It’s a fair point, though I think this meme is going after a very specific type of person: present day neoconservatives that say they used to be Trotskyites.
I’ve never seen a Trot on this site. I’m probably the closest thing in that “I think Stalin did a lot of good but also a lot of bad, but obviously not anything close to what anti-communists claim. Ultimately he and the party were faced with a multitude of impossible problems and I don’t know if the choices I would have made in his shoes would have been any better”.
“I think Stalin did a lot of good but also a lot of bad, but obviously not anything close to what anti-communists claim. Ultimately he and the party were faced with a multitude of impossible problems and I don’t know if the choices I would have made in his shoes would have been any better”.
I don't think this is very far off what most ML's believe, that whole "Stalin did nothing wrong" thing is just an internet meme.
I'd say the line goes between the second and the third guy (any imperialism is bad, so if Stalin ever did that, it would have been just as bad as that of the west)
Far be it from me to defend Trots… but when I hear about these former “Trots” who became neocon ghouls… idk I can’t help but wonder if these people were just very nominally Trots. Cultural Trots, if you will (similar to the concept of a “Cultural Christian”). Like, one guy went to Marxist book clubs with his Trot girlfriend for a couple years so he identified with it for a bit. Or someone who had zero idea what Trotskyism is but thought the way someone explained it to him once made it seem cool. Just seems like a massive swing.
As I understand it it's basically a combination of disillusionment and their material conditions. Trotskyism was a more palatable option for young people with leftist sympathies but too much Cold War conditioning and too little theoretical grounding to side with the Soviets against their own country, so as they grew older and richer, there was no perfect magical imperial core revolution coming along for them to tag along to, and they lost whatever principles they once had they took the framework they'd gotten from trot theory and reapplied it to the ends that a comfortable upper/upper middle class American would want, namely nationalist and imperialist goals.
Or to put it another way, if someone was sectarian against the USSR and their material interests were those of a comfortable white American beneficiary of empire, that's a whole lot of pressure to embrace American nationalism and go all in on the empire shit.
Some, including Kristol, Hook, and Podhoretz, later became key figures in the development of Neoconservatism.
There is also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Burnham, who could likely have been a better face for this meme as it loosely describes his positions (other than the last one).
I'd say the line goes between the second and third guy (any imperialism is bad, so if Stalin ever did that, it would be just as bad as that of the west)