thoughtful response

I'll help urmums401k@hexbear.net out here. We can summarize the first quote as follows:

information coming from the provinces

eyewitnesses I won't name

As for the rest, the CIA/MI6 possibly contributing (note: it would have happened either way - the material reasons why people went on general strike/took up arms would still be there) to the start of the uprising does not serve as evidence for much other than confirm the obvious fact "the USSR and NATO were geopolitical enemies". It's akin to saying China abandoned socialism by 1969 because of this, or that Lenin was a "german agent".

Yes, the uprising in reality did not have a single coherent ideology: some were libs, while others (most) were workers with actual grievances against the bureaucracy, who were forming workers' councils (e.g. Greater Budapest Workers' Council) and demanding direct workers' control of industries. Though note: none of the prominent participating organisations made any calls to return to capitalism, and the said workers' councils were the only ones that persisted for months after the military intervention, until the leaders were all arrested. Even if we suppose that the initial leaders of the movement were sponsored by the West, that soon stopped being the case because the leading organisations obviously changed.

In contrast, I love Maoists and MLs so much, they never ever ever ever fail at any of the above.

I thought the trots were supposed to be the splitters?

CPB, Communist Party of Canada, CPUSA etc. openly support stopping at a "two-state solution" according to the 1967 borders (note: only the last article is older than a month)

I sleep

Canadian branch of the IMT posts cringe 14 years ago, said cringe being hardly representative of the rest of the IMT's articles on Palestine

Kill all trots immediately

:konstantin-syomin-shining:

"Fascism: what it is and how to fight it" - where Trotsky says the complete opposite to what you are implying? From where are you getting that he called the USSR "red fascist", when he instead demanded for its leadership to not equate everyone else with fascists in order to form a united front against actual fascism (a completely valid criticism given any amount of historical hindsight whatsoever)? Surely, if Trotsky were to believe the USSR was "red fascist", he would instead argue for a united front against the USSR and not alongside it - but he did not.

When I meet a Trot that supports AES, even critically, ill let you know.

You could meet more than exactly 2 trots then, instead of getting all your information on Trotskyism from Grover Furr. Or are we defining "critical support" as being without the "critical" part again?

https://www.marxist.com/60-years-of-the-criminal-us-imperialist-blockade-against-the-cuban-revolution.htm

It is the duty of all revolutionaries, but also all consistent democrats, to wage a consistent struggle against this criminal imperialist blockade and unconditionally defend the Cuban Revolution.

https://www.marxist.com/50-anniversary-sputnik-soviet-science.htm

We must remember what we are speaking about. We are speaking about a country, Russia, which in 1917 was one of the most backward, underdeveloped countries in the world. Within the span of 30 years, the Soviet Union was able to achieve what took the advanced capitalist countries hundreds of years to do and what many countries have as yet been unable to do. By the end of the Second World War the Soviet Union had gone from a backward, semi-feudal, illiterate country with little to no infrastructure to become a modern, industrialized, developed economy. By the end of World War II, the Soviet Union had become one of the world's superpowers, militarily and economically, second only to the United States. A quarter of the world's scientists were found in the Soviet Union, which also had a health and educational system equal or superior to anything found in the West - to the extent that she was able to launch the first space satellite and put the first man into space.

Excerpt from a 1940 SWP article:

Socialist Appeal, Vol IV No 11, March 16 1940, page 3, literally titled "Why We Should Defend the Soviet Union"

THE SOVIET UNION REPRESENTS THE FUTURE

But do not the Finnish workers live under better conditions than the workers in the Soviet Union? Do they not have a higher standard of living and greater "freedom”? They leave the ground of Marxism who present such arguments.

One thing that every worker must understand is that capital ism is in a stage of decay and with it capitalist democracy. Whether in Finland or in any other part of the capitalist world, the workers face a choice between fascist slavery or the proletarian revolution. Capitalist democracy is doomed and whether it is this year or in ten or twenty years it will be destroyed by the fascists — or by the proletarian revolution establishing a higher form of democracy.

Finland is part of the decaying capitalist world. The foundation of the Soviet “Union, nationalized property, represents part of that future world of planned economy and the production of goods for the welfare of the people. In the last analysis the existence of the Stalinist regime is to be explained by the fact that the capitalist world still exists.

Let the workers destroy the capitalist world and Stalinism will have no base whatever. It will disappear from the Soviet Union like the scab on a sore from which the pus has been drained. The advanced Finnish workers, considering the historic interests of their class have no alternative but to defend the Soviet Union from the capitalist world.

Another quote from the same article:

History knows no example of a union defeated by the bosses in a serious struggle coming under the control of revolutionary workers as a result of the de feat. A defeat of the union by the bosses means the destruction of the union. To be for revolutionary defeatism within the Soviet Union is like being for the defeat of a union in a struggle against the boss. All the crimes of a reactionary trade union leadership would not make it any less of a crime on the part of a worker to follow a policy of defeatism in a struggle between the union and a boss.

Do you think the authors of anything in the above actually believed the USSR was the same as Nazi Germany?

The position of a majority of Trotskyist organisations is that the existence of socialist/workers' states is objectively good for the world and they must be critically supported, even though their bureaucracies are steering them towards capitalist restoration. A minority believes that they are already "state capitalists" and therefore equivalent to the USA. But absolutely no-one sincerely conflates them with fascism.

What point is there to make?

This applies equally little to "modern Trotskyists", and claiming anything to the contrary betrays a distinct lack of investigation with an overabundance of speaking.

Verification is trivial: pick your favourite trot website and look up "red fascism".

Cherrypicking the most obscure text by Trotsky imaginable, even then proceeding to ignore all context of and exaggerate what was said, and then claiming modern Trotskyists say the Soviet Union was "red fascist" because they took their ideas from the above obscure text (neither is true). Magnificient.

The full paragraph, without anything omitted "for the convenience of the reader" (machine translated from French, because there seems to be no full English translation after a brief search - does that tell you anything about the text's importance?):

Fedor Butenko took the plunge to fascism. Did he have to deny himself a lot? To fight against himself? We do not think so. A considerable – and increasingly important – part of the Soviet apparatus is made up of fascists who have not yet recognized themselves as such. The identification between the Soviet regime as a whole and fascism is a historical error to which ultra-leftist dilettantes are inclined, who ignore what fundamentally differentiates the social bases of these two regimes. But the symmetry of political superstructures, the similarity of totalitarian methods and psychological types is striking. Butenko is a symptom of great importance: he shows us what the careerists of the Stalinist school are in their natural state.

The context is that Butenko, the Soviet envoy to Romania about whom this paragraph speaks about, had actually renounced communism and defected from the USSR to fascist Italy earlier in 1938. To remark on the bureaucracy producing such people is completely different from shouting "red fascism" because a CIA-funded radio station told you to.

Wouldn't a modern passenger jet have a much greater impact than a B25? The latter is several times lighter.

Ground effect would help: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_effect_(aerodynamics)