Maybe it is a little funny that Colonel Sanders looks more than a little like Leon Trotsky.
“My mother went well supplied with money, jars of butter, bags of sweet biscuits, fried chicken and so forth.” – Leon Trotsky
Who doesn’t love cash and fried chicken? They’re two of my favorite things. Plus thank goodness there was an actual quote I could use to highlight the resemblance between Comrade Trotsky and Colonel Sanders.
While I’m not the first person to pick up on this, I might be the first person to attempt and make it into an effective joke about the Trotskyite fifth column and Russian intelligence. This post won’t even have anything to do with how Comrade Bernie Sanders might be inspired by Trotskyite social libertarianism, or even how KFC Canada is now a shill for bitcoin.
Back to our ‘antithetical hero’…
Trotsky was keenly involved with art – collaborating with Andre Breton and communist muralist Diego Rivera on “Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art”. Rivera secured asylum in Mexico for Trotsky before his 1940 assassination ; which followed attempts on his life by the pro-Stalinist muralist and agent David Siqueiros. (Interestingly, Breton may be connected to Orson Welles’ Russian-spy mentor Louis Dolivet’s organization (Free World Association); and Breton had objectively been mentored by Russian agent Alexander Kojeve as well.)
Trotsky doesn’t seem to have branded himself or his followers as a “fifth column” — however, Stalinists certainly did. I’m guessing the Trotsky guys are proud to own this though.
It is key to note the fact that Trotsky was the original sponsor in 1918 of the Red Army’s “Registration Directorate” – predecessor of today’s GRU (Main Intelligence Directorate / Russian military intelligence). Therefore there is an inherent historical connection between Trotsky, art, and Russian military intelligence.
In fact, when you see murals, you can think about how the modern mural movement is essentially descended from Mexican communist art as inspired by Trotsky’s (and Stalin’s) politics. Murals have been used in Marxist (liberation theology) political warfare – specifically in El Salvador. This does create a plausible ongoing relationship between art movements involving Trotsky and the GRU into the late USSR era .
Who knows where else this kind of fifth column thing might be going on.
Also look for a fresh post on how Russia plays both sides soon — Trotsky and Stalin — or Goldstein and Big Brother, as George Orwell put it.