Let me state, at the very beginning, that in my view the basic political character of the dispute in the 1950s derived from a manifestation of doctrinaire schematism that made no allowance for historical variations, with the tactical rigidity that flowed therefrom.
In reading again recently the material of the Cochran fight, I note that Cochran dates the origin of the dispute to the East European discussion, which began in the immediate post-war period (1946-1947), and continued right on through the Third World Congress of 1951. It was the Third World Congress of 1951 that adopted the resolution on the class character of the East European states, after a long and in my opinion very fruitful discussion.
To give the devil his due, Cochran is partly correct. The East European discussion did constitute a part of the post-war development, that entered into the "new world reality" about which we heard so much from the Cochran-ites following the Third World Congress. This "new world reality," under which the "Old Trotskyism," the "Ossified Trotskyism," as the Cochranites put it, was presumably unable to make the requisite adjustment.
Let me review briefly the issues in the East European discussion, and the character of that dispute which was finally resolved by unanimous resolution at the Third World Congress. The discussion over the class character of the states in Eastern Europe after World War II, really began in earnest after the start of the Cold War, when the coalition regimes arbitrarily established by the Stalinists were summarily dismissed, and the Stalinists took over complete control.
[p. 20]
In my opinion it would be more correct to date the origin of the struggle to the Third World Congress and its aftermath rather than to the pre-congress discussion. Because in the pre-congress Eastern Europe discussion, the differences, and the lines of division were not the same as those developed after the Congress.
The pre-congress controversy was a very rich discussion which ended in virtual unanimity; no differences on that particular question remained in the international movement so far as my memory serves me. I can't recall any serious differences over the final resolution of this controversy, to wit: that these states were deformed workers states, and the world Trotskyist movement extended its policy of defense against imperialist attack to these states, as it had previously done to the Soviet Union.
In order to understand the dispute that broke out after the Third World Congress, we have to go back to the post-war developments, and examine the "new world reality" as it developed after World War II. Stalin's postwar reality—for he also had his view of the new world reality - —was based on the pacts between the victors in the war at Yalta, Teheran, Casablanca, Bretton Woods, etc., etc. In a whole series of meetings, most of them secret, the victors carved out spheres of influence, parceled out the spoils of the war among themselves, and arranged for a division of the booty among the victorious partners in the military conflict.
Eastern Europe was awarded to Stalin as Russia's sphere of influence, with the understanding that the states there were to be ruled by coalition governments. That was part of the understanding, part of the agreement. These governments, of course, rested upon capitalist property relations.
In addition, coalition regimes were established in France and Italy. The Communist Party, which played a prominent role in Partisan movement in France and the underground in Italy, was the only cohesive political force in those states after the defeat of Hitler and Mussolini. There was no other political force capable of preventing the Stalinists from taking power in Italy and France. They voluntarily surrendered power to these coalition regimes in deference to the pacts established by Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt.
On the basis of these pacts, the Stalinists proclaimed that the world had entered a period of permanent peace; that there just wasn't going to be any more war. There was not going to be any more war, you see, because the "Allies" had so cemented their wartime relationship, had so artfully, adroitly and sagaciously divided the world between themselves; had so bound themselves to honor their holy alliance for all time that war, as a means of resolving political, economic and social conflict in the world, was ruled out forever.
Stalin had already dissolved the Communist International in 1943 in deference to the war alliance. And to underscore Stalin's vision of the new world reality, the American Communist Party proceeded to dissolve itself.
The dissolution of the American Communist Party was followed by a declaration that it was no longer necessary to have a Communist Party in the United States. And it really wasn't!
For, if there was to be permanent peace in the world, if the Yalta and Teheran agreements superseded the class struggle on a world scale, then what possible use was there of a "Communist Party" in these United States of America? Instead they spawned a "Communist Political Association." And, of course, like the American Stalinists always did, they went one step further than Stalin. He proclaimed the epoch of permanent peace. With the class struggle being supplanted by Stalin's peaceful coexistence, the American Stalinists began whooping it up for a permanent no-strike pledge. That is, they called upon the unions in this country to enter into agreements with the employers, committing themselves to a no-strike policy; not only for the period of the agreements, but forever, if you please.
In the National Maritime Union, in which we had a number of members at the time, I recall that the question arose: If there are going to be no strikes, and if there is going to be eternal peace and perpetual harmony between employers and employees, then what purpose, what possible function would the union perform? Well, that didn't faze the Stalinists hucksters.
