"Trotsky lived on after Stalin, and to some extent is still alive today, not because young people want the world he wanted: a phantasm that not even he could define. What they want is to be him."
posted on Nov 11, 2007 - View this thread

Is George Bush to Stalin as Irving Kristol is to Trotsky? When will we start hearing these sorts of claims from the right?
posted on Jul 3, 2006 - View this thread

Shades of Stalin's pre-Photoshop erasing of Trotsky from history: Joanne Amos admits to Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall that her GOP-friendly company, Reflections Photography, scrubbed images of President Bush with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff from both their online archive and CD record of official events. [Photos previously discussed here.]
posted on Jan 26, 2006 - View this thread

She interviewed Mussolini. She wrote plays for Eugene O'Neill's Provincetown Players. She got letters from Trotsky. Freud and Helen Keller were in her address book. She married journalist John Reed, and Diane Keaton played her in Reds. And she was nearly forgotten. Now, Louise Bryant is remembered. More here and much more here.
posted on Nov 9, 2005 - View this thread

Pliny's Natural History, the first encyclopedia. Featuring chapters like "Other wonderful things related to dolphins" and one mentioning the lynx and the sphinx in a single passage. Obviously he got a lot very wrong, but it launched a tradition of authoritative encyclopedias. More recently, you hopefully know that the forty-four million word eleventh (1911) edition of Encyclopedia Britannica is online, later volumes are not, but you can still find elsewhere Trotsky's article on Lenin, Freud's on psychoanalysis, Houdini on conjuring, or Lawrence of Arabia on guerillas. Britannica also offers a series of articles from its archives showing how views on Mars or the debate in 1768 over whether California was an island. Other fascinating encyclopedias online include the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia and the 1908 Catholic Encyclopedia, and the Encyclopedia Mythica.
posted on Jul 5, 2005 - View this thread

Please read what Trotsky thought of fascism from his pamphlet "FASCISM -- What It Is and How To Fight It". I'm much more interested in the "What It Is". This article from the Guerrilla News Network got me thinking about it. Trotsky does a lot of the definition here. The foreward by George Lavan Weissman contains such gems as:

The germ of fascism is endemic in capitalism; a crisis can raise it to epidemic proportions unless drastic countermeasures are applied.

and from elsewhere:

In order that the social crisis may bring about the proletarian revolution, it is necessary that, besides other conditions, a decisive shift of the petty bourgeois classes occurs in the direction of the proletariat. This gives the proletariat a chance to put itself at the head of the nation as its leader.

Oh MAN. I'm more fearful than normal about where the US is headed. And to throw some water on the flames, yes, I know that there isn't any systemic violence against the masses, but think of how the fear that's created by the administration takes the place of violence in cowing the populace.
posted on Apr 22, 2003 - View this thread

Ethical and religious perspectives on war and peace. While most of the discussions have focused political perspectives of the current conflict, there are quite a few ethical and religious perspectives. A BBC website provides excellent overview of the positions including the various types of pacifism and just war. For more detail there is a nice index site on Anabaptist- Mennonite nonresistance, Leon Trotsky's Marxist critique of pacifism, a secular argument for pacifism, a Christian Primer on Just War, an atheist ethical perspective, and a buddhist perspective.
posted on Mar 24, 2003 - View this thread