’était limité à 36.000 personnes, dont 15.000 à Idleb, et 21.000 dans les différentes régions syriennes, et aucun mort n’a été à déplorer, selon un rapport sécuritaire précis, parvenu à une ambassade arabe à Damas.
- Il s’est avéré lors des rencontres des différentes parties de l’opposition au Caire, que le CNS traite l’Instance de coordination (autre regroupement d’opposants) comme une institution de second rang, ce qui a conduit à l’échec de l’unification dans les rangs de l’opposition, malgré les pressions internationales et arabes appelant à cette unification. Et le militant des droits de l’homme et leader de l’opposition dans l’Instance de coordination, le docteur Haytham al-Manna, aurait exprimé une grande déception quant à ce qui s’est passé.
Tout cela fait que les autorités syriennes se sentent , à nouveau, dans une position de force, mais il y a aussi une tendance évidente des autorités, actuellement, à s’ouvrir davantage sur le dialogue avec certaines parties de l’opposition, et il n’est pas à écarter que le discours officiel syrien ne s’appuie dorénavant sur ces deux piliers, c’est-à-dire la discussion des points essentiels et la volonté d’ouverture et d’accélération du rythme des réformes et des élections.
Un règlement est-il possible ?
Les efforts russes actuels tendent dans ce sens. L’acceptation par la Syrie du plan arabe et la signature du protocole ne découlent pas d’une conviction effective que la Ligue arabe serait capable d’apporter une solution, mais d’une volonté de renforcer la position russe, et celui qui visite Damas, ces jours, entendra des propos durs sur la Ligue et son rôle, mais il entendra, aussi, des informations indiquant qu’au sein de la Ligue, il y a deux courants différents, et que la diplomatie qatarie, qui exerce des pressions fortes sur Damas, sent que les choses vont lui échapper, et c’est ce qui pousse certains responsables syriens à croire que la précipitation de Hamad à tenir une conférence de presse pour renouveler la menace de déférer le dossier syrien au Conseil de Sécurité, était non appropriée, parce que l’échange des correspondances entre le secrétaire général de la ligue arabe, Nabil Al Arabi, et le ministre des affaires étrangères syrien, Walid Al Moallem, était en cours, et que la Ligue a accepté, après un refus antérieur, plus de 70% des amendements syriens sur le projet du protocole. Elle a même accepté la coordination, au sujet des observateurs, avec le gouvernement syrien, et elle a pris en charge la somme d’un million de dollars, frais des observateurs, alors qu’antérieurement, elle avait voulu que Damas assume ces frais, comme elle a accepté que le protocole soit le résultat d’un accord entre les deux parties, et non plus seulement un diktat de la Ligue, l’intitulé du protocole étant « Projet du protocole du centre juridique et des missions de la délégation des observateurs de la Ligue arabe entre la République Syrienne et le Secrétaire Général de la ligue des pays arabes au sujet du suivi des développements de la situation en Syrie ».
Et si nous apprenons que le nombre des observateurs serait limité entre 50 et 70, avec leurs gardes, et que le protocole est pour une durée d’un mois renouvelable, sur accord des deux parties, Ligue arabe et gouvernement syrien, on peut dire que la Ligue a lâché beaucoup de lest, et que cela a été une raison supplémentaire pour la signature du protocole au Caire, et non pas à Doha ou ailleurs, et que les prochaines rencontres auront lieu en Syrie.
Le régime est-il sauvé ?
Il est prématuré d’avancer cette hypothèse, car beaucoup de pays occidentaux, régionaux et arabes, continuent à travailler à renverser le régime et, probablement, ils vont accentuer leur action dans la phase suivante. Mais ce qui est certain, c’est qu’il y a à l’horizon la préparation, sur feu doux, d’une recette qui peut changer l’équation, tout particulièrement si l’année se termine et que les choses restent en leur état actuel, la crise syrienne étant entrée dans son dixième mois, et l’on commence à parler de l’inquiétude américaine, israélienne et occidentale quant à l’extension de l’intégrisme dans les pays qui ont connu des révolutions.
Devant tout cela, et à la lumière de l’entrée de la crise syrienne dans son dixième mois, sans que l’une des deux parties ne soit en mesure de conclure, la Russie, les pays occidentaux et arabes se sont mis à envisager, sérieusement, que la solution unique réside dans un dialogue, sous direction de Bachar Al Assad, qui nécessitera l’élargissement de la base de participation au pouvoir, et qui aboutira à des élections qui feront participer l’opposition au pouvoir et à la prise de décision. Le retour en arrière n’est plus possible, le régime n’a plus les moyens de perdurer dans sa forme actuelle, au milieu des tempêtes des grands changements qui secouent les pays arabes, tandis que l’opposition est incapable de renverser le régime sans intervention internationale, et cette intervention est presque impossible, tant que les Russes continuent à camper sur leurs positions, et alors que le monde est préoccupé par l’extension de l’incendie dans la meule de foin régionale.
Les Russes vont-ils réussir ?
Probablement, mais le chemin est encore long, et peut-être que la signature du protocole de la Ligue arabe est le début effectif d’une discussion politique profonde, mais les hypothèses du succès balancent encore les hypothèses de l’échec, car certains pays ne sont intéressés ni par les réformes, ni par la protection des civils, mais par la chute du pouvoir et le resserrement de l’étau sur l’Iran.
Article rédigé en arabe par Sami Kleib, publié sur les colonnes d’Assafir, en date du 19.12.2011, et traduit en français, pour Infosyrie, en date du 29.12.2011.
Lien de l’article en arabe :
00:05 Publié dans Actualité, Géopolitique | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : syrie, russie, méditerranée, géopolitique, politique internationale, proche orient, monde arabe, monde arabo-musulman | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
17 millions de victimes de la traite musulmane
17 millions de victimes de la traite musulmane
A partir du VIIe siècle, les musulmans ont pratiqué une traite esclavagiste touchant à la fois les Européens et les Africains. Agrégé et docteur en histoire, Jacques Heers a été professeur des universités et directeur du département d'études médiévales à la Sorbonne. Il a consacré plusieurs ouvrages à l'esclavage médiéval en Méditerranée, aux Barbaresques et aux négriers en terre d'islam (1), qui viennent d'être réédités. Autant dire que nul n'est mieux placé que lui pour parler de la traite musulmane.
Le Choc du mois : Y -a-t-il une spécificité de la traite musulmane ?
Même si certains exégètes affirment le contraire, le Coran tolère parfaitement l'asservissement des «chiens de mécréants». Confrontés à la question cie l'esclavage, les docteurs de la loi rendaient en général le même verdict : le prisonnier infidèle doit demeurer esclave, même s'il se convertit aussitôt ; c'est la punition de sa mécréance passée. En revanche, le captif musulman, même ramené «chargé de chaînes» doit immédiatement retrouver la liberté.
Théoriquement, le Coran interdit de réduire un musulman en esclavage, mais en pratique, les exceptions abondent, pour des raisons plus ou moins légitimes : les victimes sont de « mauvais musulmans », etc.
Quand apparaît la traite musulmane ?
Dès la naissance de l'islam, au VIIe siècle! Mahomet et ses fidèles possédaient des esclaves. C'était toutefois une pratique courante, durant toute l'Antiquité. Il n'est pas étonnant que les peuples orientaux, au cours du Haut Moyen Age, la perpétuent à leur bénéfice.
Toujours en Espagne, au XII' siècle, des flottes musulmanes croisent sur les côtes de Galice et, au petit matin, lancent des attaques sur les villages de pêcheurs. En Méditerranée, sur un autre front, les musulmans, maîtres de la Sicile, lancent des chevauchées contre les grands monastères et sur les routes de pèlerinage vers Rome. Ailleurs, les pirates musulmans ravagent les côtes du Languedoc ou de Toscane avec des flottes atteignant parfois cinquante galères ! Et chaque guerre apporte son lot de captifs, qui sont aussitôt convoyés pour être vendus sur les marchés, de l'Espagne au Maghreb et jusqu'en Orient...
