Stalin- The Enduring Legacy

by Kerry Bolton

  If Chernov and even Stalin had been free to express themselves outside the bounds of Marxism-Leninist rhetoric they could have added that Marx himself was among those who – like the ‘predatory imperialists’ – preached that ‘national sovereignty was obsolete’. Those who did follow the Marxist line of ‘rootless cosmopolitism’, such as the Trotskyites, were then teaming up with the ‘predatory imperialists’ in the USA and elsewhere to launch their offensive against the USSR: ‘The ruling cliques of nations, being the objects of American expansion go all out so as to spit upon and fault the yearning of the masses for the preservation of their national sovereignty, thus rendering aid to American imperialism’.[122]

  Chernov showed that the USSR and the Soviet bloc considered their own historic mission not as the centre for ‘world revolution’, the ideal of the Trotskyites, but as the bulwark against one-worldism:

  In the guise of cosmopolitan phraseology, in false slogans about the struggle against ‘nationalist selfishness’, hides the brutal face of the inciters of a new war, trying to bring about the fantastic notion of American rule over the world. From the imperialist circles of the USA today issues propaganda of ‘world citizenship’ and ‘universal government’.[123]

  The above passage must be put into the context of the ‘Cold War’ that was emerging, as the result of Stalin’s rejection of the US demand for a United Nations as the vehicle for ‘universal government’, and the Soviet repudiation of the ‘Baruch Plan’ which would have given such a ‘universal government’ control over atomic energy.[124] Indeed, if the reader did not realise that the above passage was written by a Soviet functionary, would it not be assumed to be the statement of a ‘right-wing extremist’? Chernov continued, drawing on the 1948 speech of Zhdanov: ‘Comrade A A Zhdanov showed that bourgeois cosmopolitism and, in particular, the cosmopolitan idea of “one-world government” have a strikingly expressed anti-Soviet orientation’.[125]

  Rockefeller Sponsorship of Rootless Cosmopolitanism

  This was the background against which the ‘cultural cold war’ was formulated: that of a Trotskyite-liberal-plutocratic alliance against an intransigently nationalistic USSR that had rejected firstly the ‘world revolution’ of Trotsky, and secondly the ‘one-world government’ proposed by the USA in the aftermath World War II.

  The leading patron of American Modernism has been the Rockefeller founded and owned Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).[126] John J Whitney, formerly of the US Government’s Psychological Strategy Board, was a trustee of the Museum, and he supported Jackson Pollock and other modernists.[127] According to the archives of the Rockefeller Center, Abby, Nelson and David Rockefeller were particularly important to the ‘founding and continuous success of the museum’.[128]

  Abby Rockefeller had co-founded MoMA in 1929. Her son Nelson had been museum president through the 1940s and 1950s.[129] Nelson was an enthusiastic promoter of Abstract Expressionism, and described it as ‘free enterprise painting’,[130] while others promoted it because of its revolutionary socialist virtues. Nelson Rockefeller became president of the Museum in 1939[131]. After his service as Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America, he resumed the role in 1946. While Nelson was Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, the Department organised exhibitions of ‘contemporary American painting’, nineteen of which were contracted to the MoMA.[132] He was closely linked with the CIA, according to Tom Braden.[133] In 1954 Nelson became President Eisenhower’s special adviser on Cold War policy. [134]

  John Whitney was a MoMA Trustee, while also serving as chairman and president of the board. He had served with the CIA-forerunner, the OSS during the war, after which he continued to work with the CIA. William Burden, who joined the museum as chairman of its Advisory Committee in 1940, worked with Nelson Rockefeller’s Latin American Department during the war. A ‘venture capitalist’ like Whitney, he had been president of the CIA’s Farfield Foundation; and in 1947 was appointed chairman of the Committee on Museum Collections, and in 1956 as MoMA’s president.[135] Other corporate trustees of MoMA were William Paley, owner of CBS, and Henry Luce of Time-Life Inc., who both assisted the CIA.[136] Joseph Reed, Gardner Cowles, Junkie Fleischmann, and Cass Canfield were all simultaneously trustees of MoMA and of the CIA’s Farfield Foundation. There were numerous other connections between the CIA and the museum, including that of Tom Braden, who had been executive secretary of the museum through 1947-1949 before joining the CIA.[137] Clearly MoMA has long been considered a major element in the globalist strategy for a ‘new world order’.

