Wrong End of Pick

Students may be wondering what the pick axe it doing in the window of the Salient office. Hat Peter Pranks got a labouring job? Is Roger Steele building a house? Or are the editors collecting tools like this in order to tear up the roads and build barricades?

No. It hat more sinister implications. The pick axe (described as an 'icepick in the March 21 issue of Salient) is a threat to the Young Socialists Club, the one Trotskyist group on this campus. You tec, Leon Trotsky was assassinated in 1940 with an icepick which was wielded by one of Stalin's agents. Trotsky was head of the Petrograd Soviet in 1917, organiser of the Red Army during the Civil War, and, with the death of Lenin, led a fight against the rite of Stalin in the Soviet Union. Stalin's supporters made a number of attempts at murdering Trotsky in the years which followed his exile from Russia in 1927.

Apparently the Salient editors find it amusing that someone should be murdered for his political beliefs. Perhaps the fact that they display a pick axe in their window indicates they would like to see the same thing happen to all the Trotskyism on campus.

If so, they have successfully revealed the sickening nature of their 'radical' politics. Stalin had Trotsky murdered because he saw all opposition to him (even from someone in exile) threatened his despotic rule of the Soviet Union. Perhaps the Salient editors view any opposition to their politics in the same way.