by Felix Quigley
January 7, 2008
There are many conflicting ideas abroad on how Israel can win the war against Hamas. This seems to me something of a misnomer because Israel is not really fighting Hamas so much as is fighting against the desire of Hamas, Fatah and the Arab League, throw in Ahmadinejad and the Mullahs as well, to defeat Israel, to weaken Israel, and eventually to cause the disintegration and dissolution of Israel. In whatever form such a dissolution might take…However, given the history if I was a Jew I would not wish to be around.
The trouble is that people see things only from the present. But the present crisis in economic capitalism may have very huge political implications and antisemitism as it has morphed into antiIsraelism may be as big a factor as was under the Nazis. Or put another way, there may be many many confused people in many many unemployment queues.
Signs of this new antisemitism can be seen in the Media and moreover for some time now. See in this regard Steven Plaut’s reference and comparision to the events in Sri Lanka over the past week. Hardly a mention in the Media. But what Israel does in relation to its tormentors in Hamas, well you judge, all stops are pulled out by the Media and it is all very biassed.
There are obviously very deep and dark forces behind Fatah and Hamas, as there was behind Nasser who was the darling of the Soviets. And it is not nationalism because there have been many occasions when a second Palestine state could have been got going, the first Palestine state without question being present day Jordan. So what is it that drives these Arab forces if it is not nationalism. (By “got going” I mean that Israel in 1948 started on a sliver of land not much bigger than say Kerry and Cork combined and stretched out like a straggly streak of bacon ready to be fried)
I and many others think it is the old Jew Hatred but in a new form, which takes the loose concept of “Palestinianism”.
There are grown men and women in Ireland who will weep at the thought of the “poor” Palestinians without any understanding of who is a “Palestinian”, when the concept was applied to these Arabs, what motivates them really etc., not having ever glimpsed never mind read or studied the Constitutions of the PLO etc.
Basically the history is just not known. Rather more than not being known it is actively hidden (just incidentally as is Trotsky, Lenin and Marx’s full historical relations with the Jews also hidden, but in this regard especially that of Trotsky who lived longest and so made very serious changes in Marxist attitude towards Jewish nationalism)
I must say that in this regard of hiding the history it is not just the present Fascist Left which does it, but it is also a certain section of American Jews in and around the US Government set up, which does not want to explore history truthfully.
But today I take a sideways swipe at the subject.
Wikipedia is a strange beast but this analysis of Trotsky during the Civil War seems interesting. For discussion purposes I put it forward:
[start article on the Civil War from Wikipedia here]
Civil War (1918-1920)
[edit] 1918
Trotsky’s managerial and organization-building skills with the Soviet military were soon tested in many ways. In May-June 1918, the Czechoslovak Legions en route from European Russia to Vladivostok rose against the Soviet government. This left the Bolsheviks with the loss of most of the country’s territory, an increasingly well organized resistance by Russian anti-Communist forces (usually referred to as the White Army after their best known component) and widespread defection by the military experts that Trotsky relied on.
(If I could interpose here this reference to the White Army has another interesting angle for us. None other than Daniel Pipes of all people has dealt with how the Whites were a huge disseminator of antisemitic ideas, all based around the theme Bolshevisn equals Jews etc)
Trotsky and the government responded with a full-fledged mobilization, which increased the size of the Red Army from less than 300,000 in May 1918 to one million in October, and an introduction of political commissars into the army. The latter were responsible for ensuring the loyalty of military experts (who were mostly former officers in the imperial army) and co-signing their orders.
Unlike conventional army of the bourgeoisie, the Red Army was built on the idea of the October Revolution. As he later wrote in his autobiography:[14]
An army (read conventional bourgeoisie army – editor’s note) cannot be built without reprisals. Masses of men cannot be led to death unless the army command has the death-penalty in its arsenal. So long as those malicious tailless apes that are so proud of their technical achievements—the animals that we call men—will build armies and wage wars, the command will always be obliged to place the soldiers between the possible death in the front and the inevitable one in the rear. And yet armies are not built on fear. The Tsar’s army fell to pieces not because of any lack of reprisals. In his attempt to save it by restoring the death-penalty, Kerensky only finished it. Upon the ashes of the great war, the Bolsheviks created a new army. These facts demand no explanation for any one who has even the slightest knowledge of the language of history. The strongest cement in the new army was the ideas of the October revolution, and the train supplied the front with this cement.
