[DEBATE] : On Trotsky

[eharvey]

I just could not let this falsifying and slanderous scoundrel Ian Williams
get away with perhaps deceiving some readers
on this listserve. It is not surprising, him being the UN's correspondent
for The Nation. The irony is that while he chastises Howe for his omissions
about Trotsky's work he has certainly not himself read major works in which
Trotsky places the key questions he raises in all-rounded perspectives. Key
works he does not even refer to because he has probably not read them, and
in which Trotsky deals with most of his criticisms: The History of the
Russian Revolution, translated by Eastman and the other VERY important work
is Stalin (very difficult to find these days), which Trotsky was busy
finishing - in fact he was working on it at his desk when he had a pick axe
driven through his skull. These 2 books alone - there are many others, such
as The Revolution Betrayed, deals comrehensively with what Howe raises and
MUCH more of the difficult questions AND contradictions of the Russian
Revolution. Trotsky does not excuse the serious problems, weaknesses and
contradictions. He concedes them but explains them and places them in
historical perspective.
Williams does none of this. 

But to link Trotsy's legacy with the necons is the most outrageously
flabbergast criticisms of Trotsky I have ever read. There is MUCH valid
criticisms of Trotsky AND Lenin but this scoundrel only has another axe in
his hand to smash a legacy which also had very powerful lessons and
strengths, perfectly relevant even for today's world. Nothing about the
ENORMOUSLY difficult national and international circumstances between 1917 -
1921 when the young soviet state had to fend off invading and concerted
attacks by imperialist armies determined to crush, nothing of exactly these
conditions which forced the hand of the state in the Brest-Litovsk peace
agreement and in state coercion, etc, etc. What a shameful display. And to
say that Lenin and Trotsky laid the basis for Stalinism is grotesque and
smacks of much ignorance of the relevant literature, not only of Trotsky but
of many others, such as Mandel, Callinicos, etc. Even Isaac Deutscher dealt
with Trotsy and the legacy of the Russian revolution in more objective
terms, but it is a brutal and revealing irony that is is this scoundrel who
ends his diatribe against Trotsky with an appeal to greater objectivity on
the part of Howe!! 

Look, the guy was undoubtedly - with all his faults (he should read
Trotsky's 'My Life') - the greaetst Marxist theoretician of his time and
many think of the entire 20th century. There is NOBODY in the first 4
decades of the 20th century certainly whose pen was so prolific and
powerful, covering every imaginable issue the revolution was confronted
with. And besides the spell-binding oratory, etc, for just the illuminating
writing and analytical skills alone, George Bernard Shaw said : "Give me
Trotsky any time". On the more personal side he is probably the most tragic
of revolutionary leaders of all time: if you see what the revolution he led
did eventually to him and his family even before he was killed,
especially all of his children. That was the counterrevolutionary essence of
Stalinism, which I argue had nothing in common with the real ideas of Lenin
and Trotsky and the best traditions of Bolshevism. May this scoundrel rot in
hell! I only wish I had the time to do a systematic reply. But so hideous
are the distortions and wanton falsifications that one has to ask: is it
worth it? I don't think it is. Perhaps it did not even justify these few
words! 

Ebrahim 



 
  
  

-----Original Message-----
From: Ran Greenstein [mailto:rangreen at sn.apc.org] 
Sent: Wednesday, October 03, 2007 12:29 AM
To: debate at lists.kabissa.org
Subject: [DEBATE] : On Trotsky

Logos Journal, 6.3, Summer 2007 

An Ex-Maoist Looks at an Ex-Trotskyite: On Irving Howe's Leon Trotsky

by Ian Williams

A quarter of a century since he wrote it, Howe's biography of Trotsky raises
far more questions than it can directly answer. How could a devoted
democratic socialist describe a founder of the Bolshevik Party and thus of
the Soviet state as "one of titans of the century," 
not least when the author also recognizes that Trotskyism is "without
political or intellectual
significance: a petrified ideology?"1 Outcast and unarmed, the prophet's
strong residual attraction for someone as intellectually and politically
rigorous as Howe bears scrutiny. 
Throughout this biography he is in a state of quantum indeterminacy about
his subject, shifting from a state of intellectual criticism to one of
emotional attachment, often in the same paragraph. We read detailed
condemnation of the totalitarian state that Trotsky helped bring to birth,
of the failure of his political movement, and of his failed predictions, yet
Howe 
interlards this with general superlatives about his subject's heroic
virtues.         

