I know, right? It was so The Crucible. Not that I knew that at the time, or I’d have told them they were wasting their time on a witch hunt and name dropped the play. They’d honestly have had more luck hunting heretics, I sure as hell wasn’t a practicing Catholic in good standing, and I know we had at least two Protestants and one kid who wasn’t even Christian, even in that one tiny ass K-6 school. But saying you’re hunting commies gets the local government to cooperate, literal witch hunting doesn’t.

Which, funnily enough, just after I finally graduated from that nightmare a few years ago, the Catholic schools in my area are doing sectarianism and heretic hunting, as a result of complicated local regulatory shit that boils down to two school boards with different regulations and separate budgets and leadership, government at all levels that won’t pay for enough public schools, and desperate public schools turfing out Catholic pupils, forcing the Catholic system to turf out non Catholics to take the displaced Catholics. I just hope they’re too busy now quibbling over who’s Catholic enough, that they don’t have time to commie hunt, level baseless accusations against kids who just really like to read, and harass little girls at almost complete random, whether somethings actually Gone Wrong or not. (They had people from the district question everyone when some older kid at one K-12 I attended accidentally left some theory on a table in the school library, but that kind of visit from the district happened even when everything was business as usual.)

Oh, the stories I could tell about idiot children of the Cold War in collars and cassocks, running a school district. Homophobia, transphobia, sectarianism, commie hunting, it goes on and on. There’s a Good. Damn. Reason. that The Crucible used church witch hunting as the known and viewed with derision example of mass hysteria to compare McCarthyism to. I went through so much hell for twelve long years because of the McCarthyist ghouls who ran my local Catholic schools and couldn’t be convinced by anything short of God Himself that I was not a communist, just a bright and precocious child who was born with my mother’s book addiction. You wanna talk about Cold War Christianity and its continuing ripples in church and state issues? I may not have been born until after the war, but I sure as hell lived through Cold War Christianity. You would not believe the “Cold War as a Crusade” rhetoric that went around, or how many times I had to answer the infamous Communist Party question in a room FULL of teachers and school administrators and sometimes my mum.

Yeah, it ultimately was probably what actually made me a commie. “If I’m going to do the time, I should at least understand what the crime is, and decide if I want to do it, since I’m doing the time anyway.” Logic that makes a lot of sense when you’re twelve and it’s been six long years of this shit and another six to go. Then of course it only got worse…

There probably were actual communists for them to find, eventually. Communists that they’d made by doing this crap.

Yes, I’m still mad. Very mad. Not just because it happened to me. But because it happened to so many innocent kids. Because the Cold War never really ended. Not for everyone, not in the churches, not for the people with the least power over their own lives.

One of these days I have got to put the whole thing to (digital) paper, and change a bunch of the names and rewrite the funnier bits in third person, and sell the thing as stereotypical Cold War themed pulp fiction. Maybe I can make some lemonade out of these truly awful lemons. Or maybe just distribute the true story among comrades, horrify y’all with the Cold War nonsense that churches get away with in areas you wouldn’t peg as Cold War flashpoints and hotbeds back in the day, that even the American feds aren’t trigger happy enough to try.

Horseshoe theory, lol!

To use this exact tactic, we’d have to hand out theory as “the government doesn’t want you to read this”, but that would absolutely work. Especially in places where current public trust in government is at an all time low.

I mean, this would absolutely work on nonconformists who break rules for the sake of breaking rules, and kids/teenagers. Want a kid, or someone with a childish mindset, to study something, the best way is to convince them they’re not supposed to and they’re getting away with something. Use that on people with demand avoidance tendencies or who break rules to break rules, and use “the government doesn’t want you to read this” to reach a broader group. But yeah, if you want to get teenagers reading ML theory, this would probably work better than anything a lot of young commies are doing to radicalise peers…

I had a similar experience the first time I got harassed for allegedly being a communist, because someone in a position of limited power wanted to make trouble for me…

I’d heard of Marx, but never been interested in reading his work, but I had no idea who Lenin was, when I was brought down to the front office of my school, to be asked some questions by some guys from the district. They asked whether I was a communist, I told them I had no idea what a commie was, besides that we beat them in the Cold War. They asked if I’d read Lenin, and I told them I’d never heard of him. They asked if I could point them to any of my classmates to ask the same questions to, I told them that there are no commies in this tiny little Catholic school and they’re wasting their time questioning us.

