This diary began as a response to AndrewSshi's Unusual Bumper Sticker diary. It did not end there, and grew like topsy.

The McCain sticker on the Prius is an antidote to someone thinking the driver might be a Liberal. The driver might be secretly shopping at Whole Foods and surreptitiously eating arugula, too. Common sense and healthy food is mighty tasty, once it’s freed of its political associations. The bumper sticker keeps him from getting the finger from some redneck driving a ratty old pickup truck up from Galveston.

My Dad retired and took a lump sum payment. He turned most of it into real estate, some into stocks. For years, my folks had been buying property on the advice of a crafty real estate agent who also handled some of my real estate. How many houses did my folks own?

* Hausa farmer, Niger
Reuters/Finbarr O'Reilly


Let’s take a step back, put more of the landscape in the frame. At the risk of oversimplifying, I’ll attempt to lay out Trotsky’s point. Nations, then and now exist at various states of development. More precisely, they exist in various states of backwardness and they’re all trying to play catch-up. Backward countries need capital, and they’ll do almost anything to get it. It’s a sad fact of life: backward countries are badly led. A good measure of how badly a country is led is the percentage of subsistence farmers. Workers aren’t a whole lot better off: they leave the farm, only to spend their days doing manual labor in the factory, getting a fraction of the profits, but hey, it is a step up and don’t blame the capitalist, that’s the way these things work. These backward countries can’t wait around for bad leaders to die off and better ones replace them.

Countries with fewer farmers have the luxury of plenty of capital. An enterprising worker can run down to the bank with a good idea, get a loan and buy the means of production. Once he’s got a nice little company running, he can expand his business. If it’s a really great idea, a venture capitalist will fund him into the big leagues. The subsistence farmer has no such options.

* Iskra Offices
37a Clerkenwell_Green
London

Trotsky’s escaped from Siberia and fled to London in 1902. Why London? It was a magnet for Russian exiles and other personae-non-grata. Lenin had also escaped to London and was editing Spark magazine, Iskra in Russian. Trotksy began writing for Spark, as were several other raffish ex-prisoners of Tsar Nicholas II, Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias. All would figure large in the years to follow. This little magazine would be the fulcrum upon which Marxism would teeter and totter. With a smaller circulation than many college newspapers, around 8000, struggle for control of its editorial board would have consequences far beyond anyone’s ability to predict at the time. I give you the cast of characters, for Trotsky cannot be understood without them.

Trotsky had married while in prison. He had left his first wife and two daughters behind in Russia of necessity: escaped prisoners don’t usually go back to their families, and his wife understood completely. Trotsky met his second wife in London, took her name and had two more children. The children of Trotsky’s first marriage were raised on their grandfather’s estate. His first wife would later die in the gulag of Kolyma, mining gold in the Arctic. She was last seen in 1938 and has vanished from history. Varlam Shalamov describes the mass graves where she was doubtless buried in his Kolyma Tales, left as an exercise to the reader. Solzhenitsyn said Shalamov, not he, saw the worst of the Stalinist evil. In 1903, Stalin was in Siberia, a young sociopath and thug in training, soon to return to Georgia to a career of robbing banks and extorting money for the Bolsheviks. But this would be far in the future.

* Leon Trotsky, 1897

In the wake of WW1, and to a limited extent before that war began, the paradox of the Nation State became clear. Kings had been reduced to constitutional monarchs as the Nation States arose in Europe, but the tyrannies remained, with Empires and Nationalists largely in charge of the world. For Liberalism was largely unknown in the world: democracies had not truly reached down to ground level. Here and there, men ruled with the consent of the governed, but universal suffrage and the rights of man remained merely ideals. Into this world steps Leon Trotsky, Russia’s first foreign affairs minister after the Russian Revolution. Lenin may have ruled the Revolution and Stalin would later overthrow it in a sort of Second Revolution, but Leon Trotsky was its brains and heart.

Trotsky was essentially a ruthless, decent, intelligent man, the first man with a vision for world democracy, right down to ground level. He is the intellectual forebear of several political movements including Neoconservatives and all the Liberal Hawks, Christopher Hitchens is another of his followers. But everyone who ever believed in Leon Trotsky hated Stalin and all he did. Do not confuse Trotsky with what Communism would become, for Stalin would eventually murder Trotsky for opposing those changes. Every enemy of totalitarian Communism owes a profound debt to Trotsky. Many people espouse his causes, completely unaware of Trotsky’s authorship of those causes. Trotsky is, to my way of thinking, the most misunderstood political theorist.

Never on the face of the earth have a more cowardly, racist and self-pitying bunch of bullies and strong-arm robbers been assembled as we now see gathered in the Kremlin. Russia lapses into its natural state, a modus vivendi characterized by insularity and self-aggrandizement. Georgia again plays with fire, nationalist sentiments arise, only to be beaten down, as in centuries past. It has all been seen before

0730 EST. The Olympics rumble to life, we are witness to the overture of a new superpower. The Chinese are desperate to exhibit their hospitality. Push a microphone in from of any Chinese child, and you’ll hear him proudly root for his country. In English. I give you, however imperfectly seen from the outside, a view of the Chinese as they see themelves.

A Ming dynasty painting hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of New York City: Elegant Gathering in the Apricot Garden (complete image here). No martial statues on horseback, brandishing swords for these leaders of China. They sit under blooming trees in Beijing, admiring antiques, gazing at a particularly beautiful rock, doing calligraphy, in the company of lovely women, playing board games in the morning of April 6, 1437. They are in harmony with their world. Each guest composes a poem, attached to the scroll.

WaPo’s investigative newshounds seems to have dug up a bone.

Chatting with K yesterday, asked him for a topic for my next article. “Yourself, of course” he said. “Am I not self-indulgent enough?” I replied. “Well, all our political opinions are really facets of our personalities, clues to our anxieties and aspirations.” he sagely observed, “Why not cut to the chase?”

Azzaman, the Iraqi newspaper reports this morning, my rough translation: