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. They asked whether I was a communist, 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. They asked if I could point them to any of my classmates to ask the same questions to, 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.

[–] purpleworm@hexbear.net 21 points 1 day ago (3 children)

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.

[–] alexei_1917@hexbear.net 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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.

[–] purpleworm@hexbear.net 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] alexei_1917@hexbear.net 1 points 4 hours ago

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.

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