One of their pitchmen wrote an article which was printed in Colliers magazine, entitled: Readin', Writin', and No Strikin'. Its main point was that the National Maritime Union was being converted from a union engaging in struggles with the employers for wages, hours and working conditions to a union that taught "readin', writin' and no strikin'." Yes, not exactly the three R's - —but the next thing to it-the two "R's" and an S. I'm not pulling your leg. You can look it up in Colliers magazine in 1945, 1946, somewhere around that time.
Like the Communist Party, the unions were to be converted into educational institutions. To teach the masses the joys of peaceful coexistence!
Well, it wasn't long before this glittering coexistence bubble burst The inherent contradictions between the two incompatible systems soon engendered controversy and conflict which quickly erupted into fierce antagonisms.
In Greece, a revolution erupted which was strangled by the Stalinists because, you see, Greece had been allotted to Britain's sphere of influence.
In China, they tried by hook and by crook to seduce Chiang Kai-shek into a coalition regime. But he would have no part of it. So, civil war raged in China.
In Vietnam, the Vietnamese had begun the resistance which soon erupted in revolutionary war against French imperialism.
The revolutionary flame blazed fiercely in the whole colonial world. The masses were in revolt, and the imperialists placed the blame at the door of the Kremlin. Incorrectly so. Stalin did his damnedest to dampen the conflagration where he couldn't douse it completely. But the mass movements were too sweeping, too all-embracing, to be easily contained.
So Stalin's erstwhile partners decided to put a little heat on him. The ineffable Winston Churchill came over here at the invitation of "Hiroshima Harry." In collaboration with Truman, he made a speech in Fulton, Missouri, about the "Iron Curtain"—the famous "Iron Curtain Speech," which ushered in the period of the Cold War. (I'm compressing this account in order to provide, in outline at least, the objective conditions in which the Third World Congress convened.)
Churchill's Fulton, Missouri, cold war speech was followed by the launching of the Marshall Plan, the plan to rehabilitate, refurbish and reestablish the tottering capitalist structure in Europe and on a world scale.
[p. 21]
U. S. imperialism emerged from the war as the bulwark of the entire capitalist world order. It had a monopoly on the atom bomb. Practically all the gold in the world was flowing into Fort Knox. Washington had at its disposal the most powerful military establishment the world had ever seen.
Economically Washington and Wall Street were supreme. All of their capitalist rivals had been crushed during the war, victors as well as vanquished. British imperialism, an ally, emerged from the war in very shaky condition. French imperialism was tottering. Italian capitalism and Japanese imperialism existed only by the grace of Wall Street and Washington handouts. The United States was the one big power in the world that was maintaining capitalism as a world system. And it had the atom bomb to back up its hegemony.
It was this cold war offensive of Anglo-American imperialism that impelled the Soviet Union to resort to defensive measures to preserve the positions it had won. And one of these measures was the dismissal of Stalin's coalition regimes in Eastern Europe. I say dismissal advisedly. I don't want to dignify Stalin's phony coalition regimes by using the word overturn. There was nothing to overturn. The Soviet army had occupied these territories. These coalition regimes were arbitrarily put into power. They had no base in the population, no army or police force of their own. All it took was a little flick of the wrist by the Red Army generals and they were gone. They disappeared virtually overnight.
It was this event, that is, the elimination of these coalition regimes, that sparked an accelerated discussion over the class character of the East European states. The question was then posed: What kind of states are these? Before, under the popular front type coalition regimes which maintained capitalist property relations and capitalist property forms, there was really very little controversy. We designated them as basically capitalist regimes. Or, somewhat ambiguously, as "transitional" regimes. But now, with Stalin's capitalist partners thrown out of the governments, and with steps taken toward nationalizing property and moving toward Soviet property forms, the question was once again raised of the class character of these states.
If you recall, Trotsky had said that in the event of a war, in the event of Red army occupation of territory contiguous to Russia, failure on the part of the Soviet Union to assimilate this area into the Soviet state and to establish the same property forms as existed in the Soviet Union, would sharply pose the question of the class character of the Soviet Union.
We had often used the analogy of the Napoleonic wars. Napoleon was compelled, in his military conquest of Europe, to impose upon those states he conquered the economic and political forms established by the French revolution. For feudal Europe that meant capitalism.
