We have entered an age of constant conflict. …
We are entering a new American century, in which we will become still wealthier, culturally more lethal, and increasingly powerful. We will excite hatreds without precedent.
Information destroys traditional jobs and traditional cultures; it seduces, betrays, yet remains invulnerable. How can you counterattack the information others have turned upon you? There is no effective option other than competitive performance. For those individuals and cultures that cannot join or compete with our information empire, there is only inevitable failure …The attempt of the Iranian mullahs to secede from modernity has failed, although a turbaned corpse still stumbles about the neighborhood. Information, from the internet to rock videos, will not be contained, and fundamentalism cannot control its children. Our victims volunteer.[144]
Peters is stating that this ‘global information empire’ led by the USA is ‘historically inevitable’. This ‘historical inevitability’ is classic Karl Marx, just as ‘constant conflict’ is classic Trotsky. This is a ‘cultural revolution’, which is buttressed by American firepower. Peters continues:
It is fashionable among world intellectual elites to decry ‘American culture’, with our domestic critics among the loudest in complaint. But traditional intellectual elites are of shrinking relevance, replaced by cognitive-practical elites◦– figures such as Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, Madonna, or our most successful politicians◦– human beings who can recognize or create popular appetites, recreating themselves as necessary. Contemporary American culture is the most powerful in history, and the most destructive of competitor cultures. While some other cultures, such as those of East Asia, appear strong enough to survive the onslaught by adaptive behaviours, most are not. The genius, the secret weapon, of American culture is the essence that the elites despise: ours is the first genuine people’s culture. It stresses comfort and convenience◦– ease◦– and it generates pleasure for the masses. We are Karl Marx’s dream, and his nightmare.[145]
Peters’ enthusiastic messianic prophecies for the ‘American Century’ are reminiscent of Huxley’s Brave New World where the masses are kept in servitude not by physical force but by mindless narcosis, but addiction to the puerile,[146] everything that is in a word ‘American’ in the modern sense.
Secular and religious revolutionaries in our century have made the identical mistake, imagining that the workers of the world or the faithful just can’t wait to go home at night to study Marx or the Koran. Well, Joe Sixpack, Ivan Tipichni, and Ali Quat would rather ‘Baywatch.’ America has figured it out, and we are brilliant at operationalizing our knowledge, and our cultural power will hinder even those cultures we do not undermine. There is no ‘peer competitor’ in the cultural (or military) department. Our cultural empire has the addicted◦– men and women everywhere◦– clamoring for more. And they pay for the privilege of their disillusionment.[147]
The ‘constant conflict’ is one of world cultural revolution, with the armed forces used as backup against any reticent state. The world is therefore to be kept in a permanent state of flux, with a lack of permanence, which Peters’ calls Americas’ ‘strength’, as settled traditional modes of life do not accord with the aim of infinite industrial, technical and economic ‘progress’. Peters:
There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing.[148]
Peters refers to certain cultures trying to reassert their traditions, and again emphasises that the globalist ‘culture’ that is being imposed is one of a Huxleyan ‘infectious pleasure’. The historical inevitability is re-emphasised, as the ‘rejectionist’ (sic) regimes will be consigned to what Trotsky called the ‘dustbin of history’.
Yes, foreign cultures are reasserting their threatened identities – usually with marginal, if any, success◦– and yes, they are attempting to escape our influence. But American culture is infectious, a plague of pleasure, and you don’t have to die of it to be hindered or crippled in your integrity or competitiveness. The very struggle of other cultures to resist American cultural intrusion fatefully diverts their energies from the pursuit of the future. We should not fear the advent of fundamentalist or rejectionist regimes. They are simply guaranteeing their peoples’ failure, while further increasing our relative strength.[149]
Michael Ledeen[150] in similar terms to that of Peters, and in neo-Trotskyist mode, calls on the USA to fulfil its ‘historic mission’ of ‘exporting the democratic revolution’ throughout the world. Like Peters, Ledeen bases this world revolution as a necessary part of the ‘war on terrorism’, but emphasises also that ‘world revolution’ is the ‘historic mission’ of the USA and always has been. Writing in National Review Ledeen states:
…[W]e are the one truly revolutionary country in the world, as we have been for more than 200 years. Creative destruction is our middle name. We do it automatically, and that is precisely why the tyrants hate us, and are driven to attack us.