Il y a une réelle préférence pour les esclaves blancs...
Les musulmans ont pratiqué la traite des Noirs, mais dans les premiers temps de l'hégire, l'ère d'expansion islamique, les esclaves étaient essentiellement des Blancs. Laissez-moi vous citer le savant Ibn Haukal, qui affirmait, au temps de l'Espagne arabo-musulmane que « le plus bel article importé d'Espagne sont les esclaves, des filles et de beaux garçons qui ont été enlevés dans le pays des Francs et dans la Galice. Tous les eunuques slaves qu'on trouve sur la terre sont amenés d'Espagne et aussitôt qu'ils arrivent, on les châtre. Ce sont des marchands juifs qui font ça ». Le géographe Ibn al-Fakih, lui, racontait que « de la mer occidentale, arrivent en Orient les esclaves hommes, romains, francs, lombards et les femmes, romaines et andalouses ».
Quand la traite musulmane cesse-t'elle en direction de l'Europe ?
Elle s'est considérablement réduite lorsque les Arabes ont passé le Sahara pour aller razzier l'Afrique noire. Mais elle a très vite repris, dès les années 800, avec la piraterie. Elle s'intensifie en 1517, lorsque Alger, véritable nid de pirates, tombe aux mains des Turcs. La guerre de course fait alors partie intégrante du plan de conquête de la Méditerranée par les Ottomans. L'esclavage des chrétiens, méthodiquement mené, redouble.
En 1888, à Médine, 5.000 esclaves sont vendus dans l'année
La première traite est la plus longue et occasionne de nombreuses pertes. Elle passe par l'Egypte, dont les musulmans sont devenus maîtres, et le Sahara. Elle est d'abord faite de razzias, puis, à partir du IX' siècle, repose sur la conquête de royaumes noirs et le négoce avec les marchands d'esclaves.
Quelles sont les principales cibles ?
Le retour est un enfer. Le Niger, le Sénégal et le Mali sont également touchés ... Des forbans musulmans lancent des razzias le long des côtes de l'océan Indien avec des boutres - de rapides voiliers. Dans les royaumes islamiques du Soudan, les chasses aux esclaves mobilisent chaque année de forts partis de cavaliers. Ils repèrent les villages les plus intéressants et partent par petits groupes. Ils montent des chameaux de race, s'approvisionnent en eau, marchent la nuit et attaquent au petit matin. Les opérations devant être rentables, ils évitent les lieux trop bien protégés et n'attaquent qu'à coup sûr. Une fois maîtres du terrain, ils massacrent les faibles et les vieillards pour n'emmener que les malheureux en état de servir.
Pour être honnête, il faut ajouter que des négociants sont aussi sur les rangs, car des rois noirs, près du Tchad par exemple, les informent du lancement des grandes chasses aux esclaves. Ils vont s'installer dans les villages, en attendant - à leurs frais - le retour de l'expédition.
Comment les esclaves sont-ils traités ?
Très mal, car ils sont gratuits et en grand nombre. Contrairement à la traite atlantique, il n'a pas fallu négocier avec des rois esclavagistes. Il a suffi de tuer ceux qui se défendaient !
De quoi se compose une cargaison d'esclaves ?
Essentiellement des jeunes femmes, blanches ou noires. Des enfants et des hommes solides. Ne restent que les personnes en bonne santé. Les autres sont morts en route. En chemin, pour ècouler les «cargaisons»: plus vite, certains campements se transforment en marché, où les grossistes viennent faire un premier choix. Puis on arrive dans les grandes places, comme Zanzibar ou Bagdad. Les acheteurs peuvent examiner leur marchandise, regarder les dent, l'élasticité d'une poitrine, constater si une jeune femme est vierge ou déflorée, mesurer la vivacité intellectuelle ou la force physique d'un esclave, son adresse...
Que deviennent les victimes ?
Elles servent sur les chantiers publics ou au service d'un maître.
Une fois la part du sultan mise de côté, les captifs des Barbaresques passaient directement de l'entrepont du navire au marché. Des négociants les mettaient aux enchères, à la criée. Ceux visiblement inaptes aux travaux de force, mais dont on espère tirer une bonne rançon, valent jusqu'à sept fois un homme valide. Les Turcs et les Maures spéculent quotidiennement sur la valeur de leurs esclaves. Faut-il acheter ou vendre? C'est un peu une Bourse avant l'heure...
Comment vivaient ces esclaves ?
Le plus souvent en groupes, logés dans les bagnes - sept, rien qu'à Alger. A Tunis ou Tripoli, ils portaient plus de dix kilos de fers. Les esclaves en terre d'islam n'avaient pas le droit de fonder une famille et n'avaient pas ou peu d'enfants. Pour des raisons très simples : le grand nombre d'eunuques, l'interdiction faite aux femmes de se marier et une mortalité très élevée.
Et l'hygiène ?
Pas d'hygiène, puisqu'ils devaient payer leur eau ! Elle leur servait essentiellement à boire. Il leur était impossible de se laver régulièrement, encore moins de laver les hardes leur servant de vêtements ... Vous imaginez que, rapidement, les frottements de tissus crasseux sur les peaux sales provoquaient des irritations, des furoncles et de nombreuses maladies, qui concourraient à la mortalité.
Le matin, à peine nourris, ils partaient vers les chantiers ou les demeures de leurs maîtres, leur atelier ou leur boutique. Les mieux lotis - une minorité - étaient loués à des diplomates chrétiens : ils menaient alors l'existence d'un domestique européen.
Des esclaves chrétiens sont brûlés vifs à Alger !
Etait-il possible de fuir ?
Comme Cervantès...
Cervantès illustre parfaitement votre question sur les possibilités d'évasion(3). Il a été prisonnier durant cinq ans. Il a tenté une première évasion en subornant un garde. Celui-ci n'honora pas son engagement. Direction : les carrières! En 1577, il fit une deuxième et une troisième tentatives, mais fut toujours pris et passa en tout dix mois aux chaînes, dans un cul-de-basse-fosse. Ses comparses furent pendus ou empalés. Les autres eurent les oreilles tranchées. A la quatrième tentative, il échoua encore! Il ne fut libéré que contre une rançon importante, grâce à l'action des ordres mercédaires, ces chrétiens qui achetaient les esclaves ou s'y substituaient !
Mais il existe encore ! La colonisation de l'Afrique au XIXe siècle a mis un terme que l'on croyait définitif à l'esclavage musulman. Mais celui-ci a repris avec la décolonisation. La traite musulmane, qui a duré mille deux cents ans, perdure, au Soudan par exemple.
Les historiens travaillant sur l'esclavage musulman se heurtent à une désespérante absence de sources. Les registres fiscaux de Zanzibar sont les seuls répertoriés de nos jours mais ils ne remontent pas au-delà de 1850.
Les estimations moyennes se situent à un minimum de 17 millions de victimes. Mais c'est ignorer les « chiffres noirs » très importants : où sont passées les victimes mortes durant le voyage, les opérations dont on ne sait rien, les caravanes perdues dans le désert ou en mer ? Sans compter les esclaves européens que l'on « oublie » de comptabiliser et les Africains tués lors des razzias : défenseurs ou « inutiles », qui étaient des bouches inutiles à nourrir. Faut-il ou non les intégrer au bilan de la traite orientale ?
Propos recueillis par Patrick Cousteau
1. Les Négriers en terre d'islam. La première traite des Noirs, VIl-XVI siècle, Perrin, 2003 (rééd. Perrin, coll. Tempus, 2008).
Les Barbaresques, la course et la guerre en Méditerranée, XIV-XVI siècle, Perrin, 2001 (rééd. Perrin, coll. Tempus, 2008).
Voir aussi le livre tiré de sa thèse de doctorat; Esclaves et domestiques au Moyen Age dans le monde méditerranéen, Hachette, 1981 (rééd. 2006).
2. A lire dans le Voyage en Orient, de Gérard de Nerval, que viennent opportunément de rééditer en collection Folio les éditions Gallimard.
