PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — His U.S. Senate campaign under fire, Maine Democrat Graham Platner said Wednesday that a tattoo on his chest has been covered to no longer reflect an image widely recognized as a Nazi symbol.
The first-time political candidate said he got the skull and crossbones tattoo in 2007, when he was in his 20s and in the Marine Corps. It happened during a night of drinking while he was on leave in Croatia, he said, adding he was unaware until recently that the image has been associated with Nazi police.
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He was the war commissar during the civil war, effectively commander-in-chief of the red army, so he’s kind of responsible for what happened to the anarchist factions in it.
On some level he was going with a party line, but based on how the guy operated and what he was saying I don’t think that was much of a deviation from his actual beliefs.
I think it’s also telling how many former Trotskyists in the US pivoted to being neocon warmongers.
Oh God… this looks interesting but I have not the time to dive into it currently and my knowledge of this part of Russian history is basically 0. At a cursory reading, it kind of looks like the Russian Revolution happened, then elections, then the Bolsheviks lost the elections and announced that they were going to shoot anyone who contested their right to hold power no matter what because I say so, and so then there was more war, and I guess Trotsky was… running the Red Army during that time? Shooting anarchists, because they… wanted elections? Or something? That doesn’t sound right. I will read more when I have time.
I mean, if Trotsky was the guy who was killing the people who wanted elections, and only decades later turned around and tried to say that raw exercise of power with no attempt at a mandate was not what Communism is supposed to be about (which was what originally made me like him, and also what Stalin eventually killed him for more or less I think, because it made him “counterrevolutionary”)… you may have found a reason to criticize him that I get can behind. Of course the idea that he was shooting anarchists because they supported the Constituent Assembly sounds kind of out of character like I may have misunderstood something.
It’s too many layers.
Ah yes, those famous neocon Trotsky fans. Clearly, your grasp of geopolitics is unparalleled, and not at all based on a fuzzy team sports based value system totally unmoored from reality. Which Trotskyist neocon was your favorite?
This isn’t my own observation, it’s a well-trod assertion.
There’s been a lot of them, most way predating me. For me it’s probably Christopher Hitchens who started out out as trotskyist anti-stalinist and drifted over time to being in favor of the US-led full-scale invasion of Iraq.
Yeah, pretty much.
I read a little bit including his piece about the Iraq War. I think supporting the Iraq War can make him wrong, but I don’t think it makes him a neoconservative. All I can really say about it is, I think these people are making a similar mistake to the one I accused you of. Not every pair of people who support the same thing are obviously intellectually aligned with the same principles, and it is incredibly obvious to me that the person who wanted to overthrow Russian monarchy to install Communism is not the same as the people who wanted to invade the Middle East to install gangster capitalism.
I actually have a lot of criticisms of Communism as it plays out in practice, but even I would not accuse it of being on the same moral and intellectual level and fighting for the same principles as Bush and Rumsfeld were fighting for.
not sure how you took that from my statement, the point is that neoconservatism preserves Trotskyism’s revolutionary posture while inverting its content: the revolution is now for liberal capitalism rather than socialism.
So anything with a revolutionary posture is Trotskyism? Even if the content and what they stand for is inverted?
Y’all are so strange. I don’t really expect anything more productive (like you saying “of course I am not saying that because that would be insane”). Thank you for the pointer in any case, I will read more about the Russian revolution.
you keep making broad leaps from my statements, doesn’t make you easy to talk to either. you understand that just because oranges are round not all round things are orange, right?
I said that a number of neocons started their political trajectory as trotskyists, then became neocons later in life. There’s a list of some in the wiki I linked you.
This is the part I take issue with. Christopher Hitchens is not a neocon. Nothing I saw in anything you linked to made it seem convincing to me that any other ones of these people were neocons either. Also you flipped it around trying to say (apparently) that genuine neocons can also be considered as Trotskyites because of their “revolutionary posture” which to me is utterly insane. It’s weird and not correct on both sides, as far as I can tell.
You say I have misunderstood you. Sure. Let’s narrow it down. Aside from that one singular factor of him supporting invading Iraq for totally different reasons than the neocons wanted to invade Iraq, what makes you think Christopher Hitchens is a neocon? Or is it just that one thing?