I believe this is the only known film of Leon Trotsky speaking English:
It was evidently made in 1937 from Trotsky's refuge in Mexico, where he lived with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. He is announcing the formation of an international commission, chaired by John Dewey, to investigate Stalin's show trials (including the accusations against Trotsky himself).
Further evidence "the Russians" are attempting to interfere with our election!
It's kind of fun to hear the roosters (??) crowing in the background!
Interestingly, Trotsky was kept prisoner in 1917 in Amherst, Nova Scotia, about five miles from my family home. That fact is still remembered in rural New Brunwsick and Nova Scotia, even though many don't actually know who Trotsky was.
Thanks, Ian. I must have known that once, as I read all three volumes of the Isaac Deutscher biography, but I sure did not remember it.
Obviously, Trotsky has inspired many. From Wiki (accordingly, please correct any inaccuracies):
"Vladimir Cherniaev, a leading Russian historian, sums up Trotsky's main contributions to the Russian Revolution:
Trotsky bears a great deal of responsibility … for the establishment of a one-party authoritarian state with its apparatus for ruthlessly suppressing dissent… He was an ideologist and practitioner of the Red Terror. He despised 'bourgeois democracy'… He was the initiator of concentration camps, compulsory 'labour camps,' and the militarization of labour, and the state takeover of trade unions. Trotsky was implicated in many practices which would become standard in the Stalin era, including summary executions."
A hero to be lionized and remembered with fondness and respect? Is that the point of this post?
No, it's about the hosts here finally feeling free to come out, and be out, of the closet, having had to pretend to be "liberals" (and to bastardize the word "progressive" and hide using that too) for so long. If only their bundist parents could see them now.
Too bad their presidential candidate is more neoliberal than the incumbent, though. Guess we'll see how red the House goes.
Oh well. Time to arm up.