3. Pour en savoir plus, lire ; Le Captif. Extrait de Don Quichotte, de Cervantès, préface de Jacques Heers, éditions de Paris, 2006.
Source : le Choc du Mois - Juin 2008
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When Fascism Was On the Left
When Fascism Was On the Left
by Keith Preston
Ex: http://www.alternativeright.com/
The conventional left/right model of the political spectrum holds Fascism and Marxism to be polar opposites of one another. Marxism is regarded as an ideology of the extreme Left while Fascism supposedly represents an outlook that is about as far to the Right as one can go. A title recently translated into English by Portugal’s Finis Mundi Press, Eric Norling’s Revolutionary Fascism, does much to call the perception of Fascism, conceived of as it was by Mussolini and his cohorts, as an ideology of the extreme Right into question.
This work was originally published in 2001 and author Norling, a historian and lawyer, is a native Swede who now resides in Spain. Norling observes that throughout the entirety of his early life, from childhood until World War One, Mussolini was every bit as much as man of the Left as contemporaries such as Eugene V. Debs. He was what would later come to be known as a “red diaper baby” (meaning the child of revolutionary socialist parents). As a young man, Mussolini himself was a Marxist, fervently anticlerical, went to Switzerland to evade compulsory military service, and was arrested and imprisoned for inciting militant strikes. Eventually, he became a leader in Italy’s Socialist Party and he was imprisoned once again in 1911 for his antiwar activities related to Italy’s invasion of Libya. Mussolini was so prominent a socialist at this point in his career that he won the praise of Lenin who considered him to be the rightful head of a future Italian socialist state.
When World War One began in 1914, Mussolini initially held to the Italian Socialist Party’s antiwar position, but in the ensuing months switched to a pro-war position which earned him an expulsion from the party. He then enlisted in the Italian army and was wounded in combat. The reasons for Mussolini’s shift to a pro-war position are essential to understanding the true origins and nature of fascism and its place within the context of twentieth century political and intellectual history. Mussolini came to see the war as an anti-imperialist struggle against the Hapsburg dynasty of Austria-Hungary. Further, he regarded the war as an anti-monarchist struggle against conservative forces such as the Hapsburgs, the Ottoman Turks, and the Hohenzollern’s of Germany and attacked these regimes as reactionary enemies who had repressed socialism. Mussolini also prophetically believed that Russia’s participation in the war would weaken that nation to the point where it was susceptible to socialist revolution (which is precisely what happened). In other words, Mussolini regarded the war as an opportunity to advance leftist revolutionary struggles in Italy and elsewhere.
When the Italian Fascist movement was founded in 1919, most of its leaders and theoreticians were, like Mussolini himself, former Marxists and other radical leftists such as proponents of the revolutionary syndicalist doctrines of Georges Sorel. The official programs issued by the Fascists, translations of which are included in Norling’s book, reflected a standard mixture of republican and socialist ideas that would have been common to any European leftist group of the era. If indeed the evidence is overwhelming that Fascism has its roots on the far Left, then from where does Fascism’s reputation as a rightist ideology originate?
The answer appears to be a combination of three primary factors: Marxist propaganda that has regrettably found its way into the mainstream historiography, the revision of leftist revolutionary doctrine itself by Fascist leaders, and the inevitable compromises and accommodations made by Fascism upon the achievement of actual state power. Regarding the first these, David Ramsay Steele described the standard Marxist interpretation of Fascism in an important article on Fascism’s history:
In the 1930s, the perception of "fascism"in the English-speaking world morphed from an exotic, even chic, Italian novelty into an all-purpose symbol of evil. Under the influence of leftist writers, a view of fascism was disseminated which has remained dominant among intellectuals until today. It goes as follows:
Fascism is capitalism with the mask off. It's a tool of Big Business, which rules through democracy until it feels mortally threatened, then unleashes fascism. Mussolini and Hitler were put into power by Big Business, because Big Business was challenged by the revolutionary working class. We naturally have to explain, then, how fascism can be a mass movement, and one that is neither led nor organized by Big Business. The explanation is that Fascism does it by fiendishly clever use of ritual and symbol. Fascism as an intellectual doctrine is empty of serious content, or alternatively, its content is an incoherent hodge-podge. Fascism's appeal is a matter of emotions rather than ideas. It relies on hymn-singing, flag-waving, and other mummery, which are nothing more than irrational devices employed by the Fascist leaders who have been paid by Big Business to manipulate the masses.
This perception continues to be the standard leftist “analysis” of Fascism even in present times, and goes a long way towards explaining why, for instance, American political movements or figures that have absolutely nothing to do with historic Fascism, such as the Tea Party or the neocon mouthpieces of FOX News or “conservative” talk radio, continue to be recipients of the “fascist” label by atavistic liberals and leftists.
The reality of Fascism’s origins was quite different. Its creators were an assortment of leftist intellectuals and political figures whose common reference point was their realization that Marxism was a failed ideology. As Steele observed:
Fascism began as a revision of Marxism by Marxists, a revision which developed in successive stages, so that these Marxists gradually stopped thinking of themselves as Marxists, and eventually stopped thinking of themselves as socialists. They never stopped thinking of themselves as anti-liberal revolutionaries.
The Crisis of Marxism occurred in the 1890s. Marxist intellectuals could claim to speak for mass socialist movements across continental Europe, yet it became clear in those years that Marxism had survived into a world which Marx had believed could not possibly exist. The workers were becoming richer, the working class was fragmented into sections with different interests, technological advance was accelerating rather than meeting a roadblock, the "rate of profit" was not falling, the number of wealthy investors ("magnates of capital") was not falling but increasing, industrial concentration was not increasing, and in all countries the workers were putting their country above their class.
The early Fascists were former Marxists who had come to doubt the revolutionary potential of class struggle, but had simultaneously come to regard revolutionary nationalism as showing considerable promise. As Mussolini remarked in a speech on December 5, 1914:
The nation has not disappeared. We used to believe that the concept was totally without substance. Instead we see the nation arise as a palpitating reality before us!...Class cannot destroy the nation. Class reveals itself as a collection of interests—but the nation is a history of sentiments, traditions, language, culture, and race. Class can become an integral part of the nation, but the one cannot eclipse the other. The class struggle is a vain formula, with effect and consequence wherever one finds a people that has not integrated itself into its proper linguistic and racial confines—where the national problem has not been definitely resolved. In such circumstances the class movement finds itself impaired by an inauspicious historic climate.
Fascism subsequently abandoned class struggle for a revolutionary nationalist outlook that stood for class collaboration under the leadership of a strong state that was capable of unifying the nation and accelerating industrial development. Indeed, Steele made an interesting observation concerning the similarities between Italian and Third World Marxist “national liberation” movements of the second half of the twentieth century:
The logic underlying their shifting position was that there was unfortunately going to be no working-class revolution, either in the advanced countries, or in less developed countries like Italy. Italy was on its own, and Italy's problem was low industrial output. Italy was an exploited proletarian nation, while the richer countries were bloated bourgeois nations. The nation was the myth which could unite the productive classes behind a drive to expand output. These ideas foreshadowed the Third World propaganda of the 1950s and 1960s, in which aspiring elites in economically backward countries represented their own less than scrupulously humane rule as "progressive" because it would accelerate Third World development. From Nkrumah to Castro, Third World dictators would walk in Mussolini's footsteps. Fascism was a full dress rehearsal for post-war Third Worldism.
During its twenty-three years in power, Mussolini’s regime certainly made considerable concessions to traditionally conservative interests such as the monarchy, big business, and the Catholic Church. These pragmatic accommodations borne of political necessity are among the evidences typically offered by leftists as indications of Fascism’s rightist nature. Yet there is abundant evidence that Mussolini essentially remained a socialist throughout the entirety of his political life. By 1935, thirteen years after Mussolini seized power in the March on Rome, seventy-five percent of Italian industry had either been nationalized outright or brought under intensive state control. Indeed, it was towards the end of both his life and the life of his regime that Mussolini’s economic policies were at their most leftist.
