Trotsky in Mexico

If you are familiar with Communism, you have probably heard the name "Trotsky."  Leon Trotsky was the founder and commander of the Red Army during the Bolshevik Revolution.  You might have learned that he had to run for his life after Stalin took over and that Stalin's assassin finally found him in Mexico and murdered Trotsky there.

Here is a vignette, a depiction of Trotsky in Mexico.  This is from an article in the Sunday March 22, 2020 New York Times, Sunday Review section, page 6.  The online edition is dated March 21, 2020.

Lessons From My Grandma on Art, Sex and Life By Bret Stephens

 My father once asked his mother, the artist Annette Nancarrow, what she thought of Leon Trotsky. It wasn’t a political question. He just wanted her impression of the exiled Bolshevik, whom she had first met in Mexico City in the late 1930s, in the studio of her close friend (and, my father suspected, future lover) Diego Rivera.

“Well, I was surprised to see the leader of the proletariat so elegantly dressed,” she recalled, many decades after Trotsky’s murder by a Soviet agent in 1940. “His attire was impeccable, and I was particularly struck by the Parisian calf-skin gloves he took off of his beautifully manicured hands.”

The answer was vintage Annette. As a painter, she saw the part of the surface that revealed the inner man — the bourgeois fop within the fiery revolutionary. As a judge of character, she sensed why he had lost his power struggle with Joseph Stalin for control of the Soviet Union — people who take care of their fingernails don’t usually enjoy getting them bloody. And as a connoisseur of style, she appreciated good leather.

Here is a link to the article
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/21/opinion/sunday/annette-nancarrow-art-mexico.html

I have not said much about Communism, but I should.  The last time I wrote about Communism it was because the news media was pushing "resistance" and that made no sense until you study and discover that resistance is part of Communist ideology.  I wrote about it in this previous post:

What is this Talk About Resistance?  December 28, 2017
https://texasascendant.blogspot.com/2017/12/what-is-this-talk-about-resistance.html

Robert

Always Have Had Fake News

We have always had a problem with fake news.  Read what Thomas Jefferson said in a letter to John Norvell, 1807:
Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper.  Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.  I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live and die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time.

These means we have always had fake news in this country.

I found this on page 210 of Lapham's Quarterly, Volume XIII, Number 2, Spring 2020.  The issue is labeled "Scandal."

Robert

You might read my earlier post:
Is the Press Our Enemy?   July 4, 2017
https://texasascendant.blogspot.com/2017/07/is-press-our-enemy.html