May 12, 2012

Forward. Just, well...Forward!

By R.E. Bowse
If Marxist rhetoric were outlawed from today's political discourse, many progressives would be rendered mute.  Consider President Obama's recently unveiled 2012 election slogan, "Forward!," which has a clear consonance with socialist ideologies of the interwar era. Turns out that "forward" in Italian is "avanti," which happened to be the name of the official rag of the Italian Socialist Party in the first half of the twentieth century.  From 1912 to 1915 its editor was some guy named Mussolini. "Forward" in German is "vorwärts" and in Russian "vperyod."  These, too, were the names of socialist newspapers of the same era.  The former was the principle organ of the Social Democratic Party of Germany.  On its pages appeared the work of Engels and Trotsky, among other socialist intellectuals.  "Vperyod" was the name of a publication founded by Vladimir Lenin in 1905.  The word also appeared in the title of the newspaper "Forward for Stalin" (note: its...(Read Full Article)