War by Other Means, Part One

    Mesoamerica is a word that conjures images in the minds of westerners.  Images of colourfully decorated priests cutting the hearts out of victims atop perfectly built stone temples, the victims' blood pouring into cups via specially prepared troughs.  Images of a society girded for war while perfecting their concepts of astronomy and time and images of pyramids mysteriously abandoned for all time by their creators. 

Native dancer, Mexico City, Mexico (Author's collection,  copyright 2019)

Yet the truth is that the word is a mis-nomer.  It leads the listener to think of a single place, society or culture but Mesoamerica was anything but that.  For millennia, the region, which stretches from modern day Mexico to Costa Rica, was comprised of a conglomeration of city-states and a few empires, each of which rose and fell like all the other societies before and after them.  They traded far and wide with as many other tribes as possible but fighting amongst them was more often than not the norm.  Mayan, Olmec, Toltec, Chalchihuites, Mixtec, Zapotec and Teotihuacan to name a few, there were some who’s names aren’t even known.  One thing that is known is that commerce was a large part of each of these better known societies and commerce is  always dependent upon access to trade routes.  

Jackson Step, part of the Chacoan road system (Author's collection copyright 2019)

Two of those routes led from modern-day northwest Mexico into modern-day southwest United States.  The Hohokam Society of today’s American state of Arizona sat at the northern end of the Sonoran Corridor which ran along the Sonoran Coast and linked them to their suppliers, the Guasave culture.  The Ancestral-Puebloans (of Chaco Canyon) and the Mogollons sat at the northern end of the Chihuahua Corridor which wound along the eastern slopes of the Sierra Madre mountain range.  Each of these corridors allowed for the diffusion of Mesoamerica goods (and culture) to flow into the southwest.  Close examination of these circumstances reveals that ancient trade agreements were just as fragile as they are today and that trade wars were just as nasty then as they are now. 

Loose Ends, Part Two

    During the Republic's early days, Trotsky served as the People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs then the Founder and Commander of the Red Army by serving as the People's Commissar of Military and Naval Affairs.  As such, he was a major figure in the civil war victory.  

Trotsky office where he was mudered. (Author's collection. copyright 2019)

    After Lenin’s death, Trotsky led the failed struggle of opposition against the rise of Joseph Stalin and his ever increasing bureaucracy.  He was removed from the Politburo and the Central Committee, expelled from the Communist Party and finally, exiled.  Despite this he continued to oppose Stalin's bureaucracy at the fourth Communist International (COMINTERN).  Trotsky's actions put him on Stalin's bad side and set him on a global odyssey seeking political asylum, being repeatedly turned away by western government’s.  Eventually, he ended up in Mexico City and agreed to acceptable terms with the government there about the scope of his political activities.  Trotsky was a theorist and prolific writer, his ideas were the basis for a Marxist school of thought called Trotskyism and he was writing a "tell all" on Stalin.   To say the least, this was not to Stalin's liking and he decided to act. 

    In 1940, Stalin sent a mole to assassinate Trotsky.  By Stalin’s thinking, the world could never know the truth about him and the party’s activities - the only version of the truth was his and there could be no dissent.  So, on the afternoon of August 20, 1940 in the Mexico City neighbourhood of Coyoacán, a trusted member of Trotsky’s inner-circle entered his house under the pretence of giving him a pen.  Once alone with Trotsky in his office, Ramón Mercador hit Trotsky in the head with an ice axe.  Trotsky died later in hospital and Mercador, the assassin, would spend 20 years in prison.  Stalin went on to exterminate Trotsky's family left in Russia, including his children, and re-write Soviet history without a mention of one of its greatest architects.

Mexican authorities with ice axe (Author's collection)

    It would be decades before the world began to see the evil Stalin represented and even more decades before the world understood that communism was a failed experiment.  Yet today, in the United States, the greatest democratic nation in the world,  Politicians are openly calling for the violation of that nation's constitution in order to place their constituents in mortal danger, while they try to re-create this experiment.  Lev Trotsky's story should prove as a cautionary tale to these would-be courtiers to the ruinous and rapacious exercise that is communism.

Leon Trotsky's internment, Mexico City. (Author's Collection, copyright 2019)

Loose Ends, Part One

    Mexico City is known for many things - especially their upcoming annual celebration of Día de Muertos, but the city’s involvement in the closing chapter of the Bolshevik Revolution is little known.  It was on a sticky afternoon in August of 1940 in the now stylish borough of Coyoacán that the Bolshevik Revolution wrote its final note as the people’s rebellion.  

