Treat Mercilessly, Kids

Leon Trotsky was a genocidal monster. Incredibly, the Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv lauds him as an example for Jewish youth.

Leon Trotsky

Leon Trotsky, born Lev Davidovich Bronstein in 1879 in what is now Ukraine, was a Marxist revolutionary second only to Lenin when the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1917. As the supreme commander of the Red Army in the new communist regime, he wielded enormous political power. He also had a major impact on the ideological direction of the revolution. In particular, he provided the intellectual justification for the Red Terror, the state-sponsored mass murder of millions of Russian Christians and the confiscation of their property in the name of the proletariat. The Red Terror was administered by the new political police, the CheKa, which excused its brutality by characterizing it as the "people's anger," as if it were out of their hands. That was Trotsky's formulation. "It is difficult to teach the oppressed masses good manners under class slavery," he wrote. "When aroused, they use a club, a rock, fire and a noose."

Trotsky was politically ruthless and without scruples. He was the only witness in the disgraceful trial of a Captain Schastny in Moscow in May 1918. Captain Schastny had saved the remainder of the Russian navy in the Baltic Sea from surrender to a German fleet during WWI. He was accused of treason for "acting heroically and making himself popular with the intent to use that against the Soviet government." He was convicted and executed on the 22nd of that same month. That verdict set the precedent for a wave of politically motivated executions, which grew to become state policy when the Red Terror was officially launched four months later.

In March, 1919, a peaceful rally of 10,000 workers in Ashtrakhan was surrounded by machine gunners, sailors, and grenadiers. After the workers refused to disperse, they were shot with rifle volleys. Then the machine guns began firing into the crowd and grenades started exploding among the rally participants killing no fewer than 2000 workers. Many thousands more were taken into custody. Wires about a "riot" were sent to the capital and Trotsky responded, "Deal with mercilessly." That sealed the destiny of the unfortunate prisoners. Bloody madness ruled on the land and on water.¹

Bela Kun with Studio 54 founder, Steve Rubell

In 1921, the notorious Hungarian communist and journalist, Bela Kun, rampaged across Crimea. He, too, under the authority of Trotsky, unleashed a bloody slaughter, stating, "Comrade Trotsky told us that he would not visit Crimea as long as the very last counter-revolutionary remains there. Crimea is a bottle that none of the counter-revolutionaries will be able to escape, and as it is late on the path towards revolution, we will move it ahead quickly towards the overall revolutionary level of Russia."

Kun "moved it ahead" with mass executions at previously unheard of levels.

The slaughter continued for months. Machine gun volleys could be heard every night until dawn. The residents of the nearest houses moved out because the mental torture of the constant sound of executions was too horrible. It was dangerous, too. The wounded crawled up to the houses and begged for help. Some were executed for harboring the survivors.

The corpses were thrown into the ancient Genoan wells. When they were filled, the parties of the sentenced were sent out supposedly for work in the mines and forced to dig the mass graves during the day, locked in barns, then stripped and executed that night.

The dead were laid side by side in the graves. Moments later another layer was laid and it continued until the graves were full. The wounded were finished off in the morning by crushing the skulls with rocks.

So many were buried alive!²

In a 1921 book called "Terrorism and Communism," an Austrian-Czech Marxist named Karl Kautsky, who had assumed the position of caretaker of Marxism after the death of Engels, was sharply critical of the Bolsheviks as news of the horrors occurring inside Russia began leaking out to the world. Trotsky responded to Kautsky's book with the "ideological justification for terror." An enemy must be disarmed, he wrote, and in "times of war," that means destroyed. Kautsky called Trotsky's response a "hymn, praising inhumanity" justifying a blood lust that was the "pinnacle of revolutionary depravity."

After the 1924 death of Lenin, an intense power struggle to replace him began between Trotsky and the even more ruthless Bolshevik, Josef Stalin. Stalin finally prevailed in 1927. Trotsky was exiled in 1929, then tracked down eleven years later and murdered with an ax on August 21, 1940 in Mexico City.

How would the bloody history of the Soviet Union have been different had Trotsky won out over Stalin? Probably worse. In the July 13, 1921 issue of Pravda, Trotsky promised to "to slam the door before leaving so that the whole world will hear... Those who are planning to replace us will have to build on the ruins among graveyard silence." By the time Stalin consolidated power, 20 million had already been murdered.

In Tel Aviv, Israel, there is a museum called ANU The Museum of the Jewish People with a permanent children's exhibit called Heroes--Trailblazers of the Jewish People. “Jews, like every other people,” the museum explains, “teach the next generation about the values and actions they should pursue through its choice of heroes.”

The museum lists 148 such heroes, among them Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Oracle's Larry Ellison, the father of communism, Karl Marx, physicist Niels Bohr, film director Woody Allen, singers Bob Dylan and Barbara Streisand, diarist Anne Frank, and genocidal monster Leon Trotsky.

Really, guys? Today, there are many around the world, apparently including many young Jews, who condemn as genocidal the Israeli government's policy towards the Palestinians. The Israeli government responds indignantly that it has a right to defend itself against terrorists and any suggestion that Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is genocidal is absurd and motivated by an irrational hatred of Jews. But, the Israeli government itself helped fund the Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv in which one of the most successful perpetrators of genocide in human history is honored as a Jewish hero and a role model for Jewish children. Trotsky's inclusion in a list of Jewish heroes in a museum with the official and financial backing of the Israeli government is not a good look. At all.

1. "Astrakhan Executions," CheKa Almanac, pp. 251-253

2. The Red Terror in Russia 1918-1923, Serge I. Melgunov, pp. 66-67