During the 1917 Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky acted as a key lieutenant to Vladimir Lenin. Trotsky organized the Red Army and successfully resisted all attempts to overthrow the fledgling Communist government.
One of Trotsky’s bitterest enemies was Joseph Stalin, another intimate of Lenin’s. When Lenin died in 1924, Stalin outmaneuvered Trotsky for leadership of the Soviet Union.
Long before he ordered Trotsky’s assassination in 1940, Stalin turned his former rival into an official non-person. Trotsky was:
- Airbrushed from photos showing him sitting or standing close to Lenin.
- Written out of Soviet history textbooks.
- Depicted, in print and documentary films, as seeking to overturn the Revolution—and assassinate Stalin.
Stalin made certain his image in Soviet history was entirely different.
- In the 1930s, he was portrayed as the modest, all-wise, energetic builder of a new Communist world.
- After 1945, he was depicted as the architect of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany during World War II.
No “historian” dared mention that:
- For almost 30 years, through purges and starvation caused by enforced collections of farmers’ crops, he had slaughtered 20 to 60 million people.
- His wholesale purges of the Red Army in the 1930s had made the country vulnerable to the German attack in 1941.
- His 1939 “nonaggression” pact with Germany had almost destroyed Russia. In this he and Hitler secretly divided Poland between them. The subsequent German invasion of Poland, on September 1, 1939, directly triggered World War II.
Joseph Stalin
After Stalin died on March 5, 1953, his status in Soviet history suddenly changed.
- Thousands of his portraits—displayed on streets and in buildings throughout the Soviet Union—suddenly came down.
- In 1956, his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, secretly denounced him as a psychotic butcher and bungler who had almost wrecked the country.
So those Americans with a sense of history were undoubtedly stunned at President Donald J. Trump’s reaction to the defeat of Republican Senatorial candidate Roy Moore on December 12.
Donald Trump
Unfortunately for Trump, Moore carried heavy political baggage:
- He had twice been removed as a Justice from the Alabama Supreme Court.
- He had blamed 9/11 not on Islamic terrorists but on “America’s turning away from God.”
- He had said the United States should eliminate all but the first 10 Constitutional amendments. This would remove those amendments forbidding slavery and guaranteeing civil rights for blacks and women.
Worst of all, Moore was haunted by allegations that, as a prosecutor during his 30s, he had made sexual advances toward at least eight teenage girls.
Many Republicans openly urged Moore to withdraw. They saw him as a nightmarish embarrassment to their party should he win the election.
Roy Moore
Even the President’s favorite daughter, Ivanka Trump, said: “There is a special place in hell for people who prey on children.”
But that didn’t stop Trump supporting Moore full-tilt against his Democratic opponent, former United States Attorney Doug Jones. Jones had convicted Ku Klux Klan members for bombing a black church in 1963.
On December 4, Trump tweeted:
“Democrats refusal to give even one vote for massive Tax Cuts is why we need Republican Roy Moore to win in Alabama. We need his vote on stopping crime, illegal immigration, Border Wall, Military, Pro Life, V.A., Judges 2nd Amendment and more. No to Jones, a Pelosi/Schumer Puppet!”
During a December 8 campaign rally in Pensacola, Florida, near the state line with Alabama, Trump said:
- “Get out and vote for Roy Moore. Do it. Do it. We cannot afford, the future of this country cannot afford to lose the seat.”
- “We need somebody in that Senate seat who will vote for our Make America Great Again agenda, which involves tough on crime, strong on borders, strong on immigration.”
On December 8, Trump tweeted:
“LAST thing the Make America Great Again Agenda needs is a Liberal Democrat in Senate where we have so little margin for victory already. The Pelosi/Schumer Puppet Jones would vote against us 100% of the time. He’s bad on Crime, Life, Border, Vets, Guns & Military. VOTE ROY MOORE!”
As the December 12 election drew close, Trump made a robocall on Moore’s behalf:
“Hi, this is President Donald Trump and I need Alabama to go vote for Roy Moore. It is so important. We’re already making America great again. I’m going to make America safer, and stronger, and better than ever before, but we need that seat and we need Roy voting for us.”
Then—for Trump—the unthinkable happened: Moore lost. Jones received 49.9% of the vote; Moore got 48.4%.
Suddenly, Trump was rewriting history.
During the Republican Senatorial primary in August, Trump had backed Moore’s opponent, Luther Strange. Now he tweeted:
“The reason I originally endorsed Luther Strange (and his numbers went up mightily), is that I said Roy Moore will not be able to win the General Election. I was right! Roy worked hard but the deck was stacked against him!”
