Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

Part IV of excerpts from the chapter entitled "The Road to Nowhere" from David Horowitz's The Politics of Bad Faith:

The lineage of these ideas could be traced back to our original complex noun, Trotsky: the legend of the revolution who had defied Stalin’s tyranny in the name of the revolution. While the Father of the Peoples slaughtered millions in the 1930s, Trotsky waited in his Mexican exile for Russia’s proletariat to rise up and restore the revolution to its rightful path. But as the waves of the Opposition disappeared into the gulag, and this prospect became impossibly remote, even Trotsky began to waver in his faith. By the eve of the Second World War, Trotsky’s despair had grown to such insupportable dimensions, that he made a final wager with himself. The conflict the world had just entered would be a test for the socialist faith. If the great war did not lead to a new revolution, socialists would be compelled, finally, to concede their defeat -- to admit that “the present USSR was the precursor of a new and universal system of exploitation,” and that the socialist program had “petered out as a Utopia." Trotsky did not survive to see the Cold War and the unraveling of his Marxist dreams. In 1940, his dilemma was resolved when one of Stalin’s agents gained entrance to the fortress of his exile in Mexico, and buried an ice pick in his head.

But the fantasy survived.