Netflix’s Trotsky: A toxic combination of historical fabrication and blatant anti-Semitism

[wsws.org]

(Given the virulently anti-Semitic character of the Trotsky series, one might have assumed that a storm of protest would have greeted Netflix’s distribution and promotion of this film. But nothing of the sort has happened. Despite daily campaigns denouncing anyone who dares issue a word of criticism of the Israeli state’s brutal treatment of the Palestinian people as an anti-Semite, Netflix’s Trotsky has been given a pass. The few reviews in the capitalist media of the United States and Europe that have appeared have made no reference to the film’s blatant anti-Semitism, or even called attention to the innumerable fabrications. The New York Times has not published a review.)

(Second, under conditions of mounting political crisis, there is an increasing fear of the growth of interest in revolutionary socialism. The ruling elites and their agents in the media and academia are responding to this threat. The historical lie, as Trotsky wrote, is the ideological cement of reaction.)

The ignorance to the real history of socialism is bad enough as it is. As people walk away from this series they will believe Trotsky was antisemitic. When Trotsky was actually of Jewish decent.

(The Bolshevik revolution and the ensuing victory of the working class in the Russian Civil War drove many of the leading ideologues of Tsarist anti-Semitism into exile in Germany, where they played a major role in promoting a deadly form of Jew-hatred that exerted substantial influence on what was to become the Nazi movement. As the historian Michael Kellogg has thoroughly documented in his book, The Russian Roots of Nazism, the future leaders of the Third Reich drew heavily in the formulation of their views on the “conspiratorial-apocalyptic White émigré conceptions of international Jewry as a malevolent force that strove for world domination through dastardly means.)

Trotsky was born in the Ukraine, a Jewish farming family. To label him as antisemitic is ludicrous.