Howe is not alone in this. There is, it seems, a special romantic Trotsky in
the hearts of a certain generation of the American Left in particular: a
proto-Che, a revolutionary and man of action who was yet an intellectual and
man of sensibility. It is a mythic construct, as befits a mythical figure,
or perhaps, in this more sordidly commercial age, a spectacularly successful
example of rebranding. In either case somehow the American Left has absolved
Trotsky of any moral responsibility for the events in the Soviet Union after
his exile and indeed tends to overlook his direct responsibility for the
formation and, more important, the subsequent 
development of the Soviet regime.          

Coming from Britain to the United States, one cannot help but be impressed,
or rather somewhat depressed, by the influence of Trotskyism on the American
Left. Admittedly the Left in much of the world is now hardly at the apogee
of its influence, in contrast to the hopes many of us had at the fall of
Berlin Wall, when we imagined a new promise for the core collectivist values
of democratic socialism, untrammeled by the sordid reality of "actually 
existing socialism" of the East European variety.          

But here in the United States it seems that Leon Trotsky's attempt to pass
himself off as a democratic socialist was in large measure swallowed by the
noncommunist Left. The Dewey Commission, headed by the philosopher John
Dewey to examine the charges against Trotsky at the Moscow trials,
established that the accusations were ridiculous but would perhaps have done
better to go on to scrutinize Trotsky's own behavior in power. Although
Dewey, according to Howe, had serious misgivings about the exile's
democratic credentials for liberal sainthood, it would appear that many
American socialists took the commission's 
report as a clean bill of political health for the exiled leader.          

Within a few short years much of the noncommunist American socialist
movement was deeply under the influence of the "Old Man"--what remained of
it, that is, after his followers had joined the Socialist Party and their
infectious polemical sectarianism had spread through it, splitting it into
sects. As a result, instead of being a cluster of tiny cults breeding on the
edge of a mass social-democratic party, as in Europe, in a sense
"Trotskyism" in the 
United States killed the host and replaced it.          

The Bolshevik exile joined the mainstream of American socialism,
particularly among those intellectuals, such as Howe, who still kept the red
flag fluttering from their ivory towers, and this certainly contributed to
socialism losing its admittedly slender chance to enter the mainstream of
American politics. For American workers and liberals the choice was between
Communist-dominated activism and fervent loyalties to smaller and smaller
sects dominated by and named after obscure political leaders in unconscious
imitation of the Hasidic sects following East European rabbi families
decades after the shtetl was gone: Pabloites, Shachtmanites, Mandelites,
each wishing on the other the fate of the Amalekites. No wonder 
most of the natural constituency for social democracy chose to go with the
Democrats.         

However, even among those, often academics and intellectuals, who tried to
keep alive the ideals of democratic socialism in America, Trotsky seemed to
remain respectable when other manifestations of the Soviet "experiment" were
beyond the pale. Although he himself sought sedulously to project himself as
the pretender to the throne of Vladimir Ilyich temporarily occupied by
Stalin, many of his admirers solipsistically cast him in their own image,
whether 
anti-Soviet or democratic socialist.        

The resilience of Trotsky's attraction is shown by the continued respect
that even the neocons and others who began their political life in his
movement feel for him, although they have left socialism behind. Howe's
book, inadvertently, sheds some additional light on this
conundrum: how people ranging from the tiniest and most fissured sects
advocating world revolution and the impending downfall of capitalism to
powerbrokers in the Reagan and Bush administrations--and staunch
anti-Leninist social democrats in between--can still have 
mental icons of the Old Man hanging inside their skulls.         

In Britain, by contrast, Trotskyist movements were peripheral to the Labour
Party, buttressed as it was by a long tradition of indigenous socialism;
spurning foreign models; and nurtured on unions, Fabianism, and Methodism.
The cyclical Trotskyist attempts to infiltrate the Labour Party, usually
through its youth movement, were regularly defeated. They made little or no
impression in the unions, where indeed much of the burden of combating them
was borne by the Communist Party, which had an industrial influence way
beyond its membership. That was also why many on the left of the Labour
Party tended to travel in parallel, if not necessarily in fellowship, with
the Communist Party, since its union influence 
gave it some sway in the Labour Party, where unions had a block vote.


Even so, in Britain, with the intellectual and emotional support of a mass
socialist tradition, it was entirely possible to be a radical left-wing
socialist and yet to regard Trotsky, Lenin, and 
Stalin as cut from the same absolutist and totalitarian cloth.           