 Lev Davidovich Bronstein, AKA Leon Trotsky (Author's collection)

     Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky had built the Russian Revolution to empower the Russian people to rise up against their oppressive Monarch, Tsar Nicholas II but their overall idea was to create a system for world-wide revolution - throwing off the "oppressive" cloak of capitalism and empowering the people.  Though the Bolsheviks did a good job of harnessing some of the rampant public discontent extant in Russia at the time, there were many groups actively engaged in subversion in and around St. Petersburg in 1917 and Leon Trotsky was a leader within one of those socialist/communist groups, the  Menshevik’s.  Because of mounting turmoil, Tsar Nicholas abdicated in March of 1917 and an interim government was set up to try and repair the nation’s economy and social unrest all while fighting World War I.  The spark of public agitation was fanned to flames by groups like the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks but it wasn’t until the Germans freed Vladimir Ilyich Lenin from one of their prisons and put him on a train back to St. Petersburg that things began to really heat up.  Just before the October revolution, Trotsky joined the Bolshevik party and was an immediate "insider" who went on to be one of the original seven on the first Politburo which led and directed the Bolshevik revolution. From the October revolution, widespread pandemonium ensued and it was obvious that the Bolsheviks didn’t stand a chance of leading Russia into communism.  The Bolsheviks were ardent writers and loquacious orators but their ability to create useful policy AND put it into place was another thing all together and yet, somehow, they survived.

Secretary office in the house of Trotsky, Mexico City. (Author's Collection, copyright 2019)

    To make a long story short, Russia made a separate peace with Germany, a civil war ensued and countless Russian innocents were murdered while inept policies were implemented and overturned repeatedly and the Bolsheviks blamed everyone but themselves for their failures.  As these failures became apparent, the Soviets (the new name for the Bolsheviks) began to rule the people more harshly.  Questions were met with beatings and dissent with bullets.  During all of this, Trotsky continued to rise through the party ranks.

Trotsky's desk, where he died. (Author's collection. copyright  2019)

Globalism in the American Southwest

    We are not the first culture to have and rely upon international trade.  If we feel that way, perhaps it’s because we coined the term “globalism” to reflect our connected global marketplace.  Unfortunately, that is the only contribution we made to global trade.  The spice roads connected China and Europe via Persia and India for thousands of years before an unknown Venetian sailor in a Genoese prison recounted his travels to the East.

    Cultures are only the sum of their societal input regardless of how diverse they may be.  Life in the Roman Empire was completely different depending on whether you were in Gaul or in Palestine but it was Roman life none-the-less.

Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, USA (Author's Collection. Copyright 2015)

    Perhaps this overview should be applied to the Ancestral Puebloans.  In an attempt to explain the chasm of unknowns associated with their history, today’s scholars are trying to invent their own “Theory of Everything”.  Sadly, they are precluding obvious and significant facts in order to do it.  The largest fact is that the Chaco World conducted significant, long-distance trade not only with their contemporary societies, but also with Mesoamerica and there is evidence of even wider commercial circles.  These Ancestral Puebloans had contact with many external societies and being highly adaptable people, they traded for different goods from different regions: Sea shells from the West Coast, Macaws and cacao from Mesoamerica and copper ornaments which may have come from The midwest state of Missouri in today’s United States.  As we do today, Chacoans used what they could, acquired what they needed and tried to leave a better world for their children.  So, when studying a culture that provides no eye-witnesses and only limited recorded resources, we must be careful not to be fooled by the facts.  Because of this situation of limited resources, we rely heavily upon archaeology and, to a lesser degree, the oral traditions of today’s Puebloan tribes and it is imperative that we do not use any single-source of input if we hope to arrive at a viable conclusion. 

Kin Klizhin Tower Kiva, Kin Klizhin Outlier, New Mexico, USA (Author's Collection. Copyright 2015)

    The conclusion is that Chaco Canyon was, for centuries, a vibrant culture diffused throughout the Four-Corners Region of today’s United States that had contact with their contemporary cultures both near and far.  The level of this contact differed over the centuries but left its indelible mark on Chacoan Culture for the rest of time.  Chacoans assimilated many cultural traditions, both good and bad, and, in the end, all these forces - internal, external, cultural, socio-political and environmental - forced Ancestral Puebloans to abandon their homes and disappear into time.

Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, USA (Author's Collection. Copyright 2015)