November 30, 2005
Putin vs. the Neo-Comintern
by Patrick J. Buchanan
The Comintern, or Communist International, also known as the Third International, was the 1919 creation of Vladimir Lenin.
Its declared purpose: Fight "by all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and for the creation of an international Soviet republic."
Fomenting the communist revolution worldwide was, in brief, the Comintern's mission.
At its Seventh World Congress in 1935, however, on Stalin's orders, the Comintern repudiated the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism as its mission and called for formation of Popular Fronts in Western nations to combat fascism – a Moscow First policy.
For this act of heresy, Trotsky, the champion of permanent revolution, excommunicated Stalin as a "reformist" – and was himself rewarded in 1940 with an ice ax in the head, courtesy of Stalinist assassin Ramon Mercader.
But Trotskyism did not die with Leon Trotsky. It mutated and is today the taproot of that neoconservatism that calls for permanent revolution to advance not global communism, but global democracy. Today, this ideology is embedded in the Party of Reagan and the Bush administration, and neoconservatives are using tax dollars to create and operate their own Neo-Comintern.
http://antiwar.com/pat/