it's like that Chinese dude from Caltech who invented China's nuclear program
I love America
this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2025
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Really weird, I swear I read this anecdote years ago before Zohran's campaign, but I can't remember where.
Yeah people are just now realizing that was his dad. Its wild that nobody brought this up when everyone was questioning if he was going to be the next aoc or something.
Did it make the rounds as a meme? I was thinking I may have read it in a Parenti book or smth
“he wrote that poor people shouldnt be poor”
move aside. the marxism understander has entered the room.
"Wow, what happened?"
This genuinely made my day
This is like a funnier, more sitcom version of a story I once heard of a latin american person who was brutally tortured by the police for suspected communism (because he was poor and indigenous I think?), and after being fucked with and tortured he basically become a communist for real out of spite.
When people make it very clear that they are your enemies and also make it clear which of their own enemies they are most afraid of, that is a very good argument for joining the second group.
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. 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. 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.
They asked if I'd read Lenin
"I didn't know he wrote books, but I do like his songs though."
I'm sorry you had to go through that, but it's so funny to do McCarthyism on kids in a Catholic school, especially when there aren't any communists.
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.
I think it would be really cool if you made a memoir or a satire or something about this, and I think the world would be a better place for having more works like that. You could help kids feel reassured that it doesn't need to be this way and help the rest of society understand what goes on in some of these reactionary bubbles.
I have actually taken inspiration from it for bits of fiction I've written, using people who were actually involved as characters with changed names and the like, but you have a good point. Stories like this have been told before, but for every one person who's been through this shit or worse religious cult reactionary garbage, who writes a tell-all book, there's a hundred like me who tell the stories when pressed or among comrades, and countless thousands who maybe weren't repeated direct victims or never turned to the very ideology they were accused of every damn month, who don't tell their story, and might be convinced that they imagined it or it wasn't as bad as they remember it being, they were just young and scared.
Finding a way to tell the whole story in a chronological timeline or in an impact severity order, and make it funny and relatable and include my own wondering between incidents of if it was really that bad, then reminded by the next one it was, and the way it changes your understanding of danger and safety and self-preservation to be in the environment of fear that such things on a frequent but irregular basis creates, and the way you don't even consider it abnormal or an environment of fear, you think it's just what church school is like and sure it's psychological danger from the adults meant to care for you, but the public schools are full of worse physical dangers from the older kids (that's what Mum told me every time I told her how much I hated Catholic school, but she never really heard what I was trying to say - maybe a guardian who hadn't lived through the Cold War would have seen it through different eyes and heard me out), might be both therapeutic for me and helpful for other people who've dealt with that kind of thing, whether the authorities were Catholic churchmen, another type of theocratic authority, or some other form of autocrat or authority over kids abusing that position, and whether they were hunting commies, or heretics, or any other undesirables or scapegoats. There's probably a point to be made here about clerical fascism, even.
Maybe what happened to me can do some good, if I can use it to make people laugh and help some victims of similar shit understand "that really did happen, you're not crazy, and you didn't deserve any of it." Or to help people who think this is just what conservative church schools are like understand that it's not normal to be called into the school a couple times a month to be present while their kid's asked the Communist Party question in the main office by someone from church leadership.
Newest episode of "Weird Little Guys" just came out a few days ago and she tells this exact same story. He was such a communist he didn't even know who Marx was.
The anticommunist action/red scare stuff really did a number on any truly "left" movement in the U.S. and is a large part of why we're here.
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Cool, I saw this before but didn't realize this was Zohrans dad
This could conceivably be an Archduke Franz Ferdinand moment.
he just died? you're telling me now for the first time
Marx died? I didnt even know he was sick!
I read this before and did not make the mamdani connection. Guess we know where Zohran got his quick wit
Why did I read “dead” instead of “dad”
Rorschach’d the title too hard
I remember this from when he was on Chapo back in Feb.
wait i just made the mamdani association...
Well, poor people shouldn't be poor, he wrote 
Damn sounds good sign me up! 
Um, y-you're supposed to agree with US and NOT him
Imagine how evil you have to be if that's how you would sum up Marx and consider it something you need to fight
common thread for any type of police officer anywhere tbh. I'll say you can sign up for that kind of job out of idealism but give it like 5+ years or so on the force at some point you have to square the circle. Either you adopt the ideals you enforce or alternatively you're so much of a nihilist you figure your job is to be a mercenary to inflict violence on behalf of orders above for pay. What else are you gonna do to be able to sleep at night?
even when i was told the wrong definition of communism in school ("its when everyone is equal") i was like yeah thats awesome?
lmao that's like when my 4th. grade teacher gave me The Giver to read and I was like "Wow this sounds based if we just don't do the eugenics part. Organizing the economy? Community events? Sign me up!"
The Giver is about communism? I thought it was just teen dystopian dreck with no political relevance like Divergent or Maze Runner or whatever. Granted, I have read none of the three.
The Giver is supposed to be an Animal Farm/1984 anti-communist book for kids, yeah. Everyone is assigned families, jobs, and homes by the government, made to conform with everyone else, and is given drugs to suppress their sexuality, along with being made colorblind.
The main character is a boy (Jonas) who is born with a partial ability to see color and he gets assigned to the career "receiver of memory" and he will be trained by a "giver of memory." A giver is someone who carries memories of the past and can magically transfer those memories to someone else as long as they have the genetics. The current giver is getting old and needs a replacement, so Jonas is given this task. The memories are everything from color to snow sleds to what it's like to break bones to battlefields of dying soldiers.
Another thing in the book is people are "released." This is never explained to any of the characters what this actually means, so they think it means being sent to another community or exiled into the wilderness. Jonas finds out it means being executed. People who break rules, babies that don't have proper genetics or are excess population, etc. are all "released."
Jonas finds out it means being executed. People who break rules, babies that don't have proper genetics or are excess population, etc. are all "released."
I'm so happy we don't have anything like that in capitalist society.
Really furthers my belief that a lot of these natsec freaks aren't especially bright
Managed to accidentally radicalize someone they were probably suspecting of being a communist by using a (for them) particularly stupid choice of words
Cause and effect isn't exactly their strong suit, though in some cases maybe a little manufacturing an enemy you can box in easily to keep funding going.
Probably. On the other hand they do like radicalizing people so they can use them as an excuse to outlaw or further surveil or attack organizations so it's not impossible they were really hoping to paint MLK with the communist brush and if they had to literally turn people into communists around him to get that to work they were quite willing to do so. Hoover in particular was desperate for it so absolutely wouldn't have been beyond trying to create some communists if it meant giving him more ammo to take down the civil rights movement and MLK.
I guess they need to secure their job security somehow.
hands out a communist reading list
"Have you ever read any of these? No? Keep it that way."
Maybe this is how we get people to read theory
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...
It's the same marketing genius saying "your electric comoany doesn't want you plugging this 39-cent-BOM magic-beans box in" or "buy generic boner pills online with this lEgAl LoOpHoLe"...
except they're making bank.So I guess it would work.
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.
Impersonating feds to hand out theory (in gmod rp servers ofc) would be insanely based
Okay what are you offering then, will I still be poor?
Yes, you're still going to be poor but the already rich will get richer, great deal huh?
I don't follow...
"he's dead"
"I didn't even know he was sick"
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