Anonymous ID: 0603d1 Nov. 20, 2023, 11:30 a.m. No.19948642   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>8661 >>8805 >>8812 >>9019 >>9179 >>9363 >>9444

One Last post as this old article sums up what we're dealing with

Raised by Communists

all pb

>>19948141, >>19948160, >>19948168, >>19948170, >>19948173, >>19948183, >>19948266, >>19948332 (You) >>19948334, >>19948443, >>19948453 Naomi vs Naomi/Disney and Communists

 

Outside Agitator

Naomi Klein and the new new left.

By Larissa MacFarquhar

November 30, 2008

 

The marquee outside the Bloor Cinema, in Toronto, advertised “The Last Mistress” at four, “Naomi Klein—the Shock Doctrine” at seven, and “Little Shop of Horrors” at nine-thirty. It was a warmish night. The falafel shop next door was doing a brisk business. A line of people holding tickets to the Naomi Klein event stretched to the end of the block and around the corner. Outside the entrance to the cinema, a middle-aged man and an elderly woman paced up and downselling copies of Socialist Action for a dollar. (The September issue included articles about capitalism’s contradictions, class war in Bolivia, and a commentary by Mumia Abu-Jamal—a regular feature.)

 

The economic crisis had looked at first like a textbook enactment of her “shock doctrine” theory, and everyone wanted her to go on TV and explain it.

The central thesis of the book is that capitalism and democracy, free markets and free people, do not, as we’ve been told, go hand in hand. On the contrary, capitalism—at least fundamentalist capitalism, of the type promoted by the late economist Milton Friedman and his “Chicago School” acolytes—is so unpopular, and so obviously harmful to everyone except the richest of the rich, that its establishment requires, at best, trickery and, at worst, terror and torture.

Klein was born in 1970, but the political stories in which she places herself all begin in the thirties. The thirties and forties were the last time in America, she feels, that social movements were strong enough to force radical economic change in a progressive direction. They were also the last time that a certain kind of grand, bold political hope existed in her family—the last time before events combined to extinguish all thoughts, among Kleins, of utopia.

 

Herpaternal grandparents, Anne and Philip, met at the Jack London Club—a leftist artists’ club—in Newark, New Jersey, sometime in the thirties. (Philip’s older brother, Sol, was more committed—__he moved to the Soviet Union __after the revolution and never came back.)Philip wanted to be a painter, and in 1936 he got a job as an animator for Disney. He worked on “Fantasia” and “Snow White” and “Pinocchio.” Disney animators had been trying to organize themselves in secret since the early thirties, but they didn’t pull it off until after the bonuses they were promised for “Snow White” failed to materialize. In the late spring of 1941, they went on strike. Philip and Anne, ardent believers in the union, lived in a tent across the street from the studio, cooking over open fires and manning the picket line. Their first son, Michael, Naomi’s father, was then three, and lived with them in the tent part of the time. The strike was settled in September, but a few months after that Philip was fired for being an agitator. In 1942, he and Anne moved back to New Jersey, and he went to work in a shipyard.

Anonymous ID: 0603d1 Nov. 20, 2023, 11:36 a.m. No.19948661   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>8805 >>8812 >>9019 >>9179 >>9363 >>9444 >>9493

>>19948642

New Left

Same as the Old Left

>Outside Agitator

 

>Naomi Klein and the new new left.

 

At the time they were ruining their lives for politics, Anne and Philip were experiencing the beginnings of a crisis of faith. Stalin had signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact: that was the first betrayal. Then came news of gulags in the Soviet Union. By the time of Khrushchev’s “secret speech” of 1956, in which he denounced the cult of Stalin and its consequences, Philip and Anne, along with many others, had bitterly abandoned Communism. yeah riiiiiggght*They held on to their core beliefsin social justice and racial equality,and taught their sons to believe in those things,but apart from brief forays—Anne took ten-year-old Michael canvassing for the Progressive Party in 1948, andmarched on Washington in support of the Rosenbergs—they withdrew from politics. They began to spend time at Nature Friends (later Camp Midvale)—a retreat near Paterson, founded in the twenties as a place where workers of all races could congregate and enjoy nature. Nature Friends became their life. Philip built a house nearby, and Anne grew her own vegetables. They went to see leftist singers like Pete Seeger and Paul Robeson and Woody Guthrie. Philip sought to revive his early ambition of becoming a painter, but all his figures looked like Disney cartoons. He tried sculpting in metal, and after a while this brought him a measure of satisfaction.

In high school,Michael Kleinwas in the band and the student council and was the captain of the swim team,but he led a double life. He’d been sent to Socialist summer camp, and his real friends were other red-diaper babies who lived in New York, with whom he could discuss his home life without fear of exposure. It was difficult and frightening to be the child of Communists.One of his most vivid childhood memories was seeing buses arrive at Camp Midvale in the early fall of 1949 and disgorge dozens of bloodied people who had gone to a Paul Robeson concert and had been attacked with rocks and bats by a local mob. The electrocution of the Rosenbergs, in 1953, which left their two boys orphaned at the ages of six and ten, terrified Michael, who was not much older.

Michael Klein never deviated from the beliefs of his parents,but, like them, he stayed away from political parties. In medical school, he protested against the Vietnam War and joined Physicians for Social Responsibility. When he was drafted,he didn’t sign the statement about not belonging to organizations with Communist ties, so the Army held a hearing to decide whether he was loyal enough to serve. Meanwhile, he had met a young activist filmmaker from Philadelphia named Bonnie Sherr, and got her pregnant. In the middle of his draft negotiations, she saw a documentary about American soldiers dropping napalm on civilian populations, commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. She said, “If a Canadian government agency can produce a film like this, we should get married and run away to Canada.” So they did.

 

>https://archive.ph/Z1BSJ

 

there's moar but you get the idea