Howe's biography of Trotsky reflects much of the American Left's
ambivalence. His clarity and honesty continually bring him back to a
recognition that Trotsky never renounced Leninism and that, in the end, the
latter gave birth to Stalinism. But the intellect he brings to bear on this
is blunted, one suspects because of Trotsky's appeal to the intellectuals,
like 
Howe, rather than to the intellect.           

Howe published the book in 1978, when Trotsky was important because, in
effect, so many intellectuals thought he was. Even if Trotskyism and
Trotskyists were of marginal importance to any meaningful political movement
in the United States, the Soviet Union still stood, apparently strong, and
in a bipolar world his views on the origins and development of the 
Bolshevik state system had relevance for socialists assessing means to the
socialist future.         

It also followed a period in which Howe was wrestling for the souls of
younger socialists in the New Left, trying to prove to skeptical
revolutionaries that it was possible to be anti-Soviet and still a radical
socialist. Although he did not pull his punches in those debates, it would
not have helped to throw Trotsky, a Left icon, out with the Stalinist
bathwater. In those days before the Reagan/Thatcher counterrevolution the
achievements of social democracy in Western Europe were not the stuff to
stir the blood of the young with hope. "The West is 
Red" was not a slogan to conjure with.           

Indeed, by the time Howe wrote, Trotsky may have had a rival in Mao Zedong,
but the latter, although an intellectual with some of the necessary romantic
qualifications, suffered several disabilities. He had missed martyrdom and
had hung around too long to be distanced from any "mistakes" in the Chinese
system. Indeed, he was not Jewish! What is more, Mao was not part of the
Western intellectual tradition that had formed Trotsky and Howe. "Somewhere
in the orthodox Marxist there survived a streak of nineteenth-century
ethicism, earnest and romantic," Howe claims, with the added advantage that
Trotsky was "frank and courageous" 
in the face of power (5).          

Howe introduces himself as still a socialist and admits to a "brief time"
under "Trotsky's political influence," although in the forty years since "I
have found myself moving farther and farther away from his ideas." So why
was a social-democratic writer writing about an exiled Russian whose ideas
he no longer espoused? Howe explains that Trotsky "remains a figure of
heroic magnitude, and I have tried to see him with as much objectivity as I
could 
summon." It was perhaps not enough.       

Heroes were in demand both when Howe was growing up and when he wrote his
biography. 
The intellectually voracious radical Jewish culture of the 1930s and 40s
thought that ideas mattered and that they could change the world. Is it too
far a stretch to remember that this was the milieu that gave birth to
Superman and other comic-book superheroes? Lev Davidovich Bronstein, the
Russian Jewish intellectual, may never have stepped into a phone booth like
Clark Kent, but he did transform himself into a Colossus, bestriding the
globe. 
This was surely in the mind of Howe, who was rediscovering his Jewish roots
and had 
recently written World of Our Fathers.         

It perhaps made marginally more sense to lionize Lev Bronstein than it did
to cry when Stalin died, as some Jewish communists did--just before "Uncle
Joe" was about to try for a 
second run at the Final Solution, by many accounts.          

The era and the people also gave birth to science fiction writers such as
the explicitly Marxist Futurians in New York, with writers like Frederik
Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth, who ran dystopian thought experiments on society,
and Isaac Asimov, who created a history of the future in broad galactic
sweeps, reminiscent perhaps of Trotsky's depictions of the recent past. Big
solutions, all-inclusive tidal waves of history, the certainty of true
believers were all in the air 
in Howe's formative years.          

Howe rhapsodizes, as enthralled by the man as he is disturbed by the result:
"His personal fearlessness, his combination of firm political ends with
tactical ingenuity, and his incomparable gifts as an orator helped to
transform him, at the age of twenty-six, into a leader of the first rank: he
had entered upon the stage of modern history and only the ax of a murderer
would remove him." It is interesting that one could write a short and
entirely accurate encomium of Adolf Hitler in almost exactly the same vein,
if one chose to eschew ethical judgment on the use of these singular talents
and its consequences.