After briefly losing power for a couple of months during the summer of 1943, Mussolini returned as Italy’s head of state with German assistance and set up what came to be called the Italian Social Republic. The regime subsequently nationalized all companies employing more than a hundred workers, redistributed housing that was formerly privately owned to its worker occupants, engaged in land redistribution, and witnessed a number of prominent Marxists joining the Mussolini government, including Nicola Bombacci, the founder of the Italian Communist Party and a personal friend of Lenin. These events are described in considerable detail in Norling’s work.
It would appear that the historic bitter rivalry between Marxists and Fascists is less a conflict between the Left and the Right, and more of a conflict between erstwhile siblings on the Left. This should come as no particular surprise given the penchant of radical leftist groupings for sectarian blood feuds. Indeed, it might be plausibly argued that leftist ”anti-fascism” is rooted in jealously of a more successful relative as much as anything else. As Steele noted:
Mussolini believed that Fascism was an international movement. He expected that both decadent bourgeois democracy and dogmatic Marxism-Leninism would everywhere give way to Fascism, that the twentieth century would be a century of Fascism. Like his leftist contemporaries, he underestimated the resilience of both democracy and free-market liberalism. But in substance Mussolini's prediction was fulfilled: most of the world's people in the second half of the twentieth century were ruled by governments which were closer in practice to Fascism than they were either to liberalism or to Marxism-Leninism. The twentieth century was indeed the Fascist century.
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Interview with Leo Yankevich
Interview with Leo Yankevich
By Greg Johnson
Editor’s Note:
Recently, I interviewed leading formalist poet Leo Yankevich on poetry, politics, and his new Counter-Currents title Tikkun Olam and Other Poems [2].
What is formalist poetry? What is the new formalist movement?
Formalist poetry is essentially metrical poetry, whether it be rhymed or unrhymed. 99.99% of English-language poetry published up until 1900 was formalist. Even the early 20th century modernists, such as Ezra Pound, were highly competent formalists who, in addition to metrical poems, wrote free verse as a revolt against the stilted poetry of the 19th century Victorians. His famous motto “make it new” applies to both free and metrical verse.
The new formalist movement is a revolt against the amorphous post-modernist free verse that has been the dominant mode of poetic expression in the aftermath of World War II. It is formalism resurrected with a contemporary voice.
Which poets have inspired or influenced you the most?
W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Roy Campbell, and Dylan Thomas.
Who do you think are the best living poets?
I’d place myself on the top of the list, of course, followed by Richard Wilbur, and Joseph S. Salemi.
Who are the best non-formalist poets?
Among the dead, Robinson Jeffers.
Among the living, I don’t know. There are millions of them. Besides, I don’t consider them poets. Rather, writers-of-prose chopped-up-into-lines.
Who are the best literary critics and historians? Have any critics influenced your work as a poet?
H. L. Mencken, T. S. Eliot, and Cleanth Brooks. I can’t say, though, that they have influenced my work.
What is the relationship of art and propaganda? Art and politics?
All art is propaganda whether its creator intends it to be or not. Most art today promotes decadence, homosexuality, and miscegenation. The art of the ancient Greeks and Romans, on the other hand, promoted health and a philosophy that aimed at perfection.
What is your view of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn?
I hold Solzhenitsyn in very high esteem as a writer, soldier, and man. His books tell the truth of the inhuman Gulag and his long poem Prussian Nights depicts the barbaric behavior of Soviet rabble soldiers, who, inspired by the anti-German propaganda of Ilya Ehrenburg, raped and murdered their way through Prussia in 1945. As a young captain in the Red Army he witnessed the barbarity first hand and was later brave enough to write about it. Here I quote 5 lines:
The little daughter’s on the mattress,
Dead. How many have been on it?
A platoon, a company perhaps?
A girl’s been turned into a woman,
A woman turned into a corpse.
One of the central themes of your new book Tikkun Olam is the destructiveness of Jewish power. How did you become aware of this issue?
As early as I can remember, I knew who was behind the Katyn Massacre: the Soviets. However, in 2001 I began looking into who these “Soviets” were ethnically, and I discovered an article written by the late Dr. William Pierce on the topic. This led me to listen to his broadcasts. Week by week he removed the shutters from my eyes. Later, the writings of the superb prose stylist and classicist Revilo Oliver improved my vision on the matter.
What do you think of the writings of Count Potocki of Montalk?
Certainly Potocki was a character akin in many ways to myself. I, too, am descended from nobles (Polish-Lithuanian) on my father’s side. My paternal grandfather’s surname was Jankiewicz (Yankevich is a transliteration). And my paternal grandmother’s maiden name was Jetkiewicz. However, although I am theoretically a count, I make no claim to the Polish throne!
My good friend Joseph S. Salemi acquired a handful of Potocki’s books for me. I must admit that I am disappointed by the quality of his poetry, which is about a tenth as good as the poetry of fellow right-winger Roy Campbell.
Potocki, however, was a brave man and a good European. Although in 1943 the London Polish community was well aware of who was responsible for the Katyn massacre (the Soviets) it was the Count who brought it to light in the English-speaking world with the publication of his Katyn Manifesto, for which he was placed under surveillance by Scotland Yard.
What impact do you hope that Tikkun Olam will have on readers?
I hope the book will help them understand what has been inflicted on Europid man in the last 100 years and where our race and civilization are headed if we do not stop the darkening tide imposed upon us by the eternal enemy. After they understand this, I hope the book, through repeated readings, will fortify their desire for victory in the struggle for our people’s preservation.
What do you think will be necessary for Europeans around the world to regain control of our destinies?
First, we need to have our own all-pervasive media that gets the message out on a daily basis. Second, we need 10 thousand academics like Kevin MacDonald, and a thousand filmmakers like Mel Gibson, and 50 poets like myself. Thirdly, our people must be ready to sacrifice themselves and to suffer career assassination.
Which European nations have the best chance of doing so? Which ones have the least chance?
It is my belief that the European nations who have been battling with bordering non-white hordes for centuries have the best chance for survival. They include Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. Germany, Switzerland, and Austria are capable of regaining their destinies. Alas, I cannot say the same for the UK, France, Belgium, Holland, and the Scandinavian countries. I foresee within the next 50 years, waves of whites moving into Eastern Europe to escape the ghettoes of London, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Oslo, and Stockholm.
Thank you.
Article printed from Counter-Currents Publishing: http://www.counter-currents.com
URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/12/interview-with-leo-yankevich/
* * *
New from Counter-Currents!
Tikkun Olam & Other Poems
Counter-Currents is proud to announce the publication of our eighth title:
Leo Yankevich
Tikkun Olam and Other Poems
Second Edition
San Francisco: Counter-Currents Publishing, 2011
104 pages
Read the title poem here
Hardcover: $25
Paperback: $16
E-book: $5.99 (not available for pre-order)
Available January 16, 2012
Tikkun Olam and Other Poems collects 55 poems and one translation by leading formalist poet Leo Yankevich. Originally published as an E-book only, this is the first print edition.
Advance Praise for Tikkun Olam
Leo Yankevich’s Tikkun Olam is both devastating and heroic. The poems devastate with their unflinching depiction of the horror of the last one hundred years—the murders, the political lies, the cultural debasement, the degradation of European identity—and at the same time they are heroic in their open accusation of the force that ultimately lies behind it all: the insidious, self-serving impulse to “mend the world” in accordance with an anti-Western agenda. Yankevich’s book is unsparing in its vividness, but difficult to put down. He bravely directs our gaze at the infection that is killing us, and he does not allow us the comfortable option of turning away in forgetfulness.—Joseph S. Salemi, Editor, Trinacria
“Reading the powerful, ironic poems in Tikkun Olam—Hebrew for “the mending of the world”—in this new enlarged edition, visions of Goya’s Disasters of War come to mind.
