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Communism: Interesting idea, wrong species. It’s been a colossal fuckup whenever attempted on even a moderate scale. Since Russia went “commie,” Americans have been fucking terrified of it, going hard in the other direction and being oppressive cocknockers to anyone hinting at such a system of government. Enter the Palmer Raids.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: January 2, 1920--
Communism is “a system of social organization in which all property is owned by the community and each person contributes and receives according to their ability and needs.” Lotta Trumpanzees think Joe Biden is a communist. Many believe anything to the left of throwing poor people into a gladiatorial arena and watching them fight to the death for food is communism.
The Red Scare is alive and well, and not without at least a bit of reason. Communism sucks. Doesn’t. Fucking. Work. Causes a shit-ton of death too. Collectively, in the century since the 1917 Russian Revolution, about a hundred million people died because of self-proclaimed communist governments, which was more than died from all other oppressive regimes. Most of those were in China because of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” which was a great leap toward fucking starving to death. Same kind of thing happened in plenty of other communist countries, and the rulers of those nations fucking knew their dumbshit policies were causing rampant famine, and yet they persisted. Not to mention all the purges and those who died in slave labor camps. Continues below …
People who think communism is a grand fuckin’ idea are gonna invade my social media today and you’d help me care a lot less if you became a paying subscriber because the capitalism aspect alone will piss them off.
The First Red Scare began after World War I, due to both real and imagined fears. The U.S. experienced labor strikes, race riots, and anarchist bombings. I mean, being working class in the U.S. sucked, and there was much to complain about. But the government said it’s those fucking commies, and worse yet they’re foreign so let’s round ‘em up and deport the fuckers.
President Wilson hated “hyphenated Americans”; Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, Asian-Americans, etc. A. Mitchell Palmer was Attorney General, and he had a mandate to go after any such people with leftist ties. The first Palmer Raid was in November of 1919, on the second anniversary of the Russian Revolution, and targeted the Union of Russian Workers in violent raids across a dozen cities. Guess who was put in charge of identifying who qualified as a “leftist radical”? First FBI Director J. Edgar Fuckface Hoover.
The second and larger wave of the raids launched January 2, 1920. Many of those arrested were Italian immigrants and Eastern European Jews. During the entirety of the raids about 10,000 were arrested and 3,500 were held in detention without trial. Many had the shit beat out of them. A total of 556 were put on ships and told get the fuck out of America and don’t come back.
The American Civil Liberties Union came about as a direct result of the Palmer Raids and their shocking lack of due process. Palmer proclaimed that an armed communist uprising was coming to America in the spring and that more raids were needed, but such uprisings never materialized, leading to Palmer’s mockery and downfall. Speaking of mockery, I mock all communists I offended with today’s entry.
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I’m not offended by any of this - it is all accurate. My only quibble is that we don’t know that actual communism doesn’t work, because we have never seen it. What Russia and China did isn’t actually communism, as they we both oligarchies with a few years. Same for Cuba.