George Walford: Segal on Trotsky

From The Tragedy of Leon Trotsky, by Leonard Sega1. 1979, p.161.

On the 22nd October, 1917, Trotsky addressed a mass meeting. He began by describing the suffering in the trenches:

A Soviet regime, he went on, would end that suffering, It would bring peace…

And when Trotsky asked the thousands there to join, him in declaring that they would defend the cause of the workers and the peasant ‘to the last drop of our blood,’ they answered him as one, with arm raised and with burning eyes.

Defending peace to the last drop of one’s blood. The irrational is, indeed, universal. The distinction, between intellectuals and others, is not that the intellectuals are not irrational; it is, rather, that they, unlike the others, are sometimes guided by, reason. But, evidently, not always.

from Ideological Commentary 8, November 1980.