So, Trotsky argued, the Stalinists would be compelled, by virtue of the property forms and property relations established by the October revolution to "export," in quotation marks, revolutions to those states occupied by the Soviet army. There was no question in the case of the Baltic states, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia. Those states were assimilated into the structure of the Soviet Union. Property relations were Sovietized, or socialized, and capitalist property forms were eliminated when they became part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
This was not done in Eastern Europe. This did not happen in the case of the Eastern European countries. And so the question of structural assimilation as the perspective of the further development of these states was posed. Meanwhile, so long as they retained their character as "independent" states, it was agreed to designate those states as "deformed" workers states. "Deformed," instead of "degenerated," to underscore the fact that they were deformed at birth and never did have any existence as healthy workers states.
This dispute, I repeat, over the character of the states in Eastern Europe, was finally resolved at the Third World Congress. The resolution of the Third World Congress, printed in the November-December 1951 issue of Fourth International, beginning on page 198, on the class character of Eastern Europe, was called "Class Nature of Eastern Europe." (This resolution appears on page 53 of the Education for Socialists Bulletin, Class, Party and State and the Eastern European Revolution.] | That resolved the dispute over this question.
The discussion had been further complicated by the Yugoslav development which culminated in the Tito-Stalin split of 1948. Yugoslavia, seeking to promote a Danubian Federation, that is a federation of the Balkan states, in order to establish a base for socialist planning on a much more adequate scale, met with the fierce resistance of Stalin. The Kremlin's interest was better served by keeping those states atomized. To discourage the project, Stalin attempted in his own gentle way to discipline Tito.
But he soon found he got more than he bargained for. Tito had come to power on the basis of a surging revolutionary movement, different than that of the other Eastern European states. During the invasion of Yugoslavia by Germany, a civil war had developed in which the Stalinist forces under Tito led the partisan movement against Hitler and against the Chetniks, a bourgeois nationalist movement. The partisans emerged victorious and took the power. After an extremely abbreviated experiment with a coalition government, Tito proceeded to oust the capitalist representatives and established a workers state.
Stalin's differences with Yugoslavia led to a tremendous campaign against Tito by the entire Stalinist world apparatus. From Tito the hero, he was dubbed Tito the traitor. So far did they go, that they even elevated him to rank with Trotsky, the devil incarnate in the lexicon of Stalinist demonology.
But the Yugoslavs stood up against Stalin and his whole bloody gang. They maintained their power and emerged as an independent entity in Eastern Europe. This was the first rift in the Stalinist post-war monolith. It indicated some of the problems created for the Kremlin when national Stalinist parties shook loose from the Soviet bureaucracy, and established their independence on the basis of control of their own national state. We later saw the explosive character of these problems in the Polish uprising in Poznan, in Hungary in 1956, and later in Czechoslovakia. And the end is not yet!
[p. 22]
The Stalin-Tito conflict erupted in 1948. In 1949 we had the Chinese revolution, and in the same year the Soviets tested their nuclear weapon. And then, in 1950, the Korean war erupted. It soon led to the first serious post-war world confrontation when MacArthur marched the American troops to the Yalu river. It appeared as the initial stage of an invasion of China. An American attack on China would inevitably involve the Soviet Union.
It seemed as though the world was teetering on the brink of World War III. But a Third World War of a distinctly unique character. Both the previous world wars were interimperialist wars. This coming war, when it broke out, could not possibly be an interimperialist war, but a war of the capitalist powers against the countries of the Soviet bloc. And so it took on both the character of a military holocaust and a world class conflict. It was this, the dual character of the threatened war that served as the axis for the elaboration of the political line at the Third World Congress.
If, today, you read the Third World Congress documents—in the light of subsequent historical development—they sound a bit weird, but they didn't at the time. The major Third World Congress documents proceeded from the premise that war was on the order of the day; that war was imminent; that war was inevitable; not as an historical prognosis but as an immediate perspective. A leading Cochranite, I recall, writing in The Militant even predicted the date on which war would break out. The month of June 1953, was to witness the actual Doomsday. This was the atmosphere in which the Third World Congress took place.
It was to be war sui generis, subsumed under the thesis of war-revolution. That is, according to the Doomsday blueprint, the outbreak of a military conflict would ignite from its inception the sharpest eruption of the class struggle. The war would spark the proletarian revolution, if not immediately, then very soon after its outbreak.