I didn’t actually read any theory right after that, that took a lot more time and a few more nasty incidents, but I did find out who Lenin was and learn a lot more about communism than I’d known before that incident, so.

Yep. It’s so weird to me that Americans don’t seem to have electric kettles all that often, since they’re quite common in a lot of places, including my country.

Actually, there’s probably some interesting commentary to be made on modern workplace coffee culture being created and encouraged by the bourgeoisie to squeeze more productivity out of the proletariat…

But I’d rather bash the Trots for how they make their coffee, than do actual Marxist analysis of the ways the working class uses caffeine.

exactly 10 paragraphs of theory reading

I’d probably have to up that to properly time a cup of coffee… my mum says I read too fast.

You should see how Americans make tea. It’s even worse.

You should read the Communist Coffee Maker story on NotAlwaysRight. I also seem to remember another story I saw online where clueless Americans accused the CPC of spying on them through cheap coffee machines made in China… like a good 90% of cheap consumer crap on Turtle Island. It’s not just coffee machines! It’s all bloody made in China! But they’re not worried about any other consumer goods spying on them…

You’re specifically the British or English local party of whatever your tendency is, then. Tendency probably depends on whether you use individual mugs or a teapot, how you heat the water, and whether you use teabags or looseleaf, and if looseleaf, the exact way that you put it into the water and remove it from the steeped tea.

(Or, you’re a modern Chinese commie, see the pics of Xi with two teacups in front of him. But I like the British party branch joke better. Took me longer to write.)

Feel free to invent a new tendency

Like the Trots keep doing? (Party splits)

Or… Trot pretending to be a proper ML… I’ve run into a few of those. Most Trots are proud of being Trots (they shouldn’t be, but at least it makes 'em easy to spot and ignore), but there’s a few weirdos out there…

I don’t know in what context Bugs Bunny would dress up as Stalin, but hot DAMN, even a bunny looks good stealing Stalin’s look.

Yeah… on the one hand, the dragons are a little more creative than drawing China as a panda bear. On the other hand, the panda bear always looks cuddly and detracts from the meaning of the propaganda and I think that’s an incredibly funny juxtaposition.

Of course China’s a panda! There’s an old Sino-Soviet joke in there about the Soviet Bear, that resolves to a panda bear and a grizzly bear having a nice snuggle and looking just plain adorable.

They’re trying to counteract previous mistakes of drawing China as a panda bear, which… the Soviet Bear thing worked because you can draw a grizzly bear that looks scary (although I find most Soviet Bear junk to look hug shaped anyway), the panda allowed for good Sino-Soviet jokes, but they eventually figured out that it’s very difficult to draw a panda bear that doesn’t look hug shaped and adorable, so they started drawing China as a dragon instead… which only serves to make China look badass. Though I do miss the cuddly panda bears.

That would be amazing and I’d love it.

Except that it’d never exist, because it could only be real workplace nightmares and real union organising under capitalism, but it would never be filmed or aired in a capitalist country. The USSR absolutely would have been willing to make something like that back in the day, but the necessary class contradictions, and unionising as the only means of recourse, simply weren’t present.

Marx explains why it happens. Lenin tells you what to do about it.

This is one of the most succinct explanations of how Lenin builds on Marx, that I’ve read in a while. Nicely put, comrade.

I mean, I catch myself falling for Soviet nostalgia crap that ends up in the West a lot, despite having been born long after the dissolution, but like, the Western left as a whole has a Soviet obsession and Eastern Bloc nostalgia problem. Lot of Western communists who didn’t live through the Cold War but miss it anyway, along with those who did live through it and miss when just being a communist was in and of itself revolutionary and dangerous and Doing Something. People who love Soviet aesthetics and still want Red Dawn to actually happen, instead of having to lead a local revolution and take local culture and material conditions into account.

So, this might not work that well in the actual former Warsaw Pact… but it sure as hell works in countries that were on the other side of the Cold War.

That is… Very strange. But also not that surprising. Lot of Russian “past power and glory” nostalgia relies on the Orthodox church and tsarism just as much as it relies on Stalin era USSR or post Great Patriotic War Soviet nationalism.