Comments on a Jeet Heer article

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

(Jeet Heer is a Canadian journalist, who linked Trotsky to Paul 
Wolfowitz in a National Post article recently. These are comments on 
selected paragraphs from his piece that can be read in its entirety at: 
http://www.nationalpost.com/search/site/story.asp?id=EC4AD553-8A1D-4324-8D37-A99B2DFF9F85)

JEET HEER:
As evidence of the continuing intellectual influence of Trotsky, 
consider the curious fact that some of the books about the Middle East 
crisis that are causing the greatest stir were written by thinkers 
deeply shaped by the tradition of the Fourth International.

In seeking advice about Iraqi society, members of the Bush 
administration (notably Paul D. Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of 
Defence, and Dick Cheney, the Vice-President) frequently consulted Kanan 
Makiya, an Iraqi-American intellectual whose book The Republic of Fear 
is considered to be the definitive analysis of Saddam Hussein's 
tyrannical rule.

As the journalist Christopher Hitchens notes, Makiya is "known to 
veterans of the Trotskyist movement as a one-time leading Arab member of 
the Fourth International." When speaking about Trotskyism, Hitchens has 
a voice of authority. Like Makiya, Hitchens is a former Trotskyist who 
is influential in Washington circles as an advocate for a militantly 
interventionist policy in the Middle East. Despite his leftism, Hitchens 
has been invited into the White House as an ad hoc consultant.

COMMENT:
If Makiya's "Republic of Fear" has anything to do with Trotskyism, 
except the fact that the author spent some time in the movement as a 
youth, then one presumes that Saul Bellow's racist screed "Mr. Sammler's 
Planet" must also be linked with Leon Trotsky as well, since Bellow also 
spent a brief time in the Trotskyist movement. For that matter, one 
might link orthodox Judaism with Trotskyism since Isaac Deutscher and I 
were both bar mitzvahed and ate kosher through adolescence.

JEET HEER:
Other supporters of the Iraq war also have a Trotsky-tinged past. On the 
left, the historian Paul Berman, author of a new book called Terror and 
Liberalism, has been a resonant voice among those who want a more 
muscular struggle against Islamic fundamentalism. Berman counts the 
Trotskyist C.L.R. James as a major influence. Among neo-conservatives, 
Berman's counterpart is Stephen Schwartz, a historian whose new book, 
The Two Faces of Islam, is a key text among those who want the United 
States to sever its ties with Saudi Arabia. Schwartz spent his formative 
years in a Spanish Trotskyist group.

COMMENT:
Just because Paul Berman claims that CLR James was an influence, there 
is no reason to take him at his word. By the same token, George W. Bush 
claims that Jesus Christ influences his policies, when any sensible 
person understands that the White House owes much more to Joseph 
Goebbels. Berman is a rigid anti-Communist. During the 1980s he used his 
Village Voice bully pulpit to castigate the Sandinista government in 
terms similar to Oliver North. CLR James was a revolutionary; Paul 
Berman was and is a liberal no matter who he mistakenly thinks 
"influenced" him. In fact, his latest book simply puts forward his 
liberal prejudices in unambiguous terms as the title suggests: "Terror 
and Liberalism" (he is for liberalism).

JEET HEER:
To this day, Schwartz speaks of Trotsky affectionately as "the old man" 
and "L.D." (initials from Trotsky's birth name, Lev Davidovich 
Bronstein). "To a great extent, I still consider myself to be [one of 
the] disciples of L.D," he admits, and he observes that in certain 
Washington circles, the ghost of Trotsky still hovers around. At a party 
in February celebrating a new book about Iraq, Schwartz exchanged banter 
with Wolfowitz about Trotsky, the Moscow Trials and Max Shachtman.

"I've talked to Wolfowitz about all of this," Schwartz notes. "We had 
this discussion about Shachtman. He knows all that stuff, but was never 
part of it. He's definitely aware." The yoking together of Paul 
Wolfowitz and Leon Trotsky sounds odd, but a long and tortuous history 
explains the link between the Bolshevik left and the Republican right.

COMMENT:
I would not take anything that Schwartz says seriously. There is not a 
single political or religious sect that he has not dipped his big toe 
in, from Trotskyism, anarchism, and "libertarian socialism" on the left, 
to Buckleyite conservatism on the right. He is now a devout Sufi Muslim, 
a faith that he has latched on to in the course of moving to the Balkans 
to rediscover his Jewish identity. The old Jewish saying would apply to 
Schwartz: "A chazer bleibt a chazer." (A pig remains a pig.)

JEET HEER:
To understand how some Trotskyists ended up as advocates of U.S. 
expansionism, it is important to know something about Max Shachtman, 
Trotsky's controversial American disciple. Shachtman's career provides 
the definitive template of the trajectory that carries people from the 
Left Opposition to support for the Pentagon.

COMMENT:
The rest of Heer's article spells out the connections between people 
like Paul Berman and Max Shachtman, which of course has more than a 
grain of truth. But this has less to do with Shachtman's connections to 
Trotsky than his *break* with Trotsky. In a very real sense, Shachtman 
is the spiritual and ideological father not only to those who spent 30 
seconds in the Trotskyist movement, but to Michael Berubé, Todd Gitlin, 
Eric Alterman, Leo Casey, Stanley Aronowitz, and dozens of other 1960s 
and 70s radicals and left-liberals who have learned to worship the 
American flag since 9/11. But then again, the blame might not be put 
totally on Shachtman's shoulders. It would probably make sense to 
connect the Cruise Missile left to its true progenitors, namely the 
trade union bureaucrats, intelligentsia and parliamentarians of the 
Second International who backed their own bourgeoisie in WWI. Of course, 
Lenin and Trotsky broke with these traitors back in 1914 and Trotsky 
himself never betrayed his own principles until his death. In his fight 
with Max Shachtman and James Burnham over how to characterize the USSR 
after the Stalin-Hitler pact, Trotsky was faced with the same kind of 
liberal prejudices and inability to think in class terms that was on 
display when a large swath of the left, including some "Marxists" 
cheered on NATO's war against the Serbs. His words seem as timely as ever:

"It is necessary to call things by their right names. Now that the 
positions of both factions in the struggle have become determined with 
complete clearness, it must be said that the minority of the National 
Committee is leading a typical petty-bourgeois tendency. Like any 
petty-bourgeois group inside the socialist movement, the present 
opposition is characterized by the following features: a disdainful 
attitude toward theory and an inclination toward eclecticism; disrespect 
for the tradition of their own organization; anxiety for personal 
"independence" at the expense of anxiety for objective truth; 
nervousness instead of consistency; readiness to jump from one position 
to another…"

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