A quick Google search of the organization turns up little on its supposed communist affiliation, except by way of accusations made by the usual suspects—the rabid and vile freepers and predictably emanating from Frontpage Magazine, a website run with Scaife money by the former Marxist turned neocon, David Horowitz.

It is interesting the neocons would call McGovern a commie, or rather a commie dupe. As is well-known, or should be, the Old Guard of the Straussian neocon movement is comprised of Trotskyites. “Authentic neocons descend from the Communist and socialist movements, with the most prominent leaders being Trotskyites (that is, ultra-Left Communists),” writes Dale Vree for the New Oxford Review.

“Neoconservatism’s key founders trace their intellectual ancestry to the ‘New York Intellectuals,’ a group that originated as followers of Trotskyite theoretician Max Schactman in the 1930s and centered around influential journals like Partisan Review and Commentary (which is in fact published by the American Jewish Committee),” writes Kevin MacDonald. “In the case of neoconservatives, their early identity as radical leftist disciples shifted as there began to be evidence of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. Key figures in leading them out of the political left were philosopher Sidney Hook and Elliot Cohen, editor of Commentary. Such men as Hook, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Nathan Glazer and Seymour Martin Lipset, were deeply concerned about anti-Semitism and other Jewish issues. Many of them worked closely with Jewish activist organizations. After the 1950s, they became increasingly disenchanted with leftism. Their overriding concern was the welfare of Israel.”

“Many of the top chieftains of the War Party are ex-leftists of one sort or another,” explains Justin Raimondo. “They owe more to Hegel, Marx, and Leon Trotsky than to Russell Kirk, Friedrich Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises. The ‘godfather’ of the neoconservative movement, Irving Kristol, was a Trotskyite in his youth, and the kibitzing that went on in Cubicle B at City College of New York has achieved the status of legend. The official line, of course, is that this was all just a youthful indiscretion and that any such allegiances have long since been put away in a trunk somewhere.” In essence, the Straussian neocons are Marxist reactionaries with a deep and long Jacobin streak.

Raimondo continues:

The ideological framework of neoconservative ideology is deeply rooted in the Marxist tradition. Francis Fukuyama, the boy wonder of the neocons, even came up with an application of the Hegelian dialectic as the ultimate rationale for American global hegemony in his famous article on “The End of History.” The Marxists, too, saw themselves as agents of History, and they constantly evoked images of modernity to justify their innumerable crimes against humanity. They came as “liberators”—a favorite word of Red Army propagandists, and one that our own Pentagon has since taken up with alacrity.

The neocons retain the methods as well as the ideology of the left: party-line politics, periodic purges, and the nasty habit of smearing their opponents rather than engaging them in debate. The neocon method echoes that of its leftist progenitors: Once the party line is established—Israel must be unconditionally defended, Iraq must be utterly destroyed, Pat Buchanan must be smeared into silence—anyone who deviates is demonized.

It should be noted that neocons such as David Horowitz and Stephen Schwartz are former communists who went over to the neocon Dark Side and brought their pedantic and doctrinaire baggage along for the ride. It is sincerely creepy to read Horowitz—he still sounds like a Marxist, although instead of evil capitalists he now excoriates Muslims and his former comrades and his response to the latter hints at the Stalinesque—they are traitors probably best herded in detention camps.

Stephen Schwartz, who “speaks of Trotsky affectionately” (see Trotsky’s ghost wandering the White House, National Post), is a frequent contributor to the Weekly Standard, a magazine owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation (Murdoch also owns Fox News where neocons rant and rave daily).

It is really quite strange to witness former (and in the case of Schwartz, apparently active) Trotskyites slamming Ray McGovern—a former CIA employee who presented morning intelligence briefings at the White House for years—as a commie dupe. McGovern is a distinguished military graduate who served in the US Army from 1962-64 as an intelligence officer, while most if not virtually all of the Straussian neocons are chicken hawks and military service shirkers (recall Cheney had “other priorities” during Vietnam and Rush Limbaugh skipped out due to a pilonidal cyst, an appropriate malady considering his vile personality).

If indeed Not In Our Name is a commie front, it must not be the sort of communism approved by the Straussian neocons, a cabal of warmongers drawing ideological sustenance from vanguard Trotskyism, advocating “permanent revolution,” an ideology so radical and dangerous not even the fanatical Stalin would cotton to it. Instead, he had Leon Trotsky killed by assassin Ramón Mercader, who drove the pick of an ice axe into Trotsky’s skull in Mexico City, circa 1940.