反共產 Raising Children Communist: A Personal and Political Analysis.

we made a video together both of us
sitting side by side many months ago discussing what it was like for me to grow up communist that my parents really consciously and intentionally raised me to be a communist and I am today an anti-communist I'm not merely not contest from someone who's a pretty vocal critic of the history and current day political reality of communism that video which is quite enjoyable in its way is largely but who my parents were and their motivations and a warrant in this video to have a bit more of a focused analytical approach to I think something we all experienced in childhood were presented with a lot of information that doesn't make sense whether you grow up Christian atheist Jewish communist Republican and I think we tend to select and hold on to the little pieces that make sense to us we create a rational world for ourselves out of the irrationality of what adults are burdening us with and of course it may not be that the adults are trying to baffle you but obviously as a child the barrage of disorganized information you get watching say television news watching NBC News or CBC News or any other mainstream news source that's something you have to kind of make sense of you pick up little bits and pieces out that you carry with you and most likely your parents ideology or maybe even the ideologies you were presented with in school something in this way you pick and choose and I think what you hold on to and what lasts are the parts that make sense to you from the perspective as a child so and I'm interested here also in just saying a little bit about how this shaped my adult engagement with politics most obviously for my current audience vegan politics this doesn't really have anything to do with First Nations politics or Canadian politics or Southeast Asian politics you know honestly so you know one of the biggest overall impacts on me that my parents communist ideologies had was the assumption that the job of the government was to take care of the poor and when the government did this poorly with if the government failed in taking care of the poor the poor would rise up and tear down the government and this was the major pattern or rhythm or heartbeat in history that governments would work well for a while whether you're talking about medieval kingdoms or Renaissance or modern but then after some time the government will come irresponsible arrogant or corrupt or something and then you know that the poor would rise up and tear down the government and this is based above all else on a very slanted selective reading of the history of the French Revolution I think people today left-wing right-wing and Center I think people today really underestimate the unique importance of the French Revolution and of what Karl Marx has to say about the French Revolution to communists socialists and the whole left end of the spectrum so I've mentioned this and partly just talk about my childhood but right now I've started on a project of trying to read history textbooks current present-day history textbooks in communist China and very interested in how they now present the history of the French Revolution to students the tribe because I know they're not done they're not presenting the kind of Marxist analysis of the French Revolution nor the American Revolution for that matter it's an interesting question and it's true I mean this this is the funny thing so what you hold on to what lasts the things that seem to make sense to you and that is something a child can understand I saw a comment here on YouTube the other day from a black stand-up comedian african-american student comedian DL Hughley and this is because I just saw yesterday is almost a direct quotation he said that he thought it was immoral and unjust that American politics should be ruled and controlled by the losers in the economic and system the people who had the least money and people who had failed failed to see who had not succeeded in their education career should have decisive singer he went on to directly insult and ridicule people in Rust Belt cities like Detroit that these were the people who had elected Donald Trump and that this was these are the people Tom Ferris is pointing to and from his perspective he said again this is almost a perfect quotation he said you know if you've been a failure economically you should have less to say in politics not more so this guy's an African American stand-up comedian he doesn't think of himself as Italy just you know he doesn't think of himself as having aristocratic attitudes or plutocratic attitudes but to me that is still a shockingly it's a shockingly authoritarian elitist top-down attitude that simian is so reminded me of my kind of child the ideology I was molded into in childhood and that today whether I'm reading Aristotle or Thucydides you know ancient Greek political philosophy or I'm looking at American political philosophy it's very funny but like look Starbucks caters to the rich you know fancy shoe corporations cater to the ranch there are so many services provided obviously a for-profit basis rich government is precisely supposed to be the one part of our society that is not buy it for the rich and it's mind-blowing to me that people don't get that that know the oneness sector of a society that's supposed to really be concerned about working by and for the poor is is government so that struck me the other day that that in some ways is a very very broad assumption had had stayed with me you know the deep assumption that at all times the poor were on the side of peace and that the rich were the ones somehow conniving and conspiring to drag them into war that the poor represented all the virtues of the world and the represent illegal