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From: rpk@mit-eddie.UUCP (Robert Krajewski)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Trotsky, Stalin, Socialism
Message-ID: <1297@mit-eddie.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 16-Feb-84 11:34:48 EST
Article-I.D.: mit-eddi.1297
Posted: Thu Feb 16 11:34:48 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 17-Feb-84 06:16:32 EST
Organization: MIT, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 22

Well, Trotsky may have written ``The Revolution Betrayed,'' but that's kind a
self-fulfilling book, since he was one of Bolsheviks who did not hesitate to
put the clampdown on the Kronstadt rebellion.  So much for the Revolution.

I wouldn't impute nasty motives to Socialists in general, but state socialism
is, more than most socioeconomic systems, susceptible to demagoguery and
totalitarianism.  Mao, Cambodia, Hitler, Stalin, and ``1984'' (George Orwell,
by the way, was still a socialist, albeit an iconoclastic one.) all show that.

There's a very good article about Orwell in the ``American Specator,'' a
conservative journal that even a lefty wouldn't retch over.  Of course,
nowadays, everybody wants a piece of Orwell just to show how aghast they are at
the concept of ``1984.''  Basically, the article states that Orwell was a
democratic socialist who, as a political commentator, was not a darling of the
left.  He was very wary of a all-encompassing state, and had a pronounced
distaste for the Labour party in England.
-- 
``Bob'' (Robert P. Krajewski)
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