Jonah, I’ll definitely have to watch these discussions, which sound fascinating, but even before I do so, I was struck by your reference to “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.”

“Just dawning”? Good grief, by this point the Stalinist regime had orchestrated genocide in the Ukraine, slaughtered the kulaks, and executed, imprisoned, or deported God knows how many millions more. If we are to believe Trotsky’s claim, the poor fellow was more than a little slow on the uptake, something that’s not really credible in the case of a man of such murderous brilliance. In truth, of course, Trotsky was merely trying to dodge the fact that the Stalinist system was a logical, if neurotic, extension of the state he had done so much to create.