And, in another tweet, he stated: “Congratulations to Doug Jones on a hard fought victory. The write-in votes played a very big factor, but a win is a win. The people of Alabama are great, and the Republicans will have another shot at this seat in a very short period of time. It never ends!”
A joke Russians once shared now applies to Donald Trump: “The trouble with writing history in the Soviet Union is you never know what’s going to happen yesterday.”
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STAND UP TO BULLIES–AND WIN
In Bureaucracy, History, Politics, Social commentary on December 19, 2018 at 12:13 amOn September 26, 1960, Robert F. Kennedy gave some brutal—and effective—advice to his brother, Democratic United States Senator John F., who was about to debate Republican Vice President Richard M. Nixon.
Said RFK, who was managing his brother’s campaign: “Kick him in the balls, Jack.”
John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy
As a result, Kennedy came out fighting—and stayed on the offensive throughout the debate. At one point, he said flat-out that the United States should overthrow the year-old Cuban regime of Fidel Castro.
Nixon knew there was a secret CIA plan under way to do just that, but couldn’t afford to say so in public. So he came out hard against such a proposal, saying it would alienate American allies throughout the Caribbean.
Nixon had been warned by Henry Cabot Lodge, his Vice Presidential running mate, to tone down his “assassin image.”
During the 1950s, as a colleague of Red-baiting Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, Nixon had made himself immune from the damning charge of “soft on Communism.”
And yet, pitted against a surprisingly aggressive Kennedy, he came off as decidedly second-best in standing up to Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, the successor of Joseph Stalin.
The Kennedy-Nixon Debate
Commentators generally agreed that Nixon lost that first debate—the most-watched of the four. And it may have proved fatal to his electoral chances that year.
“Kick him in the balls, Jack.“
It’s advice that current Democrats have only now begun applying.
Case in point: The December 11 Oval Office meeting of President Donald Trump, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer. And, true to his love of publicity, Trump makes sure it’s televised live.
Nancy Pelosi
Trump opens with on a positive note: “We’ve actually worked very hard on a couple of things that are happening. Criminal justice reform…[Republican Kentucky U.S. Senator] Mitch McConnell and the group, we’re going to be putting it up for a vote. We have great Democrat support, great Republican support.”
But he soon moves to the matter he truly cares about: Demanding $5 billion to create a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border: “And one way or the other, it’s going to get built. I’d like not to see a government closing, a shutdown. We will see what happens over the next short period of time.”
“One way or the other”—“so doer so”—was a favorite phrase of Adolf Hitler’s, meaning: If he couldn’t bully his opponents into surrendering, he would use violence.
PELOSI: I think the American people recognize that we must keep government open, that a shutdown is not worth anything, and that you should not have a Trump shutdown. You have the Senate. You have the House of Representatives. You have the votes. You should pass it right now.
Trump claims he can get “Wall” legislation passed in the House but admits he doesn’t have the 60 votes he needs in the Senate.
PELOSI: Well, the fact is you can get it started that way.
Trump then contradicts himself: “The House we can get passed very easily, and we do.”
PELOSI: Okay, then do it.
Trump keeps insisting that “the House would give me the vote if I wanted it.”
PELOSI: Well, let’s take the vote and we’ll find out.
SCHUMER: We do not want to shut down the government. You have called 20 times to shut down the government….We want to come to an agreement. If we can’t come to an agreement, we have solutions that will pass the House and Senate right now, and will not shut down the government. And that’s what we’re urging you to do. Not threaten to shut down the government because you can’t get your way.
Charles Schumer
TRUMP: We need border security. And I think we all agree that we need border security.
SCHUMER: Yes, we do.
TRUMP: The wall is a part of border security. You can’t have very good border security without the wall.
PELOSI: That’s simply not true. That is a political promise. Border security is a way to effectively honor our responsibilities.
By “political promise,” Pelosi means this is an appeal Trump made to his hardcore base. which he expects to re-elect him.
SCHUMER: And the experts say you can do border security without a wall, which is wasteful and doesn’t solve the problem.
TRUMP: It totally solves the problem.
Schumer then goads Trump into taking responsibility for closing down the government if he doesn’t get funding for his border wall.
TRUMP: I’ll take it. You know what I’ll say: Yes, if we don’t get what we want, one way or the other…I will shut down the government. Absolutely.
Thus, Schumer guarantees that any government shutdown during the Christmas season will be blamed on Trump.
During the Civil War, General William Tecumseh Sherman said of his Confederate enemies: “They cannot be made to love us, but they may be made to fear us.”
General William Tecumseh Sherman
The same is equally true today.
In short: Stand up to bullies. Odds are they will respect you more for it—and you will earn your own self-respect.
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