“Leo Yankevich wants the truth—wants it out—and uses all his considerable power as a poet to get it out, bitter and bittersweet. “Those who do not know history are doomed to re-live it,” said, I believe, Santayana. Yankevich wants us to know history, so that we need not re-live it. Is this a futile dream? But someone must do something to halt or at least to slow our simian march to doom, and Yankevich does what he can in this dark true book.
“The murderous testosterone-drugged alpha-males portrayed in Tikkun Olam are not utter monsters. They are humans—husbands, sons, and brothers. They are us, or parts of us, and it is their residual humanity that is horrifying.
“This is especially clear when Yankevich takes on infamously unattractive personalities and manages to find in them the germ of humanity that is just alive enough to make stark and painful how much of their humanity has been cast off. His portrait of Rudolf Hess comes to mind. I think, too, of those menders of the world who begin their mending with the murders of the Czar, his wife and children.
“Tikkun Olam is filled with characters—human, all too human, not quite human, alive and suffering in their various tragedies—brought painfully and beautifully to life by Leo Yankevich.”—E. M. Schorb
“Leo Yankevich’s rich formalist poetry sings while it mourns. His poems bring us face to face with powerful and provocative images from more than one of those darkest of modern times–times when a terrible inhumanity was unleashed upon a culture, a folk, a Heimat. In tones both eloquent and raw, it asks of its readers no more and no less than what is regarded as the sacred duty of all those who survive: Remember. Do not let this be forgotten. This too happened. Yankevich, like Percy Shelley and Roy Campbell before him, is a courageously outspoken poet, and one who is destined to be remembered as an important classic long after his politically-correct contemporaries have forever fallen out of popular, and poetic, favor.”—Juleigh Howard-Hobson
CONTENTS
Part One
1. Tikkun Olam [2]
2. Moscow, 1928
3. Holodomor, 1932–33
4. Red Star, 1933
5. Barcelona, 1936
6. Naftaly Aronovich Frenkel
7. Kolyma, 1937
8. Lorca’s Death
Part Two
9. Neighbors, Eastern Poland, 1940
10. December, 1942
11. Vengeance is Mine, Says the Lord, 1943
12. With Blood on his Hands . . .
13. Koniuchy, Eastern Poland, 1944
14. Saint Bartholomew’s Church
15. 1945
16. Gleiwitz, 1945
17. Somewhere over Germany, 1945
18. Veteran’s Hospital
Part Three
19. After the Explusions
20. Ezra Pound Enters the Tent [3]
21. Dissident, 1962
22. Poland, New Year’s Day, 1982
23. A Hater Learns About Love
24. The Loneliest Man
25. The Death of Communism
26. Bukovina, 1989
Part Four
27. Sarajevo Sonnet
28. Draza Bregovich
29. Butugychag
30. Gulag Burial Marker
31. The Abandoned Station
32. The Last Silesian
33. An Interview with the Oldest Man In Europe
34. The Łemko Steeple
35. Starless
Part Five
36. A Plurality of Worlds
37. Water
38. The Poet of 1912
39. Anonymous Rex
40. How to Get There
Part Six
41. Spreading Democracy
42. Jenin, 2002
43. The Terrorist
44. After the Old Masters
45. No Flowers, No Doves
46. Two Dates
47. On the Beheading of Eugene Olin Armstrong
48. The July Sun over Lebanon
49. On the Lynching of Saddam Hussein
50. Black Ops [4]
Part Seven
51. A Warning to Dissidents
52. Halloween, 2006
53. The Condemned House
54. Understanding the Holocaust
55. Vision
56. Monomatapa on the Detroit River
About the Author
Leo Yankevich was born into a family of Roman Catholic Irish-Polish immigrants on October 30, 1961. He grew up and attended high school in Farrell, Penn., a small steel town in the Rust Belt of middle America. He then studied History and Polish at Alliance College, Cambridge Springs, PA, receiving a BA in 1984. Later that year he traveled to Poland to begin graduate study at the centuries-old Jagiellonian University in Krakow. A staunch anticommunist, he played an active role in the dissident movement in that country, and was arrested and beaten badly on a few occasions by the communist security forces. After the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, he decided to settle permanently in Poland. Since that time he has lived in Gliwice (Gleiwitz), an industrial city in Upper Silesia.
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Los misterios del hielo —efectos evolutivos de la glaciación
Los misterios del hielo —efectos evolutivos de la glaciación
Cuando el Yin llega a su extremo, surge espontáneamente el Yang como un punto de luz dentro del Yin.
(Proverbio taoísta).
Ex: http://europa-soberana.blogia.com/
En la cosmogonía cuasi-mística del ingeniero austriaco Hans Hörbiger (1860-1931), el universo se formó gracias a la alquimia creativa producida entre dos fuerzas extremas: el hielo cósmico (cuerpos gélidos del espacio profundo) y el fuego (las estrellas). La teoría hörbigeriana —en realidad muy relacionada con mitologías como la germánica (hielo/fuego), la maniquea (oscuridad/luz), la gnóstica (materia/espíritu) o la taoísta (Yin/Yang) — concebía el universo como un campo de batalla en el que estos signos opuestos combatían por la hegemonía. La interacción entre ambos, las maneras que tenían de mezclarse, de ajustarse, de batallar y de fluir en el mundo, eran la clave de la vida.
Los antepasados de los actuales océanos, ríos, lagos, nieves y glaciares fueron meteoritos de hielo caídos sobre la Tierra. Durante los primeros cientos de millones de años (periodo Hadeico), nuestro planeta era una bola incandescente e inhabitable, bombardeada por infinidad de objetos astrales, derretida y abrasada por su propia energía geotérmica interior. Se cree [1] que las primeras aguas fueron traídas por meteoritos portadores de hielo. Este bombardeo astral fue uno de los factores que contribuyó al refrescamiento y habitabilidad de la Tierra, algunos también consideran que el hielo de los meteoritos contenía las primeras formas de vida. Se hace más fácil comprender por qué las tradiciones antiguas asociaban lo celeste con lo masculino y lo terrestre con lo femenino: los meteoritos de hielo actuaron como fecundadores de la Tierra, de forma no distinta a como hacen los espermatozoides con el ovario. Aun hoy, las precipitaciones, que "conmemoran" este acontecimiento, son esenciales para que el suelo produzca vida.
En las mitologías indoeuropeas, el hielo fue asociado a seres titánicos, como los gigantes en el caso del paganismo germánico. Los textos védicos de la antigua India hablaban de Vitra, la serpiente del invierno, que cubrió el extremo norte de nieve forzando a sus gentes a emigrar al Sur y encerrando en sí las aguas cósmicas y energías de la vida hasta que el dios Indra (equivalente al Thor germano o al Perun eslavo) la mató con el rayo de los dioses, liberando el agua contenida —una alegoría sobre la llegada de la primavera y/o de la desglaciación. Los mitos de los pueblos tradicionales tienen en común la idea de que los enfrentamientos con seres titánicos similares forjaron el carácter de todos sus héroes y antepasados.
Para organizar estas ideas, la cosmogonía nórdica explicó simbólicamente la existencia de un gran abismo primordial, vacío, oscuro e insondable, al que se denominaba Ginungagap o Wyrd. Se trata de lo que el taoísmo chino llama "Yin extremo" y los griegos "Caos". La parte norte de Wyrd se llenó de hielo, y se llamó Nifleheim (hogar de la niebla). En la parte sur florecieron las brasas y el fuego, y se llamó Muspelheim (hogar de la llama). Cuando el fuego y el hielo se encontraron, surgió el gigante Ymir [2], quien fue el progenitor de los gigantes, los dioses y los hombres, y con cuyos restos mortales se construyó la Tierra Media.
La balanza de hielo-fuego ha ido cambiando en nuestro planeta a lo largo de su historia geológica. Durante el periodo Criogénico (hace 850-630 millones de años) los glaciares llegaron a los trópicos y probablemente todo el planeta era como una inmensa bola de nieve que brillaba intensamente reflejando la luz del sol. La Tierra ha visto al menos cuatro grandes arremetidas del hielo, cada una salpicada de breves periodos interglaciares. Actualmente nos encontramos en el Holoceno, un periodo interglaciar que comenzó hace unos 12.000 años con el fin de la glaciación de Würm. Los glaciares se encuentran en retroceso, pero no hay motivo para pensar que el hielo no volverá a avanzar, ya que ésa ha sido la tónica durante todo el Cuaternario.
