A cautionary tale
Despite the rigidities and dogmatic absurdities of Trotskyist ideology, its heirs still exercise a certain radicalizing influence - not least in their unconditional embrace of the Palestinian cause.
By Robert Wistrich, The Forward Tags: Israel newsSeventy years ago in Mexico City, Leon Trotsky - the arch-heretic of international communism and symbol (for his admirers ) of Bolshevik revolutionary purity - was struck down by a Stalinist assassin's ax. The co-architect of the 1917 October Revolution and subsequent founder of the Red Army, which he led to victory in the Russian Civil War, Trotsky was expelled from the USSR in 1929. Throughout the 1930s, as a Communist exile, he would continually denounce what he called the Stalinist "Tower of Babel" as a betrayal of the Russian Revolution. But back in Russia his followers were ruthlessly persecuted and purged.
Even today, 20 years after the collapse of Soviet-style communism in Russia, Trotsky - though no longer subject to systematic execration - still remains a controversial and unloved figure. In the West, his legacy is kept alive by the amorphous Fourth International - a motley crew of Trotskyite groups whose sectarianism, internal dissension, sterile scholastic disputes and personal rivalries are legendary.
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I invite you to read what little Trotsky wrote on Zionism, which the writer refers to, on the "Marxists Internet Archive", and come to your own conclusion.