Reply to Jeet Heer

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Jeet Heer wrote:
> Dear Louis Proyect,
>
> Thank you for your detailed and thoughtful response to my article.
> However, I have to say that I think you mis-understood my intent with
> this article. I wasn't trying to say that all Trotskyist become
> apologist for American imperialism or that there is a direct link
> between Trotsky and the Iraq War. In fact, I explicitly quoted from
> Chrisopher Phelps so that readers would understand that the trajectory
> of people like Shachtman can be seen as a "rupture" and an "abandonment
> of the left." This article is part of a series I'm doing on pro-war
> intellectuals. In previous articles I dealt with neo-Imperialists and
> Straussians. I thought it was worth noting that some of the pro-war
> intellectuals come from a Trotskyist background and explain the
> historical roots of this tendency. Also, in interviewing people like
> Berman and Schwartz I found that they themselves believe that their are
> aspects of the Left Opposition tradition that go into their support for
> the war. BUT by including the voice of Phelps, I hoped to indicate that
> there is nothing inevitable about this tendency. As I wrote to someone
> else, if I had more room I would have discussed people like James
> Cannon, Julius Jacobson or Hal Draper, who avoided the trap of
> supporting Washington. I regret not mentioning such people but as it
> stands, I think my article did an adequate job of explaining an
> important and interesting political tendency, one which the left should
> spend time studying and opposing. Jeet Heer

Well, look, Jeet. I can understand all this if we simply ignored the
body of your article and relied on the boneheaded title assigned it by
some editor:

"Trotsky's ghost wandering the White House; Influence on Bush aides:
Bolshevik's writings supported the idea of pre-emptive war"

I've seen this tendency at work at places like the NY Times where some
honest reporter files a report from benighted 3rd world country about
rapidly escalating infant mortality rates only to discover that an
editor had pasted a title like "Situation Improving in Frajistan" upon it.

But these are your exact words:

"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."

So what work of Trotsky was an intellectual influence on the dreadful
Kanan Makiya? Could it have been the interview he gave to an Argentine
journalist on September 23, 1938 in which he defended a "fascist" Brazil
against a "democratic" Great Britain?

>>In order to understand correctly the nature of the coming events we
must first of all reject ... the false ... theory that the coming war
will be a war between fascism and  "democracy." ... I will take the most
simple and obvious example. In Brazil there now reigns a semifascist
regime that every revolutionary can only view with hatred. Let us
assume, however, that on the morrow England enters into a military
conflict with Brazil. I ask you on whose side of that conflict will the
working class be?  I will answer for myself personally -- in this case I
will be on the side of "fascist" Brazil against "democratic" Great
Britain.  Why?   Because in the conflict between them it will not be a
question of democracy or fascism. If England should be victorious, she
will put another fascist in Rio de Janeiro and will place double chains
in Brazil. If Brazil on the contrary should be victorious, it will give
a mighty impulse to national and democratic consciousness of the country
and will lead to the overthrow of the Vargas dictatorship.<<

Or might it be the letter wrote to an English comrade on April 22, 1936
which not only defended feudal Ethiopia against capitalist Italy, but
was full of praise for the Negus, ie. Haile Selassie, who made Saddam
Hussein look like Martin Luther King Jr. by comparison, and contained
the remarkable formulation that "A dictator can also play a very
progressive role in history".

Indeed, the Trotsky of history has much more in common with the reviled
Ramsey Clark and WWP than he does with the Cruise Missle "leftists" you
falsely linked him with.


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