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By Mark D, February 7, 2011 8:14 am

Yesterday would have been the 100th Birthday of Ronald Reagan. For someone who is celebrated for “Fighting the Communists and winning the cold war” the Right has done everything they can to make him into Stalin’s Lenin. You see, since Stalin basically declared Lenin infallible after his death, but Stalin and Lenin didn’t always see eye to eye. So when Stalin was fighting with the Left Opposition (Trostky/Kamanev/Zinoviev) he would have Lenin’s works edited to fit what he was saying/doing. When Stalin was fighting the Right Opposition (Bukharin) he had Lenin’s works edited again to match his new views. As time went on Lenin’s work and word was continually edited by Stalin’s henchmen even when the internal struggles were over.

And so the Right continues to heap praise upon Reagan, while twisting what he actually said and did to fit the message they want him to fit. Since they fight now to “Lower Taxes” Reagan is now the Patron Saint of lowering taxes. Unfortunately the reality is that he raised taxes quite a bit during his administration. Not only that, but he tended to shift taxes from the Rich to the Poor when he did lower taxes.

Let’s not forget the great many foreign policy moves by him too. Death Squads in Central America, 5 billion dollars believed to have been spent on El Salvador, support for Saddam, support for the Jihadists who were fighting the Soviets who ended up becoming the base of Osama Bin Laden, Support for the Doc and Baby Doc regime in Haiti while refusing entry for Haitian refugees who were sent back to Haiti to certain death, his Veto on the South African Anti-Apartheid bill which was thankfully overridden by Congress and the 138 Reagan officials convicted, indicted, or named in investigations of official misconduct or criminal acts.

From top to bottom, the Reagan administration was probably one of the worst. It’s believed that one of the reasons George W. Bush extended the classified documents of the Reagan administration is that it would be discovered that Reagan’s people made a deal with Iran to not negotiate with Carter so Reagan had a better shot at winning the election. Let’s not forget that Reagan’s people ran arms to Iran (who were under an arms Embargo you know the whole Iraq/Iran War with the USA helping Iraq) in order to fund their Nicaraguan allies (which congress had already voted against). So to believe that Reagan’s people might have had a few discussions with the Iranians about the hostages isn’t far fetched.

There’s also the destruction of Labor Unions with the Air Traffic Controllers strike and the subsequent firing of 13,000 union employees by the FAA. This was the kickoff to the eroding of the power of Labor Unions in America, and when you consider that Unions weren’t all that powerful to begin with, that’s not a good sign. Even if you despise Unions, the weakening of Unions since the 1980s due to this is something that hurts everyone in the long run. If there aren’t better jobs out there, it’s the average worker that suffers.

Ronald Reagan was no saint, and how he has been almost beautified since then is one of the oddities of American Politics. Although one might argue that the short attention span, the complete misinterpretation of history, the disregard for other and not considering the long term consequences of your actions are perfect examples of American politics. Only in America could Republicans be given 8 long years to ruin the country, only to have control mostly returned to them after allowing the Democrats all of 2 years to fix things.

I almost forgot about the War On Drugs. The greatest waste of money and human life until the Second Iraq war came around. Its not about stopping the big drug pushers and helping addicts to recover. For the most part it’s the addicts who end up in jail with no hope while the pushers remain on the street. There’s no program for these people once they get out of jail either, so it just becomes a huge cycle. Let’s not forget the racist overtones in most of the anti-drug laws, crack cocaine will get someone a lot more time then just plain cocaine. It isn’t surprising then to discover that there are more black people in prison then in college. It seems like all of Reagan’s wars were nothing but heartache for the American people. His greatest victory was due more to Gorbachev realizing the Soviet system needed reform then anything Washington did.

Even more shockingly is that before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev had twice offered to Reagan for both sides to disarm and destroy all Nuclear weapons. You know those rolling stocks of Nuclear Weapons in Russia that are poorly defended and might be the source of future trouble? They would be gone. 40 years of living under the possibility of Nuclear Holocaust could have all been ended. But instead Reagan twice turned down Gorbachev’s offer (most likely due to Reagan’s ties to the Military Industrial Complex) and now we have to fear insurgents getting their hands on some of the Russians nuclear armament.

There’s also the disgusting change in opinion on the right following Reagan’s death. They were against Stem Cell research because I guess people were going to purposely get abortions so they could give up the fetus to be researched. But since stem cell research is believed to have a possibility of curing Alzheimer’s disease (which Reagan suffered from) suddenly the right change their minds about stem cell research. It kind of makes you wish that more prominent people on the right would get struck by a horrible disease so they might speed up research in those fields too.

Was Reagan a horrible demon from hell? No, but he wasn’t the saint the Right is making him out to be. With how often the right calls out the memory of Stalin, you think they would be able to look in the mirror and see that they are doing the same thing with Reagan. Instead we just have to sit in the back of the class and snicker at how they appropriate his memory and make him into something he’s not.

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By Mark D, November 25, 2010 3:27 pm

Oh, and this video is beyond awesome

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By Mark D, August 25, 2010 3:18 pm

Leon Trotsky

For forty-three years of my conscious life I have remained a revolutionist; for forty-two of them I have fought under the banner of Marxism. If I had to begin all over again I would of course try to avoid this or that mistake, but the main course of my life would remain unchanged. I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist. My faith in the communist future of mankind is not less ardent, indeed it is firmer today, than it was in the days of my youth.

Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.

