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Communism is so passe…
Seriously, who still thinks of communism as some big crazy threat? The Department of Homeland Security, that’s who:
NEW BEDFORD — A senior at UMass Dartmouth was visited by federal agents two months ago, after he requested a copy of Mao Tse-Tung’s tome on Communism called “The Little Red Book.”
Two history professors at UMass Dartmouth, Brian Glyn Williams and Robert Pontbriand, said the student told them he requested the book through the UMass Dartmouth library’s interlibrary loan program.
The student, who was completing a research paper on Communism for Professor Pontbriand’s class on fascism and totalitarianism, filled out a form for the request, leaving his name, address, phone number and Social Security number. He was later visited at his parents’ home in New Bedford by two agents of the Department of Homeland Security, the professors said.
The professors said the student was told by the agents that the book is on a “watch list,” and that his background, which included significant time abroad, triggered them to investigate the student further.
“I tell my students to go to the direct source, and so he asked for the official Peking version of the book,” Professor Pontbriand said. “Apparently, the Department of Homeland Security is monitoring inter-library loans, because that’s what triggered the visit, as I understand it.”
See, the problem here is commie liberal pinko college professors, encouraging their students to be un-American. Just kidding! As if. It’s that the bureaucracy is still operating under a cartoon caricature of what evil is and how to identify it, and what to do with it. I mean, sure this sounds all fascist and evil on the one hand, but more than that, it just sounds like a sad pathetic attempt to assert control in the most vain useless way possible. This is too lame to be scary.
- Cultural Warfare, CIA-Style
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- Prev: Paganism & Otherkin-ism
- Next: What good is meaning?
December 18th, 2005 at 2:47 am
The old saw applies:
Don’t mock until you KNOW a little more. Frankly, I don’t appreciate being “lumped-up” with the mass quanitity of teenage “Oh Em Gee I AM ARWEN RELLY OMGOMOMGSQUEE111!!11ONEONE!1″ soulbonders OR “Otherkin” out there.
I check the trackback links from truthofthespoon twice weekly, when I can — and I found this. How about ASKING questions…. good old investigative method, and all that? I mean shit, man — my e-mail’s right there. Thousands of people have. BEFORE they mocked.
*sighs.* But why am I not surprised?
December 18th, 2005 at 7:59 am
Nx0, you’re a member of the Department of Homeland Security?
December 18th, 2005 at 10:36 am
Wow, reader perspective really does influence the meaning of a text, doesn’t it!?
December 18th, 2005 at 12:08 pm
outraged. i cant say much more.
December 18th, 2005 at 2:05 pm
makes me want to request the same book through inter library loan and see what happens.
December 18th, 2005 at 4:32 pm
artists and intellectuals are the thorn in the side of the bureaucracy. the chinese just shot them all during the revolution. we have a little bit more wiggle room here. we just have special case actions. like the i.r.s. did to what`s her name with the t.v. show. makes everyone else tow the line. and actually, i think the threat to democracy lies in socialism more than in communism. communism still is interested in the preservation of capital and maintaining the means of production, whereas socialism is not so much interested in production as in slavery. the egalitarian view that the college proffesors preach is in reality everyone covered in the same layers of dirt and grime. actually read gulag archepelago and put yourself in alexander`s shoes for a minute.
pure communism and capitalism are basically the same thing. workers owning part in the means of production. in the u.s as elsewhere in the economic world we own stocks, bonds and other financial instruments as a means of ownership in companies. in karl marx`s model, the factory workers would have a share in the capital of the factories they worked in. what happened in real terms was that the union of soviet socialist republics (or c.c.c.p. in russian) took everything and gave back the scraps to the people. socialism. hilary clinton`s idea of an america of the new century with her as president and her husband as head of the u.n. is exactly that.
so here`s the choice. we either really like george bush`s gung ho capital preservation strategies or kerry, clinton, clinton, gore socialism.
aint politics fun?
December 18th, 2005 at 6:52 pm
Biblical literalists didn’t merge with the GOP until the threat of communism scared them into it. Some of them (in the churches and Wall Street both) may still fear a communist resurgence. Certainly a lot of them preserve the habit of attacking Reds.
December 18th, 2005 at 8:28 pm
Hahaha, Wow.
It’s kind of sad that I hear about this from your website. I study history at Umass Dartmouth and this is the first I’ve heard of this, although I can imagine people wanting to keep it on “the down low”, as they say. Its still weird to see an article that strikes so close to home. Well at least I’ll know now to be careful of what books I get out at the library.
December 18th, 2005 at 9:22 pm
Tim, you obviously don’t read enough political blogs. Conservative bloggers still have a fear and loathing of anything approximating to liberalism, let alone actual communism; reading right-wing blogs, you sometimes feel the cold war never ended, or that capitalism somehow didn’t triumph over communism. I don’t think anyone should be surprised to find this sort of thing still exists at the institutional level…
December 18th, 2005 at 11:12 pm
communism and capitalism are the same thing. they both deal in the ownership of the means of production. it was the theoretical brainchild of marx in russia. it never actually manifested it`s self in russia. they decided to do socialism instead. we do a mixed form of capitalism here, mixed with an egalitarian re-disribution of wealth (capital) in the form of benifits. it is a balancing act of capital preservation and re-investment and meeting the political needs of coming through with the vote promises of past generations in the form of benifits.
pretty simple really.
reduce the pre-adolescent tantrum of demanding more “rights” in the form of guaranteed money and the government can preserve the tax income, or universal benifits for everyone (hooray!) and in a gneration we are bankrupt and have to look to more extreme means to keeping the lights on. little secret between you and me…….. we`re already there.
george has been pushed to the front o`the class to explain what the fuck is going on and there are those who don`t like the message.
December 18th, 2005 at 11:48 pm
Asserting control is what all governments do, and it becomes an ends in itself. Yes, it’s lame as hell. But it’s also dangerous. Raoul Vanigem stated quite clearly that the vertical edifice of control–i.e., the medieval church’s political power & the ostensive controls of feudalism–had been replaced by a thousand horizontal means of control. E.g., the clothes you wear you bought in the store, the logo on you coffee cup, the schedule of your TV programs, etc., etc. I think that the effect of this leveling, horizontal “edifice”–somehow tied to Ken Wilber [wiping vomit off my keyboard]’s “Flatland”–has a more dangerous effect on the alchemical formation of the human psyche. The social pressure for conformity has changed from physcially coercive to “lebensfeld” (roughly, “domain of regular life,” lit., “life field”) invasive.
December 19th, 2005 at 12:00 am
You’re wrong - I don’t read *any* political blogs. Can’t stomach the stuff. Celebrity gossip is more meaningful. Okay, well just barely. But I would put them on a pretty close level.
December 19th, 2005 at 12:06 am
I was just thinking… part of the reason ideologies like communism don’t phase me is that I’m consistently immersed in shit that’s 100 times weirder than that. I guess for the ordinary folk, the communist signals still get them pretty fired up.
December 19th, 2005 at 7:43 am
well, the words are hot buttons. communism still resonates all the way back to mccarthy.
December 19th, 2005 at 8:07 am
Why the hell should a student (or anyone else) have to leave his social security number on an inter-library loan request at his own school’s library? It’s not like the university hasn’t got any of that information on file.
December 19th, 2005 at 12:19 pm
it’s so our reptilian overlords always know EXACTLY where we are!!!!
December 20th, 2005 at 9:29 am
A wise move. After a point they become toxic, both left- and right-wingers.