In exile in 1933, Trotsky saw the Nazis for just what they were:
Today . . . there lives alongside the twentieth century the tenth or thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcism. . . . [C]apitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism. Such is the physiology of National Socialism.
Today on Uncommon Knowledge, Christopher Hitchens claims that Trotsky’s denunciation of the Nazis — which took place while a lot of intellectuals were still making up their minds about Hitler — represent a “moral moment” in the former revolutionary.
Robert Service? He finds the very suggestion that Leon Trotsky ever proved “moral” hard to take:
He was right about Nazism . . . but his idea of foreign policy was not a morally pure position at all.
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