Let me quote George Clarke, one of the leaders of the Cochranite group, who was then editor of Fourth International. In an editorial in the World Congress issue entitled, "A Milestone in Internationalism" (November-December 1951, p. 164) here's what Clarke had to say:
"The epoch—our own—under consideration by the recent Congress of the international Trotskyist movement marks the last phase of this decline when wars and revolutions are being telescoped into one cataclysmic struggle, yes, into the final conflict between proletariat and bourgeoisie, between capitalism and socialism."
According to prophesy this was to be "the final conflict;" this the Armageddon; this the Apocalypse. And so you can readily imagine Clarke's dismay when he received a whole number of amendments to the resolution from the American party. We never learned until several years later that Clarke, our representative in Europe at the time, had received our amendments but did not submit them. In 1953 we were informed by Clarke himself that he had burned them. He, our representative, never submitted them at all, but later boasted he had burned them.
Let me quote Michel Pablo, the main reporter at the Third World Congress. His report was published under the title: "World Trotskyism Rearms." The Congress line was trumpeted as no less than a fundamental rearmament of the world Trotskyist movement. Pablo affirms, and I quote:
"a) With the Korean War capitalism has entered upon a more precise and a more accelerated military and political preparation of a new world war: an armaments economy. Subordination of plans and ideas to military needs. New bases and alliances.
"b) This war is directed by imperialism against the USSR, the 'People's Democracies,' China, the colonial revolution, the international revolutionary movement.
'c) It is being prepared in a relationship of forces unfavorable to imperialism, which in all probability will remain unfavorable for some years to come. Imperialism having proved itself incapable of realizing the 'optima' conditions for the unleashing of the war and its victorious conclusion.
"d) In this case, a war unleashed by imperialism will rapidly become transformed into a civil war with revolutionary implications in the rest of the world, including the USA."
Pablo continued in this vein in one section of his report after another. If one should undertake to underline those sentences and sections that iterate and reiterate the war-revolution thesis, the result would be a markup of the entire page.
Here are a few abbreviated quotes to convey its flavor: "This time what is involved is the final struggle which brings an epoch to a close." (p. 170) Again Pablo referred to "this apocalyptic struggle with its extraordinary difficulties and dangers."
But victory is assured. The theme of war-revolution runs like a thread through all of the reports and resolutions. And if it was true that the final showdown of war-revolution was imminent, then it followed as night the day, that time was of the essence. There was not time, you see, for the slow accumulation of cadre and the building of Trotskyist parties.
So, as part of the "re-armament," that task would have to be shelved. From the postulate of war-revolution, therefore, there flowed the tactic of entryism. Deep entryism. Entry ism sui generis! Entryism into both Social Democratic and Communist parties, depending upon the particular circumstances in the respective countries.
There was nothing new about the tactic of entryism applied to centrist Social Democratic parties or to mass working class political parties of the type of the British Labour Party. But what was new to world Trotskyism was the proposed entry tactic applied to Stalinist parties in such countries as France and Italy. That was entryism sui generis with a vengeance!
The justification for entryism sui generis into the Stalinist parties was based entirely upon the war-revolution thesis promulgated by the Third World Congress. In his report to the Congress, Pablo explains:
"Concerning our work in countries like France and Italy, where the majority of the working class and of the peasant poor follows the CP, we have outlined an activity which is essentially directed toward the members of these parties and the masses they influence. And this obliges me, in view of the discussion and the disagreements which have broken out on this question especially in the French organization, to deal with the more general subject of our present attitude toward the workers and masses still under the influence of Stalinism.
[p. 23]
"These workers these masses everywhere, even in countries where the CP represents a minority, and even an infinite minority, have a special interest for us that it would be criminal to neglect for the two following considerations: Because of the quality, the revolutionary inclinations of these masses, who as a general rule are composed of the best, the most active, the most revolutionary elements in each country. Because, on the other hand, of our perspectives on the evolution of the situation toward war which will accentuate the leftward development of these masses and will inevitably impel them into revolutionary struggles, including struggles for power, and in any case into a revolutionary attitude in the event of war."
The tactic of entryism sui generis was deemed imperative because, as Pablo insisted, of the "irresistible march to the new war and to new gigantic revolutionary explosions."
As the days lengthened into weeks, the weeks into months and the months into years, it became evident that the war-revolution thesis of the Third World Congress was seriously flawed. Yet, in Europe, entryism sui generis continued—perhaps by intertia—with deplorable results.