Freedom is our most lethal weapon, and the oppressed peoples of the fanatic regimes are our greatest assets. They need to hear and see that we are with them, and that the Western mission is to set them free, under leaders who will respect them and preserve their freedom.
…[I]t is time once again to export the democratic revolution. To those who say it cannot be done, we need only point to the 1980s, when we led a global democratic revolution that toppled tyrants from Moscow to Johannesburg. Then, too, the smart folks said it could not be done, and they laughed at Ronald Reagan’s chutzpah when he said that the Soviet tyrants were done for, and called on the West to think hard about the post-Communist era. We destroyed the Soviet Empire, and then walked away from our great triumph in the Third World War of the Twentieth Century. As I sadly wrote at that time, when America abandons its historic mission, our enemies take heart, grow stronger, and eventually begin to kill us again. And so they have, forcing us to take up our revolutionary burden, and bring down the despotic regimes that have made possible the hateful events of the 11th of September.”[151]
Ledeen gives credit to the USA for bringing down not only the Soviet bloc, but also the white Afrikaners in South Africa, as part of the ‘historic world revolutionary mission’ that the USA has had since its founding. However, he states that the task of world revolution was left uncompleted, since the Third World has yet to be brought into the globalist orbit. Ledeen urged then president Bush to support revolutionary movements, such as the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. Was the USSR ever as subversive and revolutionary in its internationalism, in its desire to impose a mono-political-cultural-socio-economic model on the entire world?
III
The Moscow Trials in Historical Context
Trotsky has received comparatively good press in the West, especially since World War II, when the wartime alliance with Stalin turned sour. Trotsky has been published by major corporations,[152] and is generally considered the grandfatherly figure of Bolshevism.[153] ‘Uncle Joe’ (as Stalin had been called by the Americans during World War II) on the other hand, was quickly demonized as a tyrant, and the ‘gallant Soviet Army’ that stopped the Germans at Stalingrad was turned into a threat to world freedom, when in the aftermath of World War II the USSR did not prove compliant in regard to US plans for a post-war world order.[154] However, even before the rift, basically from the beginning of the Moscow Trials of the late 1930s, Western academics such as Professor John Dewey condemned the proceedings as a brutal travesty, and a public relations campaign in the West was inaugurated in favour of Trotsky and against Stalin. The Moscow Trials are here reconsidered within the context of the historical circumstances and of the judicial system that Trotsky and other defendants had themselves played prominent roles in establishing.
144
Ralph Peters, ‘Constant Conflict’, Parameters, Summer 1997, 4-14. http://www.usamhi.army.mil/USAWC/Parameters/97summer/peters.htm
150
Ledeen is a leading member of the US foreign policy Establishment. He has been a consultant to the US National Security Council, State Department and Defense Department, and served as special adviser to US Secretary of State Alexander Haig in 1981, after having worked as an adviser for Italian Military Intelligence. He is a contributing editor to
151
Michael Ledeen, ‘Creative Destruction: How to wage a revolutionary war’, National Review online, 20 September 2001. http://old.nationalreview.com/contributors/ledeen092001.shtml
152
One of Trotsky’s publishers was Secker & Warburg, London, which published the Dewey Commission’s report, The Case of Leon Trotsky, in 1937. The proprietor, Fredric Warburg, became head of the British section of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. (Frances Stonor Saunders,op. cit., 111).
Trotsky’s Where is Britain going? was published in 1926 by George Allen & Unwin. His autobiography, My Life, was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1930. Stalin: an appraisal of the man and his influence, was published posthumously in 1946 by Harpers.
153
The most salient example being the hagiographies by Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed (1954), The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky 1921-1929 (1959), and The Prophet Outcast (Oxford University Press, 1963).
154
‘Origins of the Cold War: How Stalin Foiled a New World Order’, Chapter V below.
Russian translation: ‘Origins of the Cold War’, Red Star, Russian Ministry of Defense, http://www.redstar.ru/2010/09/01_09/6_01.html