Untiring activist, communist: Pavel Axelrod, born in Chernigov, Russia, 1850.These are perilous times for our republic and for the rest of the world. That which caught our attention so forcefully eight years ago to this day--the astounding amount of ill will "out there" directed against ordinary Americans, and the degree to which those who wish us harm will go, even including mass suicide by immolation; and the evil genius directing this campaign of terror--has not gone away, has probably not dissipated nor lost its will or its way, and will reappear in our land.
And Americans face other, more subtle perils. Our beautiful land and its people are under attack from without and from within. On the one hand, angry, determined Islamics are intent upon removing us and our influence from their lands; and on the other hand we have the equivalent of Formosan termites, hard at work destroying our free enterprise, our currency and credit, and our constitution. The leaders we have chosen and empowered by office to maintain peace and security in our land and to protect and preserve our systems of governance and commerce are failing us. (It is hard to believe that everything possible was done to minimize the impact, literal impact, of the aberrant airliners of eight years ago. Nor can I believe that no one considered the possibility of an attack on our centers of commerce and governance by civilian airliners. We know government types love Tom Clancy and his books. President Reagan loved Tom Clancy and his book The Hunt for Red October. So lots of military and government types had to be familiar with the idea of attacking US targets with an airliner.) Tom Clancy's book Debt of Honor:
In Debt of Honor, Ryan returns to government service to deal with a second war between Japan and the United States. For a brief time Ryan is the National Security Advisor, but when Vice President Ed Kealty is forced to resign after a sex scandal, President Roger Durling taps him for the job. Ryan accepts the Office of Vice President on the condition that it is only until the end of Durling's current term. He sees this as a way of ending his public life. He is barely confirmed by Congress when a Japanese airline pilot deliberately crashes his 747 onto the Capitol during a joint session of Congress, killing most of the people inside, decapitating the U.S. government and elevating Ryan to the Presidency.
Yes, that is how the protagonist Jack Ryan became POTUS: courtesy of an aberrant 747 flown into our Capitol Building. In a book that a plurality of top level types read. So no hiding behind "it was unimaginable." Ineptitude in government is a given. Ineptitude in leadership is a given. The scale of the ineptitude is what is striking these days. This is Woodrow Wilson level orange ineptitude. Perhaps you still believe that an intelligent person is by definition a capable person. Perhaps you believe the Ivy League elites are to be trusted in matters of governance, money management, leadership and honor. Well, check Harvard University's bank balance these days and reflect upon who was at the helm when the endowment went on the rocks. Or was securely on course for the rocks. (Dr. Lawrence Summers, I presume.) And what exactly is he doing these days? Financial advisor-in-chief to POTUS, I am told, but you really have to be kidding. Even those few remaining believers in the reality of Ivy meritocracy, in the competence if not benevolence of big banks and big bankers, in the ability of big government and government workers to get the job done on time and in budget, in the leadership and honor of all those government types up to and including POTUS himself must be having second thoughts about now. The people who brought us Cash for Clunkers and $5,000,000,000. for ACORN are as incapable of adding value as were the Mensheviks of old. And that brings me to (courtesy of the internet encyclopedias): Pavel Axelrod, untiring social activist of yesteryear, and no-value-added pol.
Pavel Axelrod was born in Chernigov, Russia, in 1850. Deeply influenced by the writings of Mikhail Bakunin, he established a socialist group of students in Kiev. He also contributed to the radical journals, Worker and Commune.
In 1877 he joined the Land and Liberty. Three years later the group split into two factions. The majority of members, who favoured a policy of terrorism, established the People's Will. Axelrod and George Plekhanov established the Black Repartition group that rejected terrorism and supported a socialist propaganda campaign among workers and peasants.
Axelrod went with George Plekhanov to live in Switzerland and in 1883 they established the Liberation of Labour group.
In March, 1898, the various Marxist groups in Russia met in Minsk and decided to form the Social Democratic Labour Party (SDLP). The party was banned in Russia so most of its leaders were forced to live in exile. Axelrod became co-editor of a journal called Iskra. It was printed in several European cities and then smuggled into Russia by a network of SDLP agents.
