c b wrote:
>
> c b cb31450
>
> > Hoo boy -- a Stalinist/Nazi slap fight's a brewin'! And it's only
> > 2010!
>
> It's amazing how the passage of 70 years hasn't dulled the ardor, eh?
>
> Doug
>
> ^^^^^^^
> CB: Of course, debates about Milton, Shakespeare, Jesus or Aristotle
> are fresh as daisies and oh so intellectually on time.+
1. The inclusion of Jesus in this list makes it incoherent: for the Christian such debates are not about the past but about the present (God is always there or not). So we will confine the discussion to Milton, Shakespeare, or Aristotle
2. There are almost never debates about Aristotle bu only about Aristotelian thought, a debate no cluttered with artguments about his character or whether he was in the pay of Alexander, etc. His thought is current. In so far as it isn't participants in any debate on him usually share perception on what parts of his thought are and are not of current importance and debate only the former.
3. Some debates about Milton do resemble debates re Trotsky & Stalin -- i.e., attitudes towards the execution of Charles I (which Milton defended) have or are thouyght to have current political rlevance. I doubt this, but obviously others do not, and hence these debates can develop some of the same rancor that T/S debates develop.
4. Reading Milton & Shakespeare are current events. Discussion of that writing involves the readers, directly r indirectly, not the persons of the writers.
In short, your attempt at a comparison limps badly.
In reference to the Trotsky/Stalin debate, they turn on an implicit premise which (a) is almost never stated and (b) is profoundly false: That "true" socialism could have been achieved in the SU under "correct leadership." That is absurd, and it is a premise that has disastrous effects on current socialist thought, for it is a profoundly voluntaristd premise, carrying over into such idiocies as a frequent expression in the early days of this list, "No wonder the left never gets any plac...." No matter what the leadership, no matter what the stratety and tactics, socialism was not possible under the conditions of early and mid-20th-c world. It was a reasonable goalof those in struggle, and in fact as a conscious goal probably aided them in achieving what could be achieved. But 70 years later we ought to have a clearer sense of the matrial possibilites of Russia 1917-1990, China 1949-80, etc. Had Trotsky won the political struggle with Stalin, events in the SU would have been profoundly differerent, but NOT because the achievment of a permanent socialist regime would have been any more probable under either leadership; the differences in events would have been diffrences within the same set of possiblities. Whether that difference would have affected the outcome of WW2 I do not know and neither does anyone else. Men make their own history, but....
Incidentally, I think one really old debate is of great current political importance -- that between the Sophists & Socrates. It profoundly affects one's approach to politics, one's sense of the political potential under given conditons of the masses of people, one's sense of the nature of human rationality (historically detrmined or a transhistorical standard, etc.) Far more important than the Trotsky-Stalin debate. The debate over whether or not the T/S debate is relevant is probably a relevant debate.
Carrol