There's a review by Christopher Hitchens of the Isaac Deutscher Trotsky trilogy in the latest issue of Atlantic Monthly. Though critical of Deutscher's politics, Hitchens describes that classic biography as a 'mighty work of reflection and engagement'. He writes:
This is a majestic, sonorous collection, written in the stern and judging manner of the Talmudic scholar that Deutscher had been and the Marxist polymath that he became, and of Thomas Carlyle, whose study of Cromwell he so esteemed.A topical passage:
As Hitler was advancing toward power in Germany, the European left... abandoned its nerve and its principles, and declined to make common cause. The most depraved offender was Stalin's Communist International, which insisted that the Social Democrats were a greater enemy than the Nazis, and which implied that a victory by Hitler would merely clear the way for a Communist triumph. In a series of articles that really do vibrate with the tones of Cassandra, Trotsky inveighed against this mixture of ugly realpolitik and cretinous irresponsibility. The late Irving Howe once described those articles collectively as the finest polemic of all time. I am not sure that I would go so far, but it is very difficult to re-read them even today without a tingling in the scalp and a lump in the throat. Better than Freud or Reich (or Churchill), Trotsky intuited the sheer psychopathic element that underlay the mass appeal of fascism.While others get busy with the poison darts, do read the rest of this excellent review. (Hat tip: Dave Bennett.)
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His essays from this terrifying moment are worth re-reading not just for their prescience... They are above all a moral warning against the crass mentality of moral equivalence. He wrote, "The wiseacres who claim that they see no difference between Bruning and Hitler are in fact saying: it makes no difference whether our organizations exist or whether they are already destroyed. Beneath this pseudo-radical verbiage hides the most sordid passivity."