(Lev Davidovich Bronstein, called Leon Trotsky or Trotsky; Yanovka, Ukraine, 1877 - Coyoacán, Mexico, 1940) Russian revolutionary. He was born into a Jewish family of tenant farmers and studied law at the University of Odessa. He participated from a young age in the clandestine opposition against the autocratic regime of the Tsars, organizing a Workers' League of the South of Russia (1897).
He was arrested several times and exiled to Siberia; but he managed to flee from there in 1902 and joined in London the one who already appeared as head of the Social Democratic opposition in exile: Lenin. Although he disagreed with his ideological conception of the party, he collaborated with him and tried in vain to reconcile the faction he led (the Bolsheviks) with the rival faction of the Russian Social Democracy (the Mensheviks).
He returned to Russia to participate in the 1905 Revolution (in which he organized the first Soviet or revolutionary council). When the revolution failed, he was deported again to Siberia and again escaped (1906). After traveling half the world coming into contact with the centers of revolutionary conspirators, he moved to Russia as soon as the February 1917 Revolution broke out, which overthrew Nicholas II.
Abandoning his previous career as an independent socialist (in relation to the Mensheviks), he put his talents as an organizer and agitator at the service of the Bolshevik Party and was elected president of the Petrograd Soviet. He played a central role in the victory of the bolsheviks: he was the main responsible for the taking of the Winter Palace by the Bolsheviks, which established the communist regime in Russia (October Revolution of 1917).
Although Lenin held the top of power, Trotsky played a crucial role in the Soviet government until its death. As the first Foreign Commissioner of Bolshevik Russia (1917-18), he negotiated with the Germans the Peace of Brest-Litovsk, which withdrew the country from the First World War to respond to the wishes of peace of the masses and concentrate on the consolidation of the Revolution.
Then he was commissioner of war (1918-25), a position from which he organized the Red Army under very difficult conditions and defeated in a long civil war the so-called white movement armies (counterrevolutionaries) and their western allies (1918-20). His work was therefore crucial to the survival of Early USSR.
After the rise of Joseph Stalin thanks to victory of the Centre faction over the Right and Left oppositions in the Communist Party of the USSR over what to do with the New Economic Policy and Foreign Policy (Permanent Revolution vs Socialism in One Country) , Trotsky was removed from his positions and eventually expelled from the Soviet Union in February 1929.
He resided in Turkey, France, Norway and finally in Mexico, invited by General Lázaro Cárdenas, president of the country, in 1937. He initially lived in the home of the Mexican painter Diego Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo.
Trotsky did not give up in his revolutionary struggle, which he channeled from exile writing in defense of his ideas (works such as The Permanent Revolution, 1930; or the History of the Russian Revolution, 1932) and leading a dissident communist current (grouped in the Fourth International since 1938). He was assassinated by a Soviet agent Ramón Mercader :pika-pickaxe:
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i tried my best trying to make this one seem neutral
Okay so quick show of hands, everyone here would rather sit in jail for 5 years than commit the mai lai massacre right? This is a serious question, please answer and validate my sanity. The more comments the better.
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Only good yankee in vietnam is one that intentionally killed their commanding officer and immediately defected.
No idea how you would join up with a people’s movement that mostly speaks a different language, but whatever.
So here's something I learned about that recently from a video about innacuracies in Full metal Jacket. Stuff like a peace sign on a helmet and stuff were coded signals that you didn't wanna kill Vietnamese people and sort of a signal of I don't wanna shoot you plz don't shoot me. Which was probably perfectly fine for guerilla troops to not need to waste bullets on people they know are sympathetic dead weight for the enemy.
That is wonderfully bloomer and I’m not surprised it was aggressively appropriated.
Well, there was a strategic angle there. You could risk getting chewed out if helmet signs got to the brass or you could not have to kill someone and have some assurance of safety for yourself if you're American. If you're Vietnamese you can use your limited resources more strategically with the added benefit of the already demoralized soldiers marked for safety being the ones who come back makes not shooting a better and better seeming idea for your enemy. These kinds of tactical advantages can happen when you don't see others as subhuman.