While on this particular subject, it might be useful to spend a few moments discussing our own experience with the tactic of entryism. One of the great turning points in the history of Trotskyism came as a result of the victory of Hitler in Germany. Hitlerism took power without a struggle due primarily to the "Third Period" insanity of the Stalinists. It was this event that prompted Trotsky to declare an end to the period of our functioning as a faction of the Communist International and to proclaim the need for a new international, the Fourth International, and for independent sections of the world Trotskyist movement.
At this period the American Trotskyists were organized in the Communist League of America. In 1934 we carried through a fusion with the Musteite American Workers party to form the Workers party. While we acquired some forces as a result of the German debacle, we soon became aware that through some quirk of history, a substantial number of young militants had gravitated into the Socialist party. The American SP, under the impact of the German events, the domestic strike wave, the founding of the CIO and the radicalization of the American workers, had shed its right wing and emerged as a centrist formation under the leadership of Norman Thomas, who championed the concept of building an "all-inclusive" Socialist party.
With the turn by the Comintern to Popular Front politics the American CP embarked upon a concerted campaign to win over the SP to their class collaborationist line. The entry tactic, as devised by Trotsky and carried out by our party, was designed as a three-pronged offensive.
One-to enter the SP in order to fuse with the left-wing militants and win them over to Trotskyism.
Two—in the process, to smash the Stalinist drive to recruit these forces to Popular Front politics.
Three—to remove an obstacle to the development of the revolutionary party by eliminating a potential competitor.
We succeeded on all counts. And that on the basis of a short-term perspective. We had no illusions about the possibility of peaceful coexistence over an extended period of time with the centrist majority of the SP. We knew that sooner or later our fundamental programmatic differences would manifest themselves in irreconcilable political conflict. And that's what soon happened, symptomatically enough over the issue of Popular Frontism, in Spain and in the United States.
The continued growth of the class struggle left wing was viewed as a threat to the opportunist line of the right-wing class collaborationists. The centrists were caught in the middle. Their prescription for reconciling the irreconcilable was to jettison the organizatonal principles of the "all-inclusive" party in favor of their version of the Leninist concept of democratic centralism. This sudden conversion was a bit too transparent. We said, no, we're against democratic centralism so long as the SP remains what it is.
Given its history and tradition, its political heterogeneity and composition, centralism in the SP could not possibly be democratic but could only take the form of bureaucratic centralism whose aim would be to gag the left wing while permitting the right wing to say and do what they pleased.
The fundamental prerequisite of the Leninist concept of democratic centralism, without which it can only be a caricature, is political homogeneity - —that is, agreement on the basic principles, program and practices of revolutionary Marxism. Lacking such homogeneity, "democratic centralism" could only serve to foster dissolution and split. So, when we said that we were against democratic centralism for the "all-inclusive" hodge-podge of warring groups, tendencies and factions in Norman Thomas' SP, we were not joking.
Despite our warning, the centrists, under the prodding of the right wing, persisted in carrying through their centralist miscarriage. That was the beginning of the end of our entry experiment. First they banned the left wing caucus press and publications and even put a ban on the circulation of resolutions adopted by one local to other units of the SP, etc., etc. The "democratic centralism" gambit of the centrists accelerated the split and led to the formation, in 1938, of the Socialist Workers party.
How did we arrive at that name for our party? It was really very simple. When we entered the SP our group was called the Workers party. The result of our entry was a fusion between the left wing militants in the Socialist Party and the former members of the Workers party. It seemed that the natural thing to do to underscore the fusion was to combine the two and call the new organization the Socialist Workers Party. That's the origin of the name of our party.
So much for what may seem like a digression from our subject, but is, I think, an experience with instructive lessons for the present.
So that there would be no misunderstanding, Pablo insisted that entryism sui generis would in no way resemble the entry tactic of the 1930s. For one thing, he dismissed the very idea that there might develop splits in the various Communist parties. As he and his support-ers foresaw the development, under the impact of war-revolution the Communist parties as a whole would move to the left, toward a revolutionary position.
The premise was for war-revolution encompassing the entire globe, with victory in the end going to those arrayed in the anticapitalist camp. With this perspective, deep entry-ism was projected for an entire historical epoch. This blueprint smacked a little of Pablo's previous thesis, presumably withdrawn, predicting centuries of deformed workers states. That was another reason for suspicion of the whole package and we went over the documents with a fine-tooth comb. But I have already spoken of what happened to our amendments when we submitted them to our representative in Europe.
