Just last night I was reading a chapter on the rise of fascism in Europe in a fairly good college World History textbook. Can we underestimate the role mass starvation played in the demoralization of the working class and the rise of Hitler and the Nazis in the post-war Weimar Republic ?
To my surprise the authors of the text correctly perceived the treacherous role phony " socialists " -compromised by both bourgeois liberalism and Stalinism -played in every country of Europe.
Most instructive for readers of this World Socialist Web Site was the leadership of one Leon Blum in France- such an exquisitely CIVILIZED hypocrite. I think Trotsky wrote about this guy while in ignominious exile in Mexico ( even today how many " socialist " leaders on the wrong side of the barricades - even in France ) .
How tragic for a great revolutionary like Trotsky to be both profoundly right and nearly impotent at the same time.
It is no easy task to see how to struggle in the complex hell of decaying capitalism . There is no magic solution even in " Popular Fronts " .
Any medical doctor would ask : how can starving people even think straight ? IT CAN HAPPEN HERE !
May 1936 elections and the formation of the Blum government. ... For the first time, the Socialists won more seats than the Radicals, and the Socialist leader Léon Blum became the first Socialist Prime Minister of France as well as the first Jew to hold that office. ]
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