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The Vietnamese were also aware it wasn't a popular war at home and increasingly unpopular among the troops. There were many cases of them making going turncoat easier or tried to keep sympathetic troops alive who signalled a tacit agreement they wouldn't fire on them. It's a war so this could never work perfectly but it's both based and was a very smart guerilla move. If you kill a whole unit they send a whole new unit. If you leave the people who won't shoot at you, they live to not shoot at you another day instead of dying and being replaced with someone who will.
They dropped english-language leaflets as well
who would say no
:what:
@7DeadlyFetishes want to articulate what ya meant here? I don’t want to misrepresent:
https://hexbear.net/post/152749/comment/1855819
:brak: Maybe ole Brak here just drank too much gin again, but sure smells like apologism.
Serious :bruh: moment right here:
What
People weren't drafted to work in concentration camps, they did it for a bigger pay check.
Fucking wehraboo myths here.
Edit: this whole deal has taught me one super important thing. You fuckers ALL gotta learn more history.
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Yeah, if you worked at a concentration camp you usually had a solid background check about your loyalties. They did know what they were doing would horrify people and did try to keep the holocaust as on the DL as they could.
I don't understand how you could even wind up thinking death camp guards were also victims. What the fuck.
It doesn't even make sense on its face. You don't run a death camp with people that don't want to kill. It won't work. Unless you have people who want to kill forcing your people that don't want to kill to do so which is a massive waste of manpower. Even by nazi logic it doesn't work.
"the nazis didn't want to run death camps but they were bullied and had to gas minorities for their famwies uwu"
:BibleThump:
Real nazi hours.
I was still willing to give some leeway to their point just cause, yeah, some people did get coerced into a shitty war and some did get pungie pitted without having fired or intended to fire a shot and while them's the breaks I'm not down to celebrate it and don't think anyone else should. This clean wermecht shit offends me to my core though.
Fuck nazi sympathy
what imperialism does to a liberal. Nazis deserve no sympathy and neither do other fascists.
That link is some thorough accounts, by someone who is clearly not a communist from his content but that just means it's less biased in this case, that when it comes to nazis you do not in any way shape or form ever gotta hand it to em.
Every single nazi deserved a bullet.
And they sucked at war, so a lot managed to do so.
0:50 moments
Oh goddamn. I think one of the fetishes might be nazism.
@7DeadlyFetishes wtf
Struggle session but in the original sense.
No one was drafted to be a concentration camp guard.
Can't believe this guy is doing Nazi alologism
How is not wanting to do war crimes a dificult decision?
Just do as muhammad ali did and refuce to kill innocent people
Correct and morally coherent take.
there is a difference between being a conscript and committing a massacre lmao
When it comes to Imperialism, only barely. Mai Lai just wound up being leaked because a soldier from another group showed up, there were many more events like it. It's a very clear example of imperialism and the evil it requires and causes.
I doubt any of those soldiers arrived in vietnam planning to murder an entire village. Participating in the machine can dehumanize you, especially if you don't have a clear ideology of your own going in.
yes, you can not rationally expect people born in the 50s and 60s, subjected to American exceptionalism and anti-communist propaganda, to willingly go to jail for 5 years and be ostracized from the society around them for a country they have been told is great. you can expect them to realize how fucked the war was once they got there. but boot camp is made to dehumanize the enemy and yourself. conscripts are victims of American imperialism as well. obviously not to the degree of it's foreign victims though.
A number of my relatives did (or escaped to Mexico/Canada) so I know it was possible. I understand why more didn't do it, even though they morally should have.
Drafted soldiers still shoot innocent people in the countries they invade. That's a hard thing for me to reconcile or have any empathy for.
A drafted soldier is a victim if they renounce what they've done and work to better things. Anyone proud to have fought in Korea or Vietnam has extreme chauvinism, though.
So if Iraq and Af had a draft then 9/11 and Bush era jingoism would then be an excuse?