Este es el aspecto que debió haber tenido nuestro planeta durante el periodo Criogénico, hace aproximadamente 800-600 millones de años. La capa de hielo medía aproximadamente 1 km de grosor en las costas (mucho más en el interior continental). Las temperaturas en todo el planeta no superaban los -40º, no existía agua en forma líquida o gaseosa y las únicas nubes eran de origen volcánico, ya que cualquier posible humedad había sido congelada. Toda la luz solar era reflejada hacia el espacio por el hielo y la nieve, un fenómeno bautizado con el nombre de la segunda fase alquímica: albedo, la blanca. Después de esta aparente victoria del hielo, en la que murieron la mayor parte de seres vivos, las condiciones reverdecieron, el hielo se fundió y tuvo lugar la llamada "explosión cámbrica", un estallido de biodiversidad durante el cual aparecieron los primeros animales acuáticos (cnidarias, seres gelatinosos como las anémonas, los pólipos y las medusas). Poco después, la tierra firme sería colonizada por los primeros invertebrados terrestres.
Mucho jugo se le podría sacar a las diversas facetas de este tema, pero lo que nos interesará en el presente artículo en lo referente a las ofensivas del hielo, será su papel evolutivo sobre el ser humano. Del mismo modo que el negro Yin siempre alumbra un punto de blanco Yang en lo más profundo, el frío, el hielo y la oscuridad han tendido a forjar razas humanas de luz y de fuego. ¿Mejoró el hielo a la humanidad? En los climas cálidos, el sustento diario no es difícil de conseguir. Darle una patada a un cocotero, arrancar un tubérculo, recoger unas nueces y cazar animales de tamaño modesto, no supone un estímulo evolutivo demasiado grande. Entre los cazadores-recolectores actuales de las zonas calurosas del planeta, hay mucho tiempo libre y no se trabaja demasiado. Sin embargo, en las proximidades del frente glacial, en Europa y en Siberia, las condiciones de vida eran muy distintas y no perdonaban la más mínima negligencia. Miles de individuos debieron morir de hipotermia y con los miembros gangrenados por el frío. Las comunidades humanas supervivientes se vieron obligadas a adaptarse renovando su código genético, o perecer. Tanto la presión selectiva como los efectos metabólicos ejercidos por el frío extremo, son los motivos por los que, tanto en el Paleolítico como en la actualidad, las capacidades craneales más elevadas se encuentran lejos de los trópicos. Enseguida veremos por qué.
CÓMO ERA EL MUNDO DURANTE LA ÚLTIMA GLACIACIÓN
Un glaciar no es exactamente hielo o "agua congelada" tal y como la entendemos, sino más bien nieve cuya estructura ha sido transformada por enormes presiones. El progresivo peso de sucesivas capas de nieve provoca que las capas de más abajo sufran procesos de compactación que las convierten en una materia extremadamente dura, que finalmente se expande lentamente, ya en forma de lenguas glaciares canalizadas por valles montañosos, ya como frentes inmensos que cruzan las latitudes. Los glaciares más conocidos actualmente son los casquetes polares, aunque también existen glaciares en Islandia y en las mayores cadenas montañosas del mundo. En España quedan unos veinte glaciares que antiguamente formaban parte del gran glaciar pirenaico. Se concentran en el Pirineo aragonés y son los glaciares más meridionales de Europa —por ejemplo, el glaciar del Aneto (100 hectáreas), el de Monte Perdido o el de Los Infiernos.
Antes de explicar por qué unos simples ríos y mares de hielo, conjugados con bajas temperaturas, favorecen la evolución, no está de más dar unas pinceladas que muestren por encima cómo era nuestro mundo durante la glaciación de Würm.
• Actualmente, aproximadamente el 10% del planeta está cubierto por el hielo; durante la última glaciación, llegó al 30%.
• En los sistemas montañosos, la cota de nieves perpetuas descendió nada menos que 900 m por debajo del nivel actual.
• El 40% de las superficies continentales de Norteamérica y Eurasia estaban cubiertas de permafrost (hielo y suelo congelado). La mayor parte de Europa era tundra y estepa fría. Había poco arbolado por encima de la línea formada por los Picos de Europa, los Pirineos y los Alpes.
Esto es el actual norte de Escandinavia, y el aspecto que debió tener la mayor parte de Europa durante los veranos (salvo la forma del valle, que es de origen glaciar). En los inviernos, todo quedaría cubierto por nieve.
• El clima era más seco (las aguas estaban acaparadas por el hielo y el frío congelaba la mayor parte de la humedad atándola al suelo). Debido a ello, las selvas tropicales se convirtieron en sabanas. Sólo subsistieron reductos selváticos en las riveras de los ríos y algunas costas ecuatoriales.
• El nivel del mar era mucho menor (unos 120-140 metros por debajo del actual), por tanto las tierras emergidas eran más extensas. Sicilia estaba unida a la Península Itálica, Chipre a Anatolia y ésta al continente europeo. Córcega y Cerdeña formaban una sola isla. Alaska y Siberia estaban comunicadas por un amplio puente. Japón formaba parte del Asia continental. Gran Bretaña e Irlanda estaban unidas al continente europeo, y el Támesis era un afluente del Rhin.
• No sólo los mantos polares (espectaculares masas de hielo que superaban en ocasiones 2 km de espesor) avanzaron hasta latitudes tan bajas como el actual centro de Alemania o el sur de Ucrania, sino que en los circos de las cordilleras montañosas se formaron inmensos sistemas glaciares que, como pulpos de hielo, inundaban los valles con sus tentáculos y se expandían hacia las zonas bajas. Países como Suiza, Austria y Chile, quedaron cubiertos de hielo.
Una vista del casquete polar antártico. Durante la última edad de hielo, los lugares donde hoy se alzan Berlín o Moscú, se encontraban muy por debajo de interminables desiertos gélidos como éste.
• Los niveles de CO2 eran mucho más bajos y por tanto el aire más puro. El clima era más seco y más continental. El viento era mucho más fuerte.
• La temperatura del Atlántico Norte nunca superó los 0 grados. En las latitudes septentrionales, las aguas de superficie llegaron a enfriarse 10 grados con respecto a la temperatura actual, algo que influía fortísimamente en las corrientes marinas, los vientos, las temperaturas y la flora y fauna terrestres. Los icebergs del manto Laurentino (Groenlandia y Norteamérica) llegaban hasta Portugal, y en la cueva de Cosquer (cerca de Marsella, en pleno Mediterráneo francés) se conservan, datadas en 20.000 años, pinturas rupestres de pingüinos de la especie impennis.
• Como regla general orientativa, las temperaturas medias globales eran aproximadamente 5º C menores que las de hoy en día. (Esta diferencia, que puede no parecer gran cosa, en realidad es inmensa. Para ilustrarla, si ascendiesen las temperaturas medias del planeta 5º más que el presente, los polos acabarían viéndose libres de hielo a largo plazo, y el nivel del mar subiría unos 70 metros). En el conjunto de las tierras del hemisferio norte, las temperaturas bajaron una media de entre 5,7 y 8,7 grados. Sin embargo, durante el último máximo glacial (hace unos 23-19.000 años), las temperaturas medias de algunas zonas (entre ellas Europa) pudieron llegar a descender hasta 15 grados por debajo de los niveles actuales. Las temperaturas medias de las zonas tropicales nunca cayeron más de 5 grados por debajo de los valores presentes.
El probable aspecto de nuestro planeta durante el último máximo glacial. Nótese la mayor extensión de las tierras emergidas. El blanco se corresponde con la extensión de los hielos, no con las zonas nevadas —éstas eran mucho mayores. En esta época, las zonas habitadas más cálidas eran el Congo africano e Indonesia. El azul representa el refugio franco-cantábrico (raza Cromagnon), el verde el Mediterráneo Oriental (probable zona de mezcla entre neandertales y "hombres modernos" según los estudios) y el rojo el refugio altaico (yacimientos de Okladnikov y Denisova, a modo orientativo).
