Did it make the rounds as a meme? I was thinking I may have read it in a Parenti book or smth

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.

Thank you that's right

https://readingfanon.blogspot.com/2013/07/in-conversation-with-mahmood-mamdani.html?m=1

Perfect thank you!

It was posted to Hexbear 5 months ago, likening Fuad Nassar's introduction to communism from British authorities to Mahmood Mamdani's introduction to Marx from an FBI interrogation.

Fuad Nassar, the great Palestinian communist, became a communist in Iraq, when the British authorities accused him of being a communist, even though he'd never heard of communism before. "Communism must be good if it pisses you so much," he told them. And then became a communist.