Trotsky on 60 minutes

[Blanquist]

Just now they were interviewing his great-grand daughter about drug addiction and then they talked a little about Trotsky

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57423321/hooked-why-bad-habits-are-hard-to-break/?pageNum=4&tag=contentMain;contentBody

This is the video: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7406968n&tag=contentBody;storyMediaBox

[Lenina Rosenweg]

It was interesting that the bit they had on Trotsky seemed favorable. It can't have been an accident. There's a complete US media blackout on anything to do with socialism and socialist ideas.Perhaps the corporate media is struggling to keep their credibility with the increased popularity of alternate/left media.

[gorillafuck]

It was interesting that the bit they had on Trotsky seemed favorable. It can't have been an accident. There's a complete US media blackout on anything to do with socialism and socialist ideas.Perhaps the corporate media is struggling to keep their credibility with the increased popularity of alternate/left media.it's not controversial in the United States to portray Trotsky in a good light. that's not a new thing.

[Lenina Rosenweg]

it's not controversial in the United States to portray Trotsky in a good light. that's not a new thing.

Maybe. Besides the really bad, "The Assassination of Leon Trotsky" in which Richard Burton plays Trotsky there are two indie films which sort of portray Trotsky, the recent, "The Trotsky", a Canadian indie film, and "Frida" in which Trotsky is there as Frida Kahlo's lover. There doesn't seem to be anything else on him. Robert Service's book slams Trotsky. Otherwise I can't think of anything else about the guy in the corporate media.

I could be wrong though.

I still think it is something to have the US corporate media give favorable attention to a major revolutionary. 60 Minutes is pseudo-investigative journalism, but it is a very popular show and has influence.The section before the one about Trotsky (really his great grand daughter Nora Volkov) Lesley Stahl had a soft ball interview with CIA torturer Jose Rodriguez..

[Philosopher Jay]

There is also Karol Reisz' 1966 British film, "Morgan: a Suitable Case for Treatment". The lead character is a Trotskyist. This was most notably Vanessa Redgraves first starring role in a movie, although she had done some television before this. She was a Trotskyist at the time, I believe.
One also has to see the Monty Python episode the cycling tour where a man gets into an auto accident and believes he's Trotsky. All I recall is that Trotsky gets recalled by Polit-bureau to Moscow and ends up at the YMCA.
Trotsky also appears for about one minute in Warren Beatty's movie "Reds".

[Vyacheslav Brolotov]

The capitalist media usually makes Trotsky look like the sound-minded crusader against Stalinist tyranny. They put him in a very good light for a communist and even my history textbook, which goes on 10 page long rants about the evil overlord Stalin, overlooks his role as a man who also killed some people in his life. No, they make him look pretty attractive for a communist. I bet it has nothing to do with their class interests or anything....

[Bostana]

O yeah,
we get to here about 'how Trotsky was trying to over throw the evil baby eating Stalin', and how 'he was persecuted for communism' and yada yada American Western media horse shit.

[TheGodlessUtopian]

The capitalist media usually makes Trotsky look like the sound-minded crusader against Stalinist tyranny. They put him in a very good light for a communist and even my history textbook, which goes on 10 page long rants about the evil overlord Stalin, overlooks his role as a man who also killed some people in his life. No, they make him look pretty attractive for a communist. I bet it has nothing to do with their class interests or anything....

I am willing to bet the bourgeois media portrays Trotsky in a positive light in the same mindset that they use Animal Farm as condemnation: ignorance. I wonder how many of these people even know that Trotsky was a communist.

[bad ideas actualised by alcohol]

My history book at school is full of why Trotsky is good, and I once had to watch a documentary about why Stalin is so bad and Trotsky is so good 'n stuff.

[Rooster]

The capitalist media usually makes Trotsky look like the sound-minded crusader against Stalinist tyranny. They put him in a very good light for a communist and even my history textbook, which goes on 10 page long rants about the evil overlord Stalin, overlooks his role as a man who also killed some people in his life. No, they make him look pretty attractive for a communist. I bet it has nothing to do with their class interests or anything....

You also get bourgeois text books calling the USSR socialist.

[Crux]

The capitalist media usually makes Trotsky look like the sound-minded crusader against Stalinist tyranny. They put him in a very good light for a communist and even my history textbook, which goes on 10 page long rants about the evil overlord Stalin, overlooks his role as a man who also killed some people in his life. No, they make him look pretty attractive for a communist. I bet it has nothing to do with their class interests or anything....

"What is now happening to Marx's theory has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the theories of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it. " - Lenin, the opening sentences in State and Revolution

That said I have rarely seen this praise of Trotsky you speak of. The history books I had in school seemed more inclined to portray the provisional government in a positive light. In as far as the conflict between the Stalinist clique and the Bolshevik-leninists is mentioned it is usually portrayed as a conflict of personalities.