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Special pages :
A Discussion With Carleton Smith
| Author(s) | Leon Trotsky |
|---|---|
| Written | 2 February 1940 |
The United States will join the Allied forces, win the present European war, become the greatest capitalistic nation in the world, and then America’s sixty families will hire British diplomats and statesmen as their bellboys, Leon Trotsky, exiled Russian Communist leader, told Carleton Smith, music critic who once served as commentator with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Smith said yesterday as he alighted from a plane which brought him here from Fort Worth. He saw Trotsky two days ago.
Smith, a native of Bement, Illinois, a graduate of the University of Illinois, Chicago University, and the London School of Economics, despite his mere thirty years of age, has made a _ worldwide reputation as a music critic. Back from a four-and-a-half month tour by air of South America, where he visited the president of every South American republic, and such figures as Trotsky and Diego Rivera, the eminent artist in Mexico City, Smith is enthusiastic over the possibilities of perfecting a real good-neighbor policy through the medium of art and music.
But of Trotsky and his interpretation of world events, the youthful critic, attired in a soft light brown fur coat, made from the pelts of the vicuna, an almost extinct animal found in the highlands of Bolivia, had much to say.
A virtual prisoner in Mexico City, where he lives in a house behind thick twelve-foot-high walls with electrically charged wires and machine guns as protection, Trotsky told Smith, “The first real Communist nation in the world will be the United States. The reason Russia has never been a real socialist state is because in order to have such a state you must first of all have something to divide up. The United States has much to divide, while Russia had practically nothing.
“The United States will join the war in order to defeat Hitler and when he is whipped Stalin will sell him out in order to make a better deal with the victorious Allies. The strongest firm always wins in those cases and the United States will be that firm. It will rule over the miserable and destroyed nations with usual American benevolence and will be considered a nation of great guys.”