POR QUÉ GLACIACIÓN RIMA CON EVOLUCIÓN
Lejos de provocar un estancamiento de la evolución, la glaciación hizo avanzar a toda mecha las mutaciones en el genoma humano, especialmente en las zonas más expuestas a los efectos del hielo.
• Aumenta la presión selectiva. En los climas templados, los débiles pueden subsistir, ya que la oferta de productos vegetales es muy abundante y la recolección no es una actividad física y psicológicamente demandante. Pero en los climas fríos, debido a la escasez de alimentos vegetales y la necesidad de cazar y abrigarse, aquel que no sea fuerte e ingenioso, muere. En un clima frío es imposible el típico fenómeno tercermundista de sentarse en el suelo con un taparrabos y pasarse horas y horas viendo el aire pasar; impera la acción. La voluntad humana, el comportamiento depredador y el deseo de vivir se ven intensamente estimulados.
• Obliga a llevar una alimentación cárnica. En las tundras y estepas de Europa y Asia Central, no había mucha disponibilidad de productos vegetales, lo que había era inmensos mamíferos (mamuts, bisontes, uros, etc.) que constituían una caza excelente para aquel capaz de matarlos. Como hemos visto en el anterior artículo sobre la revolución carnívora, el consumo de productos animales cocinados tuvo un papel determinante en la evolución de las razas humanas, especialmente al favorecer el desarrollo de la capacidad craneal. Los enormes avances evolutivos hechos gracias al aumento del consumo de alimentos animales en la dieta, son un efecto directísimo del frío extremo.
• (Consecuencia del punto anterior) Obliga a cazar. Y cuando digo que "obliga a cazar", me refiero no sólo a todas las cualidades estratégicas y paramilitares seleccionadas por la caza, sino también a que se adquirió una psicología de ir a arrebatar por la fuerza lo que se necesitaba para vivir: una forma de vida basada en la iniciativa y la depredación. Así como en climas meridionales la tierra era tan abundante que en cierto modo estaba todo hecho, en el Norte el pan de cada día no crecía en los árboles (literalmente), sino que era necesario superar pruebas muy arduas para acceder a él. Esto tiene una contrapartida moderna, según la cual las sociedades tropicales tienden a esperar "vivir de rentas", que alguien (generalmente el Estado o el azar) les dé gratuitamente lo que necesitan, mientras que las sociedades nórdicas tienen una mentalidad según la cual hay que trabajar y sacrificarse para merecer vivir.
• Promueve la formación de comunidades reproductivas aisladas. Una glaciación es un gran incentivo para la ramificación y diversificación de la especie, ya que los hielos tienden a aislar comunidades humanas en bolsas geográficas. Estas bolsas, cercadas por glaciares montañosos y por el casquete polar, fueron verdaderos calderos de transformación genética y alquimia evolutiva, puesto que promovieron la constitución de ramas genéticas endogámicas, capaces de mutar (y por lo tanto evolucionar) a gran velocidad.
• El frío acelera el metabolismo y fuerza al ser humano a convertirse en una verdadera central térmica mitocondrial con el objetivo de derrotar al frío. Si a esto se le une la alimentación fuertemente cárnica y se la prolonga decenas de miles de años, obtendremos una modificación profunda del metabolismo humano. La necesidad de combatir al frío probablemente fue lo que dio lugar a los primeros sistemas de respiración, yoga y alquimia interior: la balanza de la armonía dictaba que el frío exterior sólo podía ser compensado con el calor interior. El aspecto luminoso y ardiente que tienen las actuales razas nórdicas, da fe de lo intenso que fue este proceso.
• Desarrollo esquelético y muscular. Las mayores densidades y mineralizaciones esqueléticas, así como niveles de desarrollo muscular, del registro fósil paleolítico, se dan en zonas de climatología ártica y en razas humanas como el neandertal o el cromagnon. Entre los factores que contribuyeron a esto cabe señalar una mayor producción de hormona del crecimiento, mejor absorción de vitaminas A y D gracias a la despigmentación y la gran cantidad de grasas saturadas en la dieta, una alimentación basada en los productos animales, y un metabolismo mucho más activo. En el caso de algunas razas neandertales y de la raza nordico-roja, su baja estatura y gran corpulencia los ayudó a disminuir la relación entre masa y superficie corporal, para evitar la pérdida de calor.
• Los inviernos despiadados fuerzan a planificar, a pensar en el futuro y a anticiparse a los acontecimientos (por ejemplo en lo que respecta al almacenamiento y administración de víveres), a desarrollar una mayor comprensión del mundo que rodea al hombre, a acumular conocimientos vitales en forma de tradiciones perdurables, a no relajarse ante la bonanza y a buscar el beneficio común a largo plazo antes que la gratificación individual inmediata. Por todos estos motivos, la cualidades que sin duda resultaron más potenciadas en los territorios más afectados por la glaciación fueron la inteligencia, la disciplina, la sencillez, el altruismo, la dureza y la fuerza de voluntad.
• Aumenta la capacidad craneal. El volumen endocraneal relativo humano (unos 25 cc por kg de masa corporal) es más del doble que el de los simios. El papel que ha tenido el frío en esto ha sido obligarnos a comer carne como ya hemos visto, pero hay otros factores. La neotenia (conservación del aspecto juvenil) provocada por el frío prolonga la duración de la infancia, cosa que a su vez parece repercute en el desarrollo cerebral. Beals, Smith y Dodd, 1983, relacionan el frío con la capacidad craneal. Es posible que el hecho de tener la cabeza fría haya forzado al cerebro a convertirse en una central energética "caliente". Gordon G. Gallup Jr., profesor de biopsicología evolutiva, notó que, en el registro fósil, las capacidades craneales aumentan cuanto mayor es la distancia del ecuador [3].
• Despigmentación. La melanina bloquea el paso de la luz solar hacia el interior del cuerpo, por ello perderla es una ventaja en zonas donde el sol brilla poco y/o donde es necesario ir fuertemente abrigado limitando la superficie de exposición de la piel a la luz solar. La luz del sol, penetrando en la piel y los ojos, actúa para favorecer la producción de vitamina D, que a su vez repercute fuertemente en la absorción de minerales y la densidad esquelética. La falta de luz tiene otros interesantes efectos. Los hinduistas enseñan que el "sexto chakra" (el "tercer ojo" de los budistas), hallado en el centro de la cabeza a la altura del entrecejo, se ve estimulado por la oscuridad. Actualmente sabemos que la glándula pituitaria (concretamente la adenohipófisis), hallada en el centro del cerebro, es sensible a las variaciones de luz llegada vía óptica y que libera MSH, una hormona que estimula los melanóforos de la piel (células encargadas de producir pigmento). Otras interesantes sustancias producidas por esta glándula son la dopamina y la hormona del crecimiento. En lo tocante a la influencia de la luz, es muy revelador que las razas humanas de menor inteligencia se hayan formado en zonas fuertemente luminosas.
