Peter — I’ve really been enjoying your Trotskython, but if I may intrude on one point. That quote from Trotsky which you say (in your discussion) is “pretty good” is pretty good. But Trotsky’s analysis of fascism — German and Italian — wasn’t that great (as Robert Service briefly suggests). Trotsky’s essay “What is National Socialism?” is a great polemic, but the notion that Hitler was simply a “tool of capital” has been thoroughly debunked everywhere outside of hard Marxist circles. His earlier writings on fascism were, I think, far more insightful than his later ones. Regardless, Trotsky was certainly right about the barbarism and mysticism underlying much of the Nazi movement, but the notion that the movement was puked up and controlled by “the capitalists” is just nonsense. And he was completely blind to the evil he himself helped to unleash on the world.

Indeed, as you and Robert Service rightly note, Trotsky has absolutely no moral standing to condemn mass-killing or barbarism. I think Hitch’s comments at the end of segment four about how it was just dawning on Trotsky right before he was assassinated that Stalinism was a form of barbarism too are very interesting. But that’s hardly enough to scrub all that blood from Trotsky’s hands.