Thread by @CarterWSWS

Stalinism is the #1 reason why this planet isn't already socialist. The history of Stalinism is a global political genocide of Marxists, selling out the USSR and restoring of capitalism, and discrediting socialism for a generation. These are the facts. 1/

Stalinism is not a subject about which anyone can "agree to disagree." Trotsky described "not simply a bloody line but a whole river of blood" separating the Marxism from these specialists in assassination, poisoning, lies, torture, and betrayal. 2/ marxists.org/archive/trotsk…

The ice pick, a symbol utilized by the latter-day Stalinists in and around the @DemSocialists, represents a celebration of the mass murder of all those who courageously opposed the betrayal and sellout of the October Revolution by Stalin and his accomplices. 3/

Trotsky was the most famous but by no means the only victim of Stalin's worldwide campaign of terror. In the 1930s, the counterrevolutionary bureaucracy in the USSR murdered virtually the entire leadership of the October Revolution. 4/

Trotsky, without exaggeration, said of the tendentious and inquisitorial show trials under Stalin: "There are no crimes in history more terrible in intention or execution than the Moscow trials." 5/

The Russian historian Vadim Rogovin described "hundreds of thousands of people torn away from their apartments, thrown into prison, subjected to torture, made to confess to crimes, and then either exterminated or sent to concentration camps." 6/ wsws.org/en/articles/19…

The political genocide perpetrated by Stalinists decimated and decapitated the Marxist movement worldwide. Lev Sedov, for example, would have lived into many of our lifetimes. He would have celebrated his 62nd birthday in 1968, and his 85th in 1991. 7/ wsws.org/en/special/lib…

Comparing Stalin to Hitler, Trotsky once wrote that while Hitler assaults Marxism from the outside, Stalin not only assaults the movement from within, but perverts and discredits the cause. Trotsky described Stalin as the "most sinister figure in the history of mankind." 8/

And what do the Stalinists have to show for themselves? After murdering every Marxist they could get their hands on, they led the USSR to shipwreck, enriched themselves in the process of restoring capitalism, and settled comfortably into real estate in London and New York. 9/

The Stalinist liquidation of the USSR created the conditions for the current NATO proxy war in Ukraine. People who were a short time ago citizens of the same society have been turned into cannon fodder, killing each other in the service of reactionary nationalism. 10/

The history of the Soviet Union and the heroic struggle of the international Left Opposition is well-documented. The names of the martyrs should not be forgotten, and nor should the names of the villains. 11/ wsws.org/en/topics/even…

The Stalinists and their political descendants today alternate between lying about history and claiming that history is unimportant. And when they are confronted with facts they can't answer, they resort to barking and shrieking and posting memes of ice picks. 12/

The ice pick, when directed at a Marxist, belongs in the same category as a noose directed at a black person or an oven directed at a Jewish person. It is a symbol of counterrevolutionary political violence, a death threat, and an extreme provocation. 13/

After everything that happened in the 20th century, it is an outrage that Stalinists and so-called "Marxist-Leninists" so much as dare to show their faces around anyone involved in the struggle to organize the working class for a fight against capitalism in the 21st century. 14/

Stalinism as a tendency belongs, in Trotsky's world-famous phrase, in the "dustbin of history."

If you have not read any of the political writings of Trotsky yet and are looking for a place to start: The Revolution Betrayed. 15/15 mehring.com/product/the-re…