From Trotskyism to Praising Hamas

In the 1920s, Joseph Stalin drove his fellow Bolshevik Leon Trotsky out of the inner circle of the Soviet government and then expelled him from the country, eventually having him assassinated in 1940. While Trotsky and Stalin did have genuine ideological disagreements, they agreed that the USSR should be autocratic, brutal, and ruthless toward dissenters. A myth nonetheless grew up that Trotsky embodied a more humane and democratic version of Communism—true only insofar as it’s difficult to be less humane than Stalin—and an energetic Trotskyite movement persisted in the West into the 1950s.