While everyone’s worrying about “fake news” on the “unregulated” internet, the world’s new global screen content behemoth is pumping it out to untold millions of homes.
One of the unintended effects of the vast growth of Netflix is the sheer demand it has for new product. This is increasingly being sourced from non-US places, and so viewers are exposed to worldviews other than their own, and how the rest of the world thinks. And that is sometimes an amazing and horrifying experience.
Take Trotsky, an eight-part series currently on offer, detailing the rise and fall of the co-leader of the October revolution. Produced in Russia, it is a fervently anti-Bolshevik picture of the era, with even neocon journal Foreign Affairs noting that it reduced Lenin and others to caricatures. When Foreign Affairs thinks that…
Trotsky, who had a genuine wit*, gets the best lines. But what makes the show important is its portrayal of how the October revolution came about, and the central place it gives the shadowy figure of Alexander Parvus-Helphand, the most significant historical figure you’ve never heard of — a Marxist who became a millionaire, and then a German imperial agent. According to Trotsky, the entire October revolution was pretty much his creation, with Trotsky as a willing puppet.
I’ve banged on about Parvus once or twice before here, and in just about every other forum. Here’s the short version: he was a Russian Jewish radical, a trained economist, who became a leading theorist in German Marxism around 1900, a leader in the 1905 Russian revolution, developing the theory of “war and permanent revolution”, which would become the basis of the October revolution.
He was a man of huge influence (much of it unknown, or denied by official history) in fomenting and facilitating the revolution that defined the 20th century. What he wasn’t was a sinister Jewish puppet master with the revolutionaries on strings, for obscure Judaic purposes, as the Trotsky series appears to suggest (his money did fund Trotsky’s revolutionary newspaper Nashe Slovo, through a Romanian double agent named Rakovsky — better than Le Carre, isn’t it? — which left Trotsky unaware of the source).
Read the article by Guy Rundle in Crikey (access can be obtained by taking a trial specifying your email address).