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By Mark D, April 2, 2011 3:47 pm

So this is sort of a followup to my post about the Wayseers. People have asked who influenced me, or who have inspired me. Personally most of these people are people I found through searching and reading. Someone didn’t just pop into my life one day and say here’s who you should be interested in. A lot of my anarchist leanings come from when I was young, one day I told my mom I hated rules. She said if there wasn’t any rules, someone could just walk in and kill you. I always wondered why someone would want to walk in and kill me. Why can’t we all just work together as human beings and all share and share alike. To this day I don’t understand how it doesn’t happen, considering that so much wealth in America is concentrated between so few people. The top 1% of society controls over 50% of all wealth in this country. But that’s a tangent for another day. These are my heroes who I believe are overlooked or not recognized.

Leon Trotsky

I’ve made my love for Trotsky known. I’ve read as many of his works as I could, including  the great Biography on him by Isaac Duetscher. It has always been a wonder to me what could have been if not for Stalin. Of course Trotsky could have become an even worse butcher then Stalin, but there is still that dream, that hope. Trotsky was a revolutionary to the end, outlawed by every nation on the planet but Mexico. His whole family killed one by one by Stalin’s agents until they finally got to him. An interesting tidbit is that when he headed back to Russia following the first Revolution which had disposed the Tsar, his boat was stopped in Canada and he was put in an Allied POW camp. After a few days of rabble rousing among the Kaiser’s men, the German officers were begging the Allies to get him out of there, which the Allies agreed to and shipped him off.

Voltairine De Cleyre

One of the great American Anarchists (of which there are many due to our unique spirits) she is also one of many members of the woman’s rights movement (much like colleague Emma Goldman) pushed aside to instead honor Susan B Anthony. It’s one of many examples on this list of people who weren’t honored for their hard work while others were because they worked within the system. Infamously Voltarine’s life was cut short by an attempted assassination. She stood by her teachings and refused to have the attempted assassin tried for a crime. She is a great gem that appears to be lost to history, unfortunately.

Thomas Paine

Hey there Thomas Paine. It must suck to be one of the least loved founding fathers. While every school child knows who you are, very few of them know beyond the fact that “Common Sense” helped inspire people to fight for the revolution. Even fewer have ever actually read Common Sense, which is a good thing for the people in charge because it might inspire people. Your many works are great and inspiring and deserve to be read in detail by the youth much more then they are. But you are as misunderstood today as you were in your day. While other founding fathers can’t seem to have enough statues and streets and everything else, you have 2 statues in all of America along with a statue in the Capitol area which has been approved but lies unfinished.

Eugene Debs

The only man to ever run for President from behind bars, and that was his most successful campaign as he rallied people against WW1. Eugene Debs dedicated himself to improving the average worker’s life, asking for almost nothing for himself. Considered the father of many Socialist parties in the United States, and one of the first people to fight back against the early Corporations, Eugene Debs today might be mentioned in passing in textbooks but he is otherwise forgotten. A great orator and writer, it’s rather sad that he’s been confined to the dustbin of history.

Frederick Douglass

Another great orator who seems to only get a passing mention in conjunction with the Civil War, the former slave was also a great writer. His autobiography is an incredible read, and I believe that the Lost Cause culture has a bit to do with it’s disappearance. As a slave in the “Civilized” Baltimore, it was believed to be a better life then some of the slaves further South who worked on the plantation. But reality was that life was just as bad as a slave in what was considered a Civilized life as it was further south. There seems to be this false notion that not all slavery was bad as perpetuated by the Lost Causers. I found his first autobiography as a Dover book for about 2 bucks, and it was money well spent. Another great thing about Douglass was that he wanted Equality for all people, and was an early member of the woman’s suffrage movement too.

These are just some of the people I found through my own searches, mostly me being curious to find out more about them then was available to me. This isn’t the be all end all for me, or the be all end all about each person. They all had their own faults and weakness along with their strengths. I just tried to summarize what I look up to in each. Go out, and find your own heroes, find people who you will enjoy and relate to. But in the end, be your own hero, take your own stand, be your own person first and foremost.

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By Mark D, December 12, 2010 8:24 pm

Freikorps is a strategic war game based on an Alternate History in which the Soviets defeat Poland following the Russian Civil War. The Soviets decide to press on and spread the Revolution into Germany. The game map is Poland (From Warsaw west) to Germany (ending at Berlin/Dresden). The German Army not being much of a fighting force, the Freikorps takes up the banner to stop the Bolshevik Hordes. Helping them (at least in the base game) are the Entente (France, England, US) and Polish National Army under Pilsudski. The Soviets are the Red Army, the Konarmiya, German Spartacus Militia and the Polish Red Army.

The game plays quickly once you get rolling. Some rules are tough to remember (each force has a different Cadre level, having a higher cadre level in battle means a column shift) but it isn’t a game breaking deal. The random events at the start of every turn can really turn the game around. On the 2nd turn the Soviets had to send 6 Brigades back to fight Wrangel. On the next two turns German towns went into revolt, destroying the Freikorps morale. The back breaker was the US withdrawal from the war as their units were defending the flank of the Freikorps making a stand against the Konarmiya trying to cross that way. It also didn’t help that nearly all the Freikorps depending the center of the map took a pounding from the main part of the steamroller, and the Polish National Army was crushed.

For what it usually costs, I can definitely recommend picking up Freikorps. It does a good job of recreating InterWar warfare. I would also love to see the system transferred to North America, to create a game based on the Turtledove Southern Victory series. A few tweaks for the trenches in the eastern theater, and the west tends to really play like the wide open plains of Germany/Poland. I’ve heard people bash these games because they are cheap, but they definitely aren’t poor. I wouldn’t recommend a bad game just because it had a good price. This game is worth every penny.

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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.