At the Second Congress of the Social Democratic Labour Party in London in 1903, there was a dispute between Vladimir Lenin and Julius Martov, two of SDLP's leaders. Lenin argued for a small party of professional revolutionaries with a large fringe of non-party sympathizers and supporters. Martov disagreed believing it was better to have a large party of activists.
Julius Martov based his ideas on the socialist parties that existed in other European countries such as the British Labour Party. Lenin argued that the situation was different in Russia as it was illegal to form socialist political parties under the Tsar's autocratic government. At the end of the debate Martov won the vote 28-23 . Vladimir Lenin was unwilling to accept the result and formed a faction known as the Bolsheviks. Those who remained loyal to Martov became known as Mensheviks.
Along with Julius Martov, Pavel Axelrod, Leon Trotsky, Irakli Tsereteli, Moisei Uritsky, Noi Zhordania and Fedor Dan, Axelrod joined the Mensheviks. However, a large number of important figures in the Social Democratic Labour Party, including Gregory Zinoviev, Anatoli Lunacharsky, Joseph Stalin, Mikhail Lashevich, Nadezhda Krupskaya, Mikhail Frunze, Alexei Rykov, Yakov Sverdlov, Lev Kamenev, Maxim Litvinov, Vladimir Antonov, Felix Dzerzhinsky, Gregory Ordzhonikidze and Alexander Bogdanov joined the Bolsheviks.
An opponent of the First World War, Axelrod worked with Julius Martov, Vladimir Antonov and Leon Trotsky, to produce the internationalist newspaper, Our World.
After the February Revolution Axelrod returned to Russia but was too late to stop some Mensheviks joining the Provisional Government. He strongly criticized those Mensheviks such as Irakli Tsereteli and Fedor Dan who now supported the war effort. However at a conference held on 18th June, 1917, he failed to gain the support of the delegates for a policy of immediate peace negotiations with the Central Powers.
After the October Revolution, which Axelrod called a "historical crime without parallel in modern history", he toured the world rallying socialist opposition to the Bolsheviks. Pavel Axelrod died in 1928
Uncle Pavel, untiring activist and communist. I would say that he went to his reward eighty years ago but he was an atheist. ("All dressed up and no where to go: the atheist at his funeral.") He reminds me of a present day Axelrod, another untiring social activist and seeker after power. There aren't many communists these days, so I doubt our present day Axelrod is a communist. But he's definitely on a crusade of some sort and I have a hunch it's not the free enterprise sort. Try social democrat labor party, or just get-in-power-and-we'll-figure-the-rest-out-as-we-go-along party. Let's take a close look at one of the primary architects of this change in America: Mr. David Axelrod, advisor-in-chief to POTUS.
Another untiring activist Axelrod: David, opportunist and/or social democrat laborist.
Biography courtesy of The Guardian:
For Axelrod, for reasons political, professional but also deeply personal, guiding Obama to victory in November has become more than just a challenge. It is, say those who know him best, a 'crusade'. And it began not with Obama's formal declaration of his candidacy in front of Illinois's capitol building on a cold February day 18 months ago, but nearly five decades earlier in Axelrod's boyhood home of New York.
The year was 1960. Axelrod was five, as he would recall the experience to fellow reporters when he began work on the Tribune. He had been taken by his sister to a campaign rally, where he heard the stirring oratory of another young senator who had set off on a journey to the White House: John F Kennedy.
'David was smitten, that's absolutely the right word,' says George de Lama, recently retired news editor of the Tribune, who began at the paper alongside Axelrod as a summer intern and became a friend. 'The experience of seeing Kennedy became etched in his memory - the excitement, the sense that something really important was happening.'
Eight years later, as a 13-year-old campaign volunteer, he sold lapel buttons and bumper stickers for the short-lived presidential bid of Robert, JFK's brother.
But if Axelrod's Kennedy-era sense of political idealism goes a long way to explaining his bond with Obama - and the course of the campaign, from its central message of 'change' to the echoes of JFK in last week's huge rally in Berlin - the focus and urgency he has brought to the fight has roots that are deeper and much more personal.