[p. 24]
Starting with the war-revolution thesis the Cochranites in the SWP arrived at the point of picturing the Stalinists as a potentially revolutionary current in the world working class movement. Too impatient to wait for the predicted war-revolution to materialize they proceeded as though it was already a fact and began to act accordingly.
It was this aspect of the dispute that invested the controversy with such bitterness after it broke into the open upon Clarke's return from Europe. This, plus the knowledge that the Cochranite formation was an unprincipled bloc.
It was common knowledge that the Cochran wing had no illusions about Stalinism and even less inclination to move into that orbit. To the contrary, Cochran and his cohorts were beguiled by an altogether different vista. They gravitated toward the Reuther wing of the union bureaucracy. That was their pole of attraction. What the Cochran wing had in common with the pro-Stalinist Clark e-Bartell wing was that both were oriented toward the liquidation of the party. When they splintered soon after they were expelled from the SWP, they split into their two component parts.
Another factor that contributed to the bitterness of the faction struggle was the surreptitious role played by Pablo and his collaborators in Europe. The Cochranites kept insisting that they were the true, the genuine, dyed-in-the-wool disciples of Pablo in this country and the only authentic interpreters of the decisions of the Third World Congress. Pablo and Company said nothing! While we have made available all of the the written material, including correspondence circulated by the majority faction, the Pablo-Cochran-Clarke-Bartell group studiously refrained from doing so. Until this comes to light the entire history of that important episode in party history will remain incomplete.
In retrospect, the fundamental premise upon which the political strategy and tactic was based, proved false. The tactic of deep entryism and its derivative Stalinist con-ciliationism came a cropper. Nevertheless, deep entryism was continued long after the war-revolution thesis had been consigned to the limbo of political oddities.
We learned an important lesson from this experience, and we learned it the hard way. Beware of doomsday politics and the tactics that flow therefrom! Always leave room for historical developments and variations that have not been foreseen. All we can do, at best, is establish certain tendencies of development. It is possible to estab-list definite trends, likely courses of development, probable lines of development, in the prognosis.
But we have got to leave open the possible intervention of unforeseen factors which may require change and alteration in our tactics to conform to change and alteration in the historical development.
I want to end this lecture with a few general observations. As you all know, there is a discussion going on right now in the world movement. And the differences that have arisen are of a very serious nature. But I don't want any comrade to go away feeling that we are heading into a repetition of the 1953-4 split in the International, because the situation now is altogether different.
And, in addition, no one should get the idea that we are going to walk out of the world movement. We're not going to publish a big blast and then walk out. We never did, and we will not now. No, we're going to have a discussion, and we're going to present our point of view, and do it as forcefully as we can. We're going to circulate our views throughout the world movement, and we're going to try to convince a majority, for we are convinced that the historical events have confirmed the correctness of our criticism of the Ninth World Congress resolution on Latin America, as well as on other disputed questions.
In revolutionary Marxist politics, in Leninist politics, the ultimate determination of who was right and who wrong in any given political dispute, is the test of events themselves. Lenin taught, and Trotsky after him, that the majority is not always right. That events decide! This is the corner-stone of democratic centralism.
It is this that distinguishes Leninist democratic centralism from Stalinist bureaucratic centralism. Under Lenin all that was asked of a minority is that they accept the decision of the majority until such time as events decide who was right and who wrong. Stalin just changed the one word "accept" to "agree," and therewith cut the democratic heart out of the Leninist concept. Under Stalin a minority, when such were permitted to exist in the very early days, was compelled to agree with the majority. A psychological impossibility but a bureaucratic necessity.
The determination of truth by the test of events is the great advantage that politics has over religion. One can argue without end over how many angels can dance on the point of a needle, or whether it is proper to make the sign of the cross with two instead of three fingers. There is no objective criteria for the resolution of such disputes. But in politics, events decide, and often without too long delay.
But there are those who, when displeased by actual historical development seek to ignore, or misinterpret, or twist the events into a preconceived mold. Such reasoning, like Alice in Wonderland, concludes that if events fail to conform to the prognosis, so much the worse for the events. And that, my friends, is another of the unfortunate byproducts of Doomsday politics.