These occasional intrusions of hagiography into Howe's treatment perhaps
highlight the path that many followers of the Old Man took to
neoconservatism, even if it is not a journey that Howe himself ever chose.
They help explain why Trotsky remains a hero even for those who have
abandoned his socialist ideas. Trotsky was an intellectual who was a man of
action. He had fomented revolution; he had waged a war that looked romantic
the farther away from it the observer was in space and time. He wrote about
his own times and deeds with verve and with the broad brush of certainty
that appeals to intellectuals haunted by quibbles and details. And what's
more, he was dead, martyred. No wonder people like Howe could see the 
warts, describe them, and yet simultaneously paint them over.         

However, Howe's hero never renounced the Bolshevik's methods, and he never
seriously addressed, let alone apologized for, his own role in developing
the totalitarian state that hounded him to his death, even though it had
begun its execution of opponents while he was one of its leaders. Indeed, in
his arrogance Trotsky never explained quite why he had been so politically
maladroit in his assessment of the trend in the party represented by Stalin
and why the latter, whom he despised so roundly, so equally roundly defeated
and ousted 
him.        

"If there is a single text that supports those who believe Leninism and
Stalinism to be closely linked or to form a line of continuous descent, it
is Terrorism and Communism," Howe declares regretfully (74). He is clearly
still not prepared to make the connection unequivocally in this biography.
He deems it "perhaps profitless" to try to identify the precise time when
"the revolutionary dictatorship of Lenin gave way to the totalitarianism of
Stalin" (88). It is interesting that Howe himself is in effect
distinguishing the two, when by then his general 
drift of political thought was rather to conflate them.          

It is equally interesting that Howe's other great mentor was George Orwell,
whose emphasis on an intellectual tradition, on democracy and decency,
anticipated Howe's and was so much clearer, so much earlier, about this
issue. Orwell, for example, took Arthur Koestler to task for his residual
loyalty to the party "and a resulting tendency to make all bad developments
date from the rise of Stalin," whereas "all the seeds of the evil were there
from the start, and . . . things would not have been substantially different
if Lenin or Trotsky had remained in control."2

Trotsky himself made the break with his past, says Howe, during the last
decade of his life, when he "offered a towering example of what a man can
be." He adds, "A later generation . . 
. may be forgiven if it sees the issue of democracy as crucial and regards
Trotsky's sustained 
critique of Stalinism as his greatest contribution to modern thought and
politics" (130).         

However, an even later generation could equally be forgiven for regarding as
lacking and somewhat insubstantial any critique that sedulously avoids
considering the roots of totalitarianism in the theory and practice espoused
by the ruling party when Trotsky was one of its architects. Terrorism and
Communism would have allowed him to be cast as Squealer 
as much as Snowball.          

Accurate as his current allegations about Soviet practices may have been,
Trotsky was far from the first to identify the regime's faults, and the
absence of any hint of self-criticism could make it look like a
Tweedledum-Tweedledee bout in which the only serious question was 
whether he or Stalin should be master.     

In contrast, Howe's critique of Bolshevism is measured and analytical rather
than bell-book- and-candling exorcism. He distinguishes between the freedom
of internal debate among the original Bolsheviks under Lenin and in the
later Stalinist and post-Leninist organization and so to some extent
discounts the inevitability of what happens when a party of true believers
becomes possessed of exclusive state power. Few, if any, of the sects that
claimed to follow Trotsky showed much toleration for dissent in their ranks,
even if they, perhaps fortunately, never achieved state power to enforce
their discipline. In fact the younger Trotsky was more astute than both Howe
and the later Trotsky in foretelling the way that things would go when 
the Central Committee substituted itself for party, class, and state.


Howe recognizes this in a strangely muted way. In describing his subject's
failures he says, "this is not to excuse the principled failure of Trotsky
to raise the issue of multi-party socialist democracy, it is, at best, to
explain it" (125). This is strange wording, since by all of Howe's 
normal standards the failure to raise such an issue was deeply unprincipled.


Where Howe went part of the road with the neocons in the early stages was in
the strain of Trotskyism identified above all by anticommunism, or
anti-Stalinism, developed by Max Shachtman, who took the Old Man's critiques
of the Soviet system to new and higher levels 
of dissociation and whom Howe acknowledges as a major influence.     

The followers of Shachtman and their neocon political progeny had little or
no difficulty in seeing Communism and the Soviet Union, not as some
redeemable wayward revolution, but as an absolute evil to be crusaded
against. That proto-neocon passion against the Evil Empire reached a
crescendo by the fall of the U.S.S.R., ironically almost putting
retrospective truth in the Stalinist canards about Trotskyism's alliance
with fascism, in light of neoconservative support for U.S. alliances with
right-wing dictatorships against the greater 
enemy of Communism.         