  In 1952 MoMA launched its world revolution of Abstract Expressionism via the International Program. This received a five year annual grant of $125,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, under the direction of Porter McCray, who had also worked with Nelson’s Latin American Department, and in 1950 as an attaché of the cultural section of the US Foreign Service.[138] Russell Lynes, writing of this period stated that MoMA now had the entire world to ‘proselytise’ with what he called ‘the exportable religion’ of Abstract Expressionism[139].

  While the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom no longer exists, the cultural-bolshevism it was set up to promote set the trend for a nihilism that has not abated in the world of the Arts, but has rather accelerated. All criteria for what constitutes art and culture generally has been rendered redundant, and derided as ‘old fashioned’ and ‘reactionary’, while Modernism remains a tool for those who see the Arts as a means of creating a universal ‘culture’ as the basis for a ‘universal state’, or ‘new world order’ as it is now called. Chernov’s Stalinist analysis of the arts in 1949 predicted what would take place.

  Despite the fall of the Soviet bloc and the end of the Cold War there has been no cessation of the globalist cultural offensive. The National Endowment for Democracy was formed by neo-Trotskyites with the help of neo-conservatives and funding from US Congress to assume the role of the CIA and CCF in instigating global subversion.[140] A new ‘Cold War’ era was declared with the so-called ‘war on terrorism’. With the destruction of the Soviet bloc a new was bogey was invented: ‘Islamofascism’, a term coined by Trotskyite-turned neo-con, Stephen Schwartz, Director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism; thereby making Islam the new Stalinism/Hitlerism.[141] Like World War II, this new era of tension is supposed to herald a one world government or what President George H W Bush referred to as a ‘new world order’. Again, Russia threw a spanner in the works, and the post-Yeltsin regime under Putin has been uncooperative, while the globalists warn of an ominous return to Stalinism in Russia.

  The cultural offensive is being continued as a primary strategy for the ‘emaciation’[142] of nations, cultures and peoples. America as the historic centre of world Bolshevism has its own version of Trotsky’s ‘permanent revolution’ which US strategists call ‘constant conflict’. Major Ralph Peters[143], a prominent military strategist, appears to have coined the term. Peters has written of this in an article by that name:

  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 Tro
tsky. 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.

  A reconsideration of the Moscow Trials of the defendants Trotsky et al is important for more reasons than the purely academic. Since the scuttling of the USSR and of the Warsaw Pact by a combination of internal betrayal and of subversion undertaken by a myriad of US-based ‘civil societies’ and NGOs,[155] – after the Yeltsin interlude of subservience to globalisation – Russia has sought to recreate herself as a power that offers a hindrance to US global domination. A reborn Russia and a new geopolitical bloc with Russian leadership, is therefore of importance to all those throughout the world who are cynical about the prospect of a ‘new world order’ dominated by ‘American ideals’. US foreign policy analysts, ‘statesmen’ (sic), opinion moulders, and lobbyists still have nightmares about Stalin and the possibility of a Stalin-type figure arising who will re-establish Russia’s position in the world. For example, Putin, a ‘strongman’ type in Western-liberal eyes at least, has been ambivalent about the role of Stalin in histo
ry. Such ambivalence, rather than unequivocal rejection, is sufficient to make oligarchs in the USA and Russia herself, nervous. Hence, The Sunday Times, commenting on the Putin phenomena being dangerously reminiscent of Stalinism, stated:

  Joseph Stalin sent millions to their deaths during his reign of terror, and his name was taboo for decades, but the dictator is a step closer to rehabilitation after Vladimir Putin openly praised his achievements.

  The Prime Minister and former KGB agent used an appearance on national television to give credit to Stalin for making the Soviet Union an industrial superpower, and for defeating Hitler in the Second World War.

  In a verdict that will be obediently absorbed by a state bureaucracy long used to taking its cue from above, Mr Putin declared that it was ‘impossible to make a judgment in general’ about the man who presided over the Gulag slave camps. His view contrasted sharply with that of President Medvedev, Russia’s nominal leader, who has said that there is no excuse for the terror unleashed by Stalin. Mr Putin said that he had deliberately included the issue of Stalin’s legacy in a marathon annual question-and-answer programme on live television, because it was being ‘actively discussed’ by Russians.[156]