In dealing with deserters, Trotsky often appealed to them politically; arousing them with the ideas of the Revolution.
In the provinces of Kaluga, Voronezh, and Ryazan, tens of thousands of young peasants had failed to answer the first recruiting summons by the Soviets … The war commissariat of Ryazan succeeded in gathering in some fifteen thousand of such deserters. While passing through Ryazan, I decided to take a look at them. Some of our men tried to dissuade me. “Something might happen,” they warned me. But everything went off beautifully. The men were called out of their barracks. “Comrade-deserters – come to the meeting. Comrade Trotsky has come to speak to you.” They ran out excited, boisterous, as curious as schoolboys. I had imagined them much worse, and they had imagined me as more terrible. In a few minutes, I was surrounded by a huge crowd of unbridled, utterly undisciplined, but not at all hostile men. The “comrade-deserters” were looking at me with such curiosity that it seemed as if their eyes would pop out of their heads. I climbed on a table there in the yard, and spoke to them for about an hour and a half. It was a most responsive audience. I tried to raise them in their own eyes; concluding, I asked them to lift their hands in token of their loyalty to the revolution. The new ideas infected them before my very eyes. They were genuinely enthusiastic; they followed me to the automobile, devoured me with their eyes, not fearfully, as before, but rapturously, and shouted at the tops of their voices. They would hardly let me go. I learned afterward, with some pride, that one of the best ways to educate them was to remind them: “What did you promise Comrade Trotsky?” Later on, regiments of Ryazan “deserters” fought well at the fronts.
Given the lack of man power and the invading 16 (I hope the reader got that…I have been looking for the exact figure for a while) foreign armies, Trotsky also insisted that former Tsar officers should be used as military specialists within the Red Army, with a combination of Bolshevik political commissars to ensure the revolutionary nature of the Red Army. Lenin commented on this:
When Comrade Trotsky recently informed me that in our military department the officers are numbered in tens of thousands, I gained a concrete conception of what constitutes the secret of making proper use of our enemy … of how to build communism out of the bricks that the capitalists had gathered to use against us.
In September 1918, the government, facing continuous military difficulties, declared what amounted to martial law and reorganized the Red Army. The Supreme Military Council was abolished and the position of commander-in-chief was restored, filled by the commander of the Red Latvian Rifleman Ioakim Vatsetis (aka Jukums Vācietis), who had formerly led the Eastern Front against the Czechoslovak Legions. Vatsetis was put in charge of day-to-day operations of the army while Trotsky became chairman of the newly formed Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic and retained overall control of the military. Trotsky and Vatsetis had clashed earlier in 1918 while Vatsetis and Trotsky’s adviser Mikhail Bonch-Bruevich were also on unfriendly terms. Nevertheless, Trotsky eventually established a working relationship with the often prickly Vatsetis.
The reorganization caused yet another conflict between Trotsky and Stalin in late September. Trotsky appointed former imperial general Pavel Sytin to command the Southern Front, but in early October 1918 Stalin refused to accept him and so was recalled from the front. Lenin and Yakov Sverdlov tried to make Trotsky and Stalin reconcile, but their meeting was unsuccessful.
[edit] 1919
Throughout late 1918 and early 1919, there were a number of attacks on Trotsky’s leadership of the Red Army, including veiled accusations in newspaper articles inspired by Stalin and a direct attack by the Military Opposition at the VIIIth Party Congress in March 1919. On the surface, he weathered them successfully and was elected one of only five full members of the first Politburo after the Congress. But he later wrote:[15]
It is no wonder that my military work created so many enemies for me. I did not look to the side, I elbowed away those who interfered with military success, or in the haste of the work trod on the toes of the unheeding and was too busy even to apologize. Some people remember such things. The dissatisfied and those whose feelings had been hurt found their way to Stalin or Zinoviev, for these two also nourished hurts.