What did the neocons take from Trotsky? Certainly we know that politically
they abandoned Trotskyism, in the sense of the revolutionary socialism that
their hero would have considered his essence. However, there are strongly
idiosyncratic characteristics of the Old Man and his movement that seem to
be adoptable and transmittable even when pithed of their ideological core.
As Howe, in his introduction, mentions, his hero's ideas "take on vibrancy
only when set into their context of striving, debate, combat" (vi). As he
points out, Trotsky's oratory earned "the dislike, even hatred, of many
opponents because of what they saw as the 
polemical ruthlessness and arrogance of his style" (41).          

We miss from this an appreciation that the later Howe had himself become one
of those opponents, an advocate for democracy and openness, for democratic
socialism as opposed to the burgeoning totalitarianism of Bolshevism, who
would surely have been cast rhetorically 
into the dustbin of history by his subject, depicted here as a Leftist Rush
Limbaugh.        

However, no one who has had dealings with the various strains of Trotskyism
in later years would have any difficulty in identifying this robustly
unforgiving polemicism as an integral part 
of Trotskyite practice, even more so than that of their Stalinist
antagonists.           

Indeed, Howe reports that Trotsky in 1920 condoned "acts of repression that
undercut whatever remnants there still were of 'Soviet democracy.' Worse yet
he did all this with a kind of excessive zeal, as if to blot out from memory
much of what he had said in earlier years" 
(70).         

Trotskyism's obsession with the Soviet Union, its inability to shed the
baggage of Bolshevism, led for decades to a strange sterile dialectic, all
antithesis and no thesis, in which negative polemics and Talmudic exegesis
of the Master's texts substituted for engagement with the realities of
political and social life, with perhaps a penchant for 
infiltrating and suborning other political entities.         

It is fascinating to see how that passion has survived the demise of its
target. The "striving, debate and combat," the deep self-certainty of the
Trotskyist sects, the polemics with no quarter, the eschewal of all thought
of consensus and compromise as betrayal of the truth are recognizable
characteristics of the neocons--and to some extent of neo-neocons such as
Christopher Hitchens, who, like Howe, has Trotsky and Orwell as twin icons.
Could it be some common thread of anxiety for politically motivated
intellectuals, un impuissance des clercs, a feeling that, despite the
aphorism, the pen usually wilts in the face of the sword?

However, so much negative passion demands a thoroughly unworthy opponent,
and radical Islam seems to have provided the neocons with more than enough
target for their redirected revolutionary ire now that they have lost their
primary target. Ironically some at least of their cousins who stayed in the
nominally socialist fold have equally eagerly acted as apologists 
for the Islamic states against "imperialism."        

Howe recognizes the inherent idealism, in the Platonic sense, that Trotsky
displays. 
Somewhat at odds with his own generally more approbatory treatment, he
quotes approvingly Joel Carmichael's "shrewd" assessment of his subject: "It
was no doubt his lofty- -indeed in the philosophical sense 'idealist'--view
of politics that made Trotsky misunderstand what was actually happening. . .
. It astigmatized him, as it were, with respect to the power of the actual
apparatus, and made him regard himself as Bolshevik paragon merely because
of his identification with the Idea of the Party: he disregarded his 
failure to be identified with its personnel" (92).          

Certainly it could be argued that the neocons inherited from Trotsky the
passion for the importance of ideas, and of fighting for them, and also that
that intoxication, transferred from the heady intellectualism and
sectarianism of the sundered American socialist movement, has transformed
American conservatism, which had previously tended more naturally to
empiricist defenses of the status quo or to golden days.

Almost equally integral to Trotskyism was the ability to hold huge,
inspiring, eloquent--and utterly wrong--"Ideas" and to hold onto them in the
face of uncooperative reality. Even the levelheaded Howe treasured Trotsky's
"heroic" ability to be stunningly wrong in a spectacular, albeit
imaginatively attractive way. In dealing with his "boldest" theory, of
Permanent Revolution, Howe asserts that "the full measure of its audacity
can be grasped even today by anyone who troubles to break past the special
barriers of Marxist vocabulary" 
(28). However, while Howe is mesmerized with the "brilliance" of Trotsky's
historical prognosis, he goes on to admit that history neglected to follow
the course so brilliantly laid out for it. Nor does the idea that a minority
working class cannot bring about socialism seem that audacious in the light
of the historical experience of so many failed statist pseudo-
socialist experiments in the Third World.        