So reads the ending of Leon Trotsky’s last will and testament. To find him still believing after everything he’s been through his amazing. His whole family was basically wiped out except for a single grandson. Even those who had nothing to do with him like his sister and her family was slaughtered by Stalin. Can you imagine living your whole life with one dream, finally making that dream happen, only to find it corrupted? And then your family killed? Eventually Stalin managed to kill Trotsky in Mexico. But in that time Trotsky was pretty much the most feared man on the planet. After his exile he time and time again was refused entry to nations due to his history as commander/creator of the Red Army.

My knowledge of Trotsky started when I was younger. One night I pretended to sleep while one of my parents watched the Animal Farm British Animated Film:

Animal Farm

I quickly got interested in Snowball and never forgot about the movie. As I got older and went through years of catholic school, the constant bashing of communism left me intrigued. Eventually I read the communist manifesto and started reading more into communist history. Around the same time I also was required to read Animal Farm for the first time. I immediately recognized it as the movie I had seen when I was younger.

This time though, I was able to recognize Snowball as Trotsky and started reading up more about Trotsky. Especially his own works and those of Lenin. It’s amazing that the pre-revolution disagreements between Lenin and Trotsky that it was Lenin who came to agree with Trotsky’s vision. It is unfortunate that these old disagreements between the two (and despite Lenin trying to name Trotsky as his successor on 3 occasions) were used to run Trotsky out of power.

Trotsky lived an amazing life. Ironically his early pen name was Antid Otto or “The Pen” but while being held for his actions in the 1905 Russian Revolution, he took the extremely conservative guards name as his new pen name. Another interesting scene in his life involves his attempt to return to Russia following the February Revolution. Returning from New York, he got stopped in Canada and was put in a POW camp. After a week or two of rabble rousing in the POW camp the German officers requested that Trotsky be removed from camp. And so during the Great War both the Germans and British agreed that Trotsky was dangerous. I can not recommend enough the “Prophet Trilogy” by Isaac Deutscher as being one of the greatest biography’s I’ve read. If I ever had the money I would love to turn it into a film.

Today many of Trotsky’s works still ring as true today as when he first wrote them. The world today would be drastically different had the power struggle between Trotsky and Stalin ended up differently. At the very least one can picture Trotsky’s belief in permanent revolution changing the history of Germany. Trotsky’s exile and inter war writings point towards a united front to fight Fascism. Meanwhile Stalin would claim that the Socialists where the real fascists and didn’t allow the Communists and Socialists to work together until it was too late. Or even worse, in Spain where he changed his mind about such an alliance and cost the Republicans the war.

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By Mark D, July 14, 2010 5:35 pm

To Whom It May Concern

Could you please read a History Textbook? I understand that it’s easy to look at Hitler as a National Socialist and Lenin as a Marxist Socialist in order to scare people when you say Obama is a Socialist. Hitler was actually against the name National Socialist and wanted to name the party the “Social Revolutionary Party”.  To quote from the Nazi Party entry from Wikipedia (yes, I hate using it but it’s easy).

Unlike Drexler and other party members, Hitler was less interested in the “socialist” aspect of “national socialism” beyond moving Social Welfare administration from the Church to the State.

While Hitler would preach a revolution from below to the working class, he would quietly assure his rich backers that no such revolution was coming. Meanwhile, Ernst Rohm, leader of the Brownshirts (or SA) had the utmost belief in not only a revolution from below but that his SA would replace the professional army. As Rohm stirred up trouble after Hitler was named Chancellor he was eventually eliminated during the Knight of the Long Knives.

Although today the German Concentration Camps are remembered for the deaths of millions of Jews. But it might surprise people to learn that the first such Nazi Concentration Camp was setup for Communists and Social Democrats who might resist the Nazi regime. From the press release on the opening of Dachau the first such camp

On Wednesday the first concentration camp is to be opened in Dachau with an accommodation for 5000 persons. ‘All Communists and—where necessary—Reichsbanner and Social Democratic functionaries who endanger state security are to be concentrated here, as in the long run it is not possible to keep individual functionaries in the state prisons without overburdening these prisons, and on the other hand these people cannot be released because attempts have shown that they persist in their efforts to agitate and organise as soon as they are released

So while you may look to vilify Obama, the comparisons of Obama to both Hitler and Lenin (or Stalin) make you look rather silly and clueless to the reality of history. While Hitler’s party might share the word Socialist in it’s name with other Socialist movements it is quite obvious that Hitler never had any intentions to fulfill his “socialist” promises.

Although Lenin may have set up the machinery which Stalin eventually turned the Soviet Union into a dictatorship and a cult of personality of himself, Lenin clearly planned for a much more democratic future. It can not be forgotten that the Reds not only had to deal with a Civil War sponsored by the capitalist nations but invasions from the French, British, United States and Japanese. To blame the Soviets for the starvation and failure of democracy in the nation after facing such odds is to ignore history.

But this is not a rant about the Russian Civil War and Foreign Intervention. But the intentions of the Bolsheviks should be clear from the Russian Constitution of 1918. Firstly, it gave women the right to vote a full two years before the 19th Amendment would be passed in the United States. The Soviet’s at least had good intentions, but the Civil War and the failure to realize the threat that Stalin was lead to it’s failure.

So please, in the future when your screaming about Obama being a “Nazi Communist” understand that quite simply the two words you are putting together (Since you tend to be baby boomers who lived through the Cold War and thus picture “The Enemy” as Communists or Fascists) do not go together at all. I as an Obama supporter (no, I’m not out there campaigning for him, but I at least like him better then the last President) could easily poke a bunch of holes in his campaign platform and his promises without bringing up Nazis, Communists, Fascists or anything of their ilk. Please read a history book or at least read some of Wikipedia so you know what you are talking about.

Best Wishes,
Mark