Setting Trotsky Free

Go home to your Jews and tell them that I am not a Jew and I care nothing for Jews and their fate.
- Leon Trotsky, to Jewish delegation, 1921

There has never been so blunt a "non-Jewish Jew" than Trotsky. Yet inevitably, after communist, the first thing that comes to mind when people think of Trotsky is "Jew." If Trotsky didn't want to be considered a Jew, shouldn't we honour his wish?

I raised the issue in a conversation with one of the more erudite anti-Semites trolling the Internet:
Somehow every Jewish communist is representative of Judaism’s essence, every Jewish liberal is representative of a Jewish plot, but their Gentile equivalents get to be individuals with their own personal motivations.

His reply:
Either you are very poorly informed or being intellectually dishonest. Clearly, even those rabid anti-culture nihilists of the “Frankfurt School” were consciously attempting to advancing Jewish group interests. As was Jacob Schiff, capitalist and supporter of Communism.

A more pronounced individualism, and lower ethnocentrism, are evolved European traits.

Jacob Schiff was a Jewish-American capitalist who, in response to the Russian pogroms, helped bankroll the Japanese in the Russo-Japanese war. Trotsky was an Ashkenazi Russian anti-capitalist who helped overthrow the Tsarist government for ideological reasons. Yet to anti-Semites they are blood brothers, and that's all that matters. "A more pronounced individualism" apparently doesn't include recognizing that people of other races can also be individuals. I can only shake my head at the recurring irony of ethnocentrists haranguing Jews for essentially being more successful ethnocentrists: so successful in fact, that even Jews who explicitly come out against Jewish interests are secretly advancing Jewish interests.

No matter the protestations of the men themselves, ardent universalists like Marx and Trotsky are always going to be recognized as Jews. That is a sign of the failure of universalism. Nonetheless, in honour of the individual who he was, I hereby declare Trotsky to be the first and last member of the Social Democrat ethnicity. You are free, Lev Davidovich Bronstein. There are no Jews in historical materialist heaven.

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