Indeed, Howe admits that Trotsky "failed to anticipate the modern phenomenon
of the totalitarian or authoritarian state, which would bring some of the
features of permanent revolution into a socioeconomic development having
some of the features of a permanent counter-revolution" (33). As failures
go, this goes a long way. Howe is too kind when he concludes that "Trotsky's
theory remains a valuable lens for seeing what has happened in the twentieth
century--but a lens that needs correction" (33). A lens that fails so
signally 
surely needs recasting and regrinding in its entirety.         

Toward the conclusion of his biography Howe tempers his romantic attachment
and becomes less uncritical, seeing his subject emerging as "a figure of
greatness, but flawed greatness, a man great of personal courage and
intellectual resources, but flawed in self recognition, in his final
inability or refusal to scrutinize his own assumptions with the 
corrosive intensity he brought to those of his political opponents."


A quarter of a century after Howe's biography, six decades after Trotsky's
death, and ten years after the curtain came down finally on the Bolshevik
experiment, things can be seen in a different light. Trotsky's role "on the
stage of modern history" has shrunk into perspective. 
He lost the arguments in the Soviet Union: capitalism did not collapse
catastrophically, the industrial proletariat in the world did not move to
revolution. The reformers and social democrats he despised built societies
that, even after Thatcherism and the Third Way, still offer workers and
other citizens more in the way of prosperity, freedom, civil, political and 
social rights, than any other societies that have existed on the face of the
earth.        

Trotsky may not be in the "dustbin of history" to which he consigned his
democratic-socialist opponents in the Leningrad Soviet (52), but he is now a
bit player who exited, stage left, in a show that was a hit for a while but
has now closed with no prospect of ever reopening. He is 
more reminiscent of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern than of Hamlet.         

Ironically the only admirers of Trotsky to achieve any degree of power are
the neocons, those who have joined with the world's biggest imperialist
power to remake the world in some neoliberal capitalist image. It is an
achievement, but it is a severely qualified one. Howe, who knew just how
ineffectual the squabbling Trotskyist sects were--"not distinguished for an
ability to engage in fresh thought politically, or reach the masses of
workers practically" 
(191)--would be amazed, possibly even amused, if he were around to see the
heights reached by his former comrades, even if one suspects he would think
they were climbing the wrong mountain.

After all, once the socialism was stripped out, which was quite easily done
in the face of popular indifference, what was left of Trotskyism but the
failed predictions, the ability to hold a deep belief, with quasi-religious
fervor, in a secular idea in the face of all advice and empirical evidence
to the contrary? Having infiltrated the conservative movement, Trotsky's
heirs, still an antithesis looking for a thesis to batter, have substituted
Islam, or Islamic 
fascism, to fill the gap in their universe left by the disappearing Soviet
Union.        

They have a mission to remake the world, but instead of Trotsky's Red Army
swooping to bring socialism to ungrateful Poles and Central Asians, it is
now the U.S. military bringing democracy and free markets to lesser breeds
hitherto without the law. And with the ruthless romanticism of the
revolutionary, they think the price in blood is well worth paying, that
history will absolve them.

Howe never succumbed to such temptations, retaining an attachment to
socialism and democracy that eschewed such misplaced millennial visions.
Somehow he contrives to admire the man while deploring his deeds; his
philosophy; and, when it comes down it, most of his life work. But his
uncharacteristic partial abandonment of his usual sharply critical spirit
when it came to Lev Davidovich Bronstein--the Red intellectual who could,
and briefly did-- demonstrates the dangerous seductions of hero worship. It
is difficult to steer a course between the Scylla of damnation and the
Charybdis of canonization when dealing with historical figures, and if so
rigorous a thinker as Howe steered so close to the rocks as he did with this
biography, it is a warning to others to try harder for some objectivity.

 Notes

1. Howe, Leon Trotsky, 193, 192. Subsequent references will appear in the
text.

2. George Orwell, "Catastrophic Gradualism" in The Collected Essays of
George Orwell, Vol. 
IV (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970) 5.
 

Ian Williams is the United Nations Correspondent for The Nation. His most
recent books are 
Rum: A Social and Sociable History of the Real Spirit of 1776 and Deserter:
Bush's War on 
Military Families, Veterans, and his Past. His blog is Deadline Pundit.

 
=========

Ran Greenstein
Johannesburg, South Africa