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Dude excused concentration camp guards as victims as a double down, so while there is subtlety, nazis were excused so fuck that guy regardless.
I'm a coward and that's still an easy choice of jail time.
Right? I'd easily trade half a decade to not have the blood of other workers on my hands.
Less likely to die in jail
Oh yeah, easily.
Respect, thanks friend. :halal: :amerikkka:
I'd do life instead of that shit. Absolute no brainer. This is not a so brave thing, it's a being able to live with myself thing.
You’d think so, you’d think so. Maybe I just misread it, though.
:shrug-outta-hecks:
Yeah I saw that. Like, I've got some degree of leeway for some normie who's scared of jail figuring they might be able to keep their head down and hopefully just not see action and going along. It's not good but I can understand someone being duped and to an extent I feel bad for the duped but that only extends so far. If you're on the ground and don't change your tune then you're a bad person.
✋
Thank fuck
Without fucking question. Wtf? Anyone who would murder even one innocent child, let alone massacre a fucking town, rather than spend 5 years in really shitty (even hellish) circumstances, is an immoral piece of shit, to put it lightly. I realize it's more complicated when you're traumatized by all the murder and destruction you've already been (to be generous) coerced to participate in, and with your own mortality at stake. I can sympathize, maybe even empathize with that too. But straight up murdering innocent people who pose no threat? Killing little kids and families? NO. FUCKING NO.
Yeah duh be a conscientious objector or draft dodger.
If forced into the military, be useless or sabotage the effort. Refuse to go to the places they want you to be. If they push even harder and force you there, seriously consider killing your officers.
The way you talk about this makes it sound a like videogame walkthrough guide; I mean...
Much easier said than done I suppose!
-7DeadlyFetishes
Fragging was a pretty real and awesome thing in Vietnam. I recall reading that a squad would pay the bravest guy in the unit to off some officer looking for a nice career without regards to the enlisted men's lives.
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:same-picture:
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I was mostly making a short comment on the mai lai massacre being an inevitable expression of imperialism. You can't detangle the two, imperialism depends on acts of horrorifying brutality like that.
Plenty of stupid kids went off to die for uncle sam, but plenty more joined the anti-war movement. Considering how I wound up as a leftie, I'm pretty confident I'd wind up with similar beliefs even back then.
Is the implication here that if the United States didn't go into Vietnam, that droves of middle class white boys from the suburbs would ship themselves off to Asia to kill the people in Mai lai themselves?
-7DeadlyFetishes
what the fuck is wrong with you
Finally, someone gets it.
-7DeadlyFetishes
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It's not a hard decision, especially if you're a leftist.
:shrug-outta-hecks:
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Turns out that liberalism is the deadliest fetish of all :sadness:
It's strange, because I don't remember them being like that in the past.
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Too bad most Americans weren't leftists, go figure.
-7DeadlyFetishes
The question was for “everyone here” ie leftists not some hypothetical chuds
Poor showing here comrade
Poor showing is pretty on brand for 7DeadlyFetishes
That was never the topic and you're on a leftist website. Also, lots of people in the anti-war movement weren't explicitly left!
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Yeah "Normal Americans" just a bunch of philosophically zombified meatbags who could be programmed by the state on a whim to support any war of aggression, yeah this is the more accurate view of the American history in the 60's, and definitely not just an expression of capitalist realism effecting your view of a time period famous for its radical movements
Ok but people literally did do that, that happened, like you get that's an historical fact, people didn't spit on soldiers returning, but people did burn draft cards and veterans did tear medals off their uniforms and toss them to the ground in front of crowds literally clapping
Even Bernies dork ass was dragged away by cops for saying shit probably closer to maoism then whatever he's farting out now, and presumably his neighborhood wasn't clapping, so was he a bizarre anomaly outside the historical context. Or maybe he was part of a historic current of radicalism that leftists today find easy to connect with
I would've been the guy in the helicopter who pointed the big machine gun at the killers to get them to stop, pretty sure he didn't go to jail
for sure
:unity:
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