In mid-1919 the dissatisfied had an opportunity to mount a serious challenge to Trotsky’s leadership. The Red Army had defeated the White Army’s spring offensive in the east and was about to cross the Ural mountains and enter Siberia in pursuit of Admiral Alexander Kolchak’s forces. But in the south, General Anton Denikin’s White Russian forces advanced, and the situation deteriorated rapidly. On June 6 commander-in-chief Vatsetis ordered the Eastern Front to stop the offensive so that he could use its forces in the south. But the leadership of the Eastern Front, including its commander Sergei Kamenev (a colonel in the imperial army, not to be confused with the Politburo member Lev Kamenev), and Eastern Front Revolutionary Military Council members Ivar Smilga, Mikhail Lashevich and Sergei Gusev vigorously protested and wanted to keep emphasis on the Eastern Front. They insisted that it was vital to capture Siberia before the onset of winter and that once Kolchak’s forces were broken, many more divisions would be freed up for the Southern Front. Trotsky, who had earlier had conflicts with the leadership of the Eastern Front, including a temporary removal of Kamenev in May 1919, supported Vatsetis.
At the 3-July 4 Central Committee meeting, after a heated exchange the majority supported Kamenev and Smilga against Vatsetis and Trotsky. Trotsky’s plan was rejected and he was much criticized for various alleged shortcomings in his leadership style, much of it of a personal nature. Stalin used this opportunity to pressure Lenin[16] to dismiss Trotsky from his post. But when, on July 5, Trotsky offered his resignation, the Politburo and the Orgburo of the Central Committee unanimously rejected it.
Yet, a number of significant changes to the leadership of the Red Army were made. Trotsky was temporarily sent to the Southern Front, while the work in Moscow was informally coordinated by Smilga. Most members of the bloated Revolutionary Military Council who were not involved in its day to day operations, were relieved of their duties on July 8, while new members including Smilga were added. The same day, while Trotsky was already in the south, Vatsetis was suddenly arrested by the Cheka on suspicion of involvement in an anti-Soviet plot, and replaced by Sergei Kamenev.
After a few weeks in the south, Trotsky returned to Moscow and resumed control of the Red Army. A year later, Smilga and Tukhachevsky were defeated during the Miracle at the Vistula, but Trotsky refused this opportunity to pay Smilga back, which earned him Smilga’s friendship and later support during the intra-Party battles of the 1920s.[17]
By October 1919 the government was in the worst crisis of the Civil War: Denikin’s troops approached Tula and Moscow from the south, and General Nikolay Yudenich’s troops approached Petrograd from the west. Lenin decided that since it was more important to defend Moscow, Petrograd would have to be abandoned. Trotsky argued[18] that Petrograd needed to be defended, at least in part to prevent Estonia and Finland from intervening. In a rare reversal, Trotsky was supported by Stalin and Zinoviev and prevailed against Lenin in the Central Committee. He immediately went to Petrograd, whose leadership headed by Zinoviev he found demoralized, and organized its defense, sometimes personally stopping fleeing soldiers. By October 22 the Red Army was on the offensive and in early November Yudenich’s troops were driven back to Estonia, where they were disarmed and interned. Trotsky was awarded the Order of the Red Banner for his actions in Petrograd.
[edit] 1920
With the defeat of Denikin and Yudenich in late 1919, the Soviet government’s emphasis shifted to economic work and Trotsky spent the winter of 1919-1920 in the Urals region trying to re-start its economy. Based on his experiences there, he proposed abandoning the policies of War Communism,[19] which included confiscating grain from peasants, and partially restoring the grain market. But Lenin was still committed to War Communism and the proposal was rejected. Instead, Trotsky was put in charge of the country’s railroads (while retaining overall control of the Red Army), which he tried to militarize in the spirit of War Communism. It wasn’t until early 1921 that economic collapse and uprisings would force Lenin and the rest of the Bolshevik leadership to abandon War Communism in favor of the New Economic Policy.
Meanwhile, in early 1920 Soviet-Polish tensions eventually led to the Polish-Soviet War. In the run-up and during the war, Trotsky argued[16] that the Red Army was exhausted and the Soviet government should sign a peace treaty with Poland as soon as possible. He also did not believe that the Red Army would find much support in Poland proper. Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders thought that the Red Army’s successes in the Russian Civil War and against the Poles meant that, as Lenin said later:[20]
The defensive period of the war with worldwide imperialism was over, and we could, and had the obligation to, exploit the military situation to launch an offensive war.
But the Red Army offensive was turned back during the Battle of Warsaw in August 1920, in part because of Stalin’s failure to obey Trotsky’s orders in the run-up to the decisive engagements. Back in Moscow, Trotsky again argued for a peace treaty and this time prevailed