• Inhibición del envejecimiento. Observando a las razas más antiguas (por ejemplo, a los bosquimanos, con influencia racial khoisánida) es muy interesante ver cómo sus tejidos parecen envejecer con mucha facilidad, ofreciendo un aspecto seco y arrugado a muy temprana edad. Sin embargo, las razas modernas tienen una muy pronunciada neotenia y preservan muy bien su juventud incluso hasta edades muy avanzadas. A la vez, se trata de razas menos precoces que las tropicales y de maduración mucho más lenta. ¿A qué se debe que el frío parezca inhibir el envejecimiento? Está claro que el calor favorece la descomposición y que el frío actúa como "nevera" alargando la vida de la materia orgánica, pero hay otros factores. Acabamos de ver cómo la estimulación de la glándula pituitaria tiene como efecto la liberación de hormona del crecimiento, una hormona que quema grasa, aumenta la densidad muscular y ósea y preserva la juventud de los tejidos corporales, también hemos visto cómo el frío combate la depresión del metabolismo, que es una de las cosas que causan la vejez. Existe otra hormona estimulada por la oscuridad y que solemos producir durante el sueño: la melatonina. La melatonina es producida por la glándula pineal —que se encuentra justo por encima de la pituitaria. Se trata de una hormona que aclara la piel (es la que le prescribieron a Michael Jackson durante su antinatural transformación) y que retrasa el envejecimiento del organismo, además de favorecer la regularidad de los ciclos de sueño-vigilia (se considera eficaz contra el jet-lag y el insomnio). Es interesante ver cómo en la mitología hindú, tanto el soma como el amrita, bebidas de la inmortalidad y la juventud eterna, son obtenidas respectivamente de lo alto de una montaña nevada y de un "océano de leche" (un mar helado o glaciar) [4]. Estas ideas, arraigadas en la psique colectiva de pueblos enteros, vendrían a confirmar hasta cierto punto ese papel simbólico del hielo como factor de preservación, estatismo y perennidad.
El desarrollo del sistema bioeléctrico y de las glándulas pituitaria y pineal son quizás los efectos evolutivos más desconocidos y menos investigados del frío y la escasez de luz. Actualmente sabemos que entre la frente y la glándula pituitaria hay cristales de magnetita sensibles a las oscilaciones del campo electromagnético del entorno, de otros seres vivos, del planeta y de otros cuerpos celestes, y que son responsables de la percepción intuitiva y la "visión psíquica".
• Ionización negativa. En el artículo sobre venenos cotidianos vimos lo importante que era la ionización para el equilibrio bioeléctrico humano. Los lugares calientes, con aires cargados de efluvios, polvo o humedad, tienen mayor proporción de perjudiciales iones positivos, con lo cual el contraste electromagnético entre el suelo (tierra) y la atmósfera (cielo) es menor, la frontera entre ambos se encuentra difuminada y mezclada, y por tanto el flujo vertical de la energía (gradiente de voltaje) se ve limitado. Por el contrario, los aires de los lugares fríos y secos tienen mayor proporción de beneficiosos iones negativos, ya que el polvo y la humedad, factores de ionización positiva, se quedan congelados y pegados al suelo. Por este motivo, en tales lugares, el contraste eléctrico entre positivo y negativo, era más pronunciado. Durante la última glaciación, el sur de Europa y especialmente de Siberia, tenían las climatologías más frías y más secas de cualquier territorio paleolítico habitado, por lo cual eran con toda probabilidad las atmósferas más cargadas de ionización negativa.
• Alineación del campo magnético de la tierra con el humano, mejora del sistema bioeléctrico. Este factor no está relacionado con el frío, sino con la latitud. La tierra tiene un polo positivo (el norte) y otro negativo (el sur), y los minerales magnéticos tienden a alinearse con el inmenso campo magnético formado entre ambos. De tal modo, dichos minerales toman una postura horizontal cerca del ecuador y más vertical cerca de los polos. El cuerpo humano también tiene un campo electromagnético, cuyo polo positivo Yang está en el centro de la cabeza, y cuyo polo negativo Yin está en el centro del vientre. Su disposición es vertical. Por este motivo, en las latitudes más árticas, el campo electromagnético humano está mejor alineado con el campo electromagnético de la Tierra, algo que se armoniza con el sistema bioeléctrico humano. En esta compleja red de relaciones también entra de nuevo la glándula pituitaria, ya que entre ella y el entrecejo existen células sensibles a los campos magnéticos. Estas unidades son las responsables del campo magnético de la raíz de la nariz y el entrecejo, una zona predilecta de la hipnosis.
La runa Is (hielo) representaba el hielo como lo estático, lo gestador, lo inmortal y preservador. La hibernación, lo portador de vida latente, lo incorruptible y vertical del ser frente a la descomposición y despilfarramiento horizontal del devenir. Actualmente sabemos que los minerales magnéticos se alinean con el campo magnético de la tierra, y que tienden a la horizontalidad (nivelación, muerte, igualdad) cerca del ecuador y a la verticalidad (jerarquía, distinción, vida) en los polos.
• El frío, la nieve, el hielo, también dejan una marca psicológica profunda. Hoy en día la calefacción nos aísla del frío, hay muy pocos individuos que se vean sometidos a las mismas condiciones ambientales que nuestros lejanos antepasados, y cuando lo hacen es bien protegidos por materiales de última generación. Muchas personas pasan vidas enteras sin conocer la desesperación de un frío prolongado del cual no se puede escapar ni esconderse. Actualmente los montañeros invernales más experimentados probablemente se hagan una idea de lo que supone desplazarse, cazar, dormir y sobrevivir ("más que vivir") en semejantes condiciones, y de la huella que deja en la mente para siempre.
BALANCE A 12.000 AÑOS DE LA DESGLACIACIÓN
Ahora nos encontramos en una época de retroceso de los glaciares, mientras que avanza otro tipo de hielo, gris y sucio, que ahora lo mezcla y lo devora todo cual agujero negro: el glaciar urbano. Sin embargo, durante todo el Cuaternario (época geológica en la cual nos encontramos), las épocas glaciales han venido durando en torno a 100.000 años, mientras que los interglaciares han solido durar en torno a 10.000. El período interglaciar actual, llamado Holoceno, ha durado ya 12.000 años. Lo normal es que en un futuro ocurra otra arremetida del hielo y el frente polar vuelva a dirigirse al ecuador. La teoría de Gea sostiene que la Tierra y toda su biomasa conforman una entidad capaz de auto-reajustarse. Si actualmente la actividad humana está provocando graves trastornos, según la teoría de Gea, la Tierra tendrá que reaccionar para reestablecer el correcto equilibrio.
Por otro lado, no cabe duda de que las condiciones benévolas estropean al hombre y provocan el estancamiento de su evolución, tal y como les pasó a los homínidos menos carnívoros, que no persiguieron a las manadas de animales durante la gran migración del Homo erectus fuera de África. Las temperaturas suaves y las diversas comodidades de la civilización humana están produciendo verdaderos monstruos psicofísicos, y si volver a la glaciación no es posible, al menos se debería lograr una civilización que no perjudicase al genoma humano con su falta de selección natural y de severidad.
Reminiscencias de la última edad de hielo: mucho antes de que Napoleón y Hitler luchasen y perdiesen contra el poder irresistible del frío y del hielo para cambiar el destino del mundo para siempre, nuestros antepasados ya lo hicieron y triunfaron, resultando en un enorme empujón a la evolución humana. Este signo es una runa Heil o Hagal —la estructura de los cristales de hielo y los copos de nieve.
NOTAS
[1] M. J. Drake (2005). "Origin of water in the terrestrial planets", Meteoritics & Planetary Science, 40, 515–656. Más información sobre la procedencia del agua terrestre aquí. Ver también aquí y aquí.
[2] Los hindúes tenían a Yama, un rey primigenio, y el "Avesta" iranio hablaba de Yima, el hombre primordial perfecto, que vivía en Aryana Vaeyo, la patria de los arios.
[3] "Human Nature", Vol. 18, Issue 2, 2007, Transaction Publishers. Más info sobre la correlación entre frío y capacidad craneal en "Brain size, cranial morphology, climate and time machines", Kenneth N. Beals, Courtland L. Smith y Stephen M. Dodd, Current Anthropology, Vol. 25, No. 3, June 1984. (Click aquí).
[4] Los hindúes explicaban la existencia de Svetadvipa, una "Isla Blanca", equivalente a la Thule germánica o la Avalon céltica, que se encontraba en el extremo norte. Se describe su situación como "más allá del océano de leche", cosa que, sabiendo que está en el Norte, hace pensar en el Mar Ártico o en el casquete polar.
[X] Sobre las particularidades de las glaciaciones, recomendado leer Historia del clima de la Tierra, de Antón Uriarte.
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