Axelrod was born in New York's Lower East Side and raised in Manhattan. His father was a psychologist, his mother a journalist for the city's crusading left-wing 1940s newspaper, PM. His early years no doubt helped to give him not only an interest in politics, but a sense that politics mattered.
But they also embedded other qualities remarked upon by friends and colleagues in the political word he has inhabited all his adult life: a sometimes moody introspectiveness. 'Soulfulness' is the word one friend uses; a seriousness; a 'driven' urge to succeed; and an 'inner toughness'.
When he was eight, his parents divorced. When he was 19 - a tragedy he mentioned publicly for the first time only in a moving Father's Day article for the Tribune - his father committed suicide. It began: 'My father died 31 years ago ...' and described him as my 'best friend and hero', an immigrant who had fled the anti-Jewish pogroms of eastern Europe, survived an 'unhappy, failed marriage', yet never showed any signs of sadness. It ended: 'It has taken me more than 30 years to say out loud that the man I most loved and admired took his own life.'
By then, Axelrod had moved west, studying political science at the University of Chicago and, first as an intern and, from 1977, a staff reporter, to the Tribune. He spent nearly eight years there, becoming City Hall bureau chief and then the paper's youngest political columnist, before leaving to join the campaign of another Illinois senator, Paul Simon.
Axelrod, says de Lama, was not only an incisive observer and reporter, but a 'beautiful writer - which you can see in some of the Obama speeches'. But when he left the paper, 'our editor said it was inevitable - that David loved being in the game more than writing about it'.
He founded a political consultancy and soon made his mark running the re-election campaign of Chicago's first African-American mayor, Harold Washington. He has since done work for clients ranging from the current mayor, Richard M Daley, to presidential hopefuls John Edwards and Hillary Clinton. But the Washington campaign proved a template for helping other African-American mayoral candidates, leading one commentator early in the Obama campaign to remark that Axelrod had 'developed something of a novel niche for a political consultant - helping black politicians convince white supporters to support them'.
"Helping black politicians convince white supporters to support them." In 1960 America was ninety percent white, or so it is said. We are now seventy-five percent white. Axelrod's "novel niche for a political consultant" worked at least a minor miracle for Obama. (And one cannot discount the excellent candidate he had to work with. Could Axelrod have put Jesse Jackson or Reverend Al Sharpton in the Oval Office?)
I submit that we are seeing the dismantling of our systems of commerce and governance in America. Systems that we have known all our lives are being exchanged for ones that Europeans would term social democrat labor unionist. The electorate's "vote for change" in the last federal election has (unwittingly) empowered a small but dedicated subset of America's elite, even though our Ivy League elites and those whom the elites gather around themselves have fallen from grace. Undeterred by their fall,they stumble on, seemingly more determined than ever to have their way with America. Now, social activists, communists, and anarchists have always been a fringe of American politics and of American academia. But now groups who dream of forcing severe social change upon America find themselves grasping the reins of power. This is a scary time, and just when America least needs it, what does she get but her own Axelrod. Let us all pray that our Axerod does more good for Americans than Mother Russia's did for Russians.
The good news seems to be that we have change. The bad news is what kind and how extensive. Soon we will see what is in store for us. Not to beat a dead horse, but did Cubans profit when they switched from inept, corrupt governance before Fidel Castro to communism? Of course not. They changed both the form of governance and the form of their economy. It is an unpleasant thought and an inconvenient truth but a crooked politician/free enterprise system worked better for Cubans than an honest politician/communism. And then, in accord with the old saw "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely," honest Fidel turned into corrupt Fidel--at which point there remained no advantage of having embraced change. Will we Americans be better off by change--going from inept, inattentive, greedy governance of the republicans to the high minded, uplifting and stirring rhetoric and generous promises of the social democrat labor party? Does anyone think blue pols are intrinsically more intelligent, moral, and vigilant than red ones? Does anyone think that an intelligent, moral, and vigilant big government could get the job done? Or is a good thing? Does anyone remember Thomas Jefferson's "He who governs least governs best?"
Does anyone ever swim from Miami to Havana?
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