and that there's this conflict you know this is part of quote-unquote internationalism in communism Connor's international of course you know even as a child I started to figure out that was untrue I can remember asking my father directly I'd be hard for you to figure out was that 8 years old or 11 years old or what but I remember asked him I said you know but what you're saying how can this be true I'd seen in the newspapers dissent the vast majority of the working class like people jobs as factory workers the vast majority of the poor in Canada at that time voted for the Conservative Party the vast majority of the hard pro-american and pro war you know just in the newspaper the news you saw this our working-class just now has mentioned the working-class just voted for Donald Trump for have you it's just not true that the working class or the poor are this repository of left-wing uh virtues and that's what's the small elite and the other hand of course I was presented with all these examples of wealthy and sometimes literally aristocratic people who had become left-wing icons but you know even people who represented to you somebody like George Bernard Shaw sort of champagne socialists and this kind of thing that you know wealth didn't wasn't linked to being the sort of right-wing war monger and poverty was not linked to being a left-wing you know peacenik so that was one of the things that started to unravel so just saying contrasting just these two points one the idea that the government's you know most fundamental responsibility is to help people who cannot help themselves you know that stay with me but then to this is like the antithesis of my parents philosophy and part it's the government's responsibility to help those people just because they need help period not because they're good not because they're morally secure it's the Richard something and not because they have the power to tear down the government they don't and one of the things that was to shock me when I move past the propaganda version of history to real political history was that most of those revolutions in France what was being left out of the store was the military that in reality these were military coup d'etat I mean this obviously shows even in the the first that was Napoleon rise in the power and so on that no this wasn't really peasants with pitchforks that decided the course of history that was a communist version that omitted all the people who had cannons it was camping stuff pitchforks that really matter what what really happened in the the rise and fall this way anyway you know I'm conscious of this because I think a lot of us imagine were raising our children without any political ideology and it was shocking to me when I talked to my father for the first time after ten years of silence between us and quite hostile invidious that once he knew I mean he knew I disapproved of him and of course he disapproved a lot of things I don't know much some of them he admired and respected to whatever you know instead going to Cambodia and doing humanitarian work or this kind of thing you know but obviously he had spent his life justifying the massacre of Buddhists by communist regimes you know including China and I converted two terabyte of Buddhism there were a lot of really obvious gaps he was a hardcore communist and I was I was an economist but when I talked to him for the first time after 10 years of invidious silence he insisted to me that he hadn't raised me communists at all and this was quite a long fierce debate where I was really trying to explain to me like no this is untrue you know everything from the the books I read as a child the books that were literally on my bookshelf the books that were given to me in the same way that a Christian family gives their kid Bible stories you know like they don't you know I mean there are four children versions of communist program I've met a boardgame I remember seeing an article but as I recall the board game was called class struggle it's like monopoly you know the board game and out there we move around the outside but the point isn't to get rich the point is to lead the revolution and destroy justice but even that board game at the beginning you were supposed to roll roll the dice to decide which social class you were whether you were like a factory worker or a miner but the game was easier you were in a more powerful position if you start in as a medical doctor or another like bourgeois like milk slowly price that you were at a better position you have advantages by not team working class I remember my mother was once in the room when I started a game with a friend and I said no no I don't wanna go that I want to play as the medical doctor I want to play as the medical doctor or architect there was some of their wealthy there and my mom laughed and she said no you can't choose the point of the game is you have to roll the dice then Plainsman I was like no but it's easier to win if you start as a back there was garbage as propaganda in the home in this way you know adapted the kids but you know it was kind of chilling it's kind of a warning to all of us that my father who you know sat and talked to me about call Marx and Lenin and Stalin and Mao Zedong for hours during my childhood as I've said much more even if your father was a rabbi or something he might not have cared that much about Judaism protrude philosophy might have had that much to say but I've known a lot of very secular even atheist rabbis you know but you know the hours and hours put into it he perceived himself as not having raised us as communists you know at all and that I mean in as much as he was capable of being sincere about about anything that was a sincere perception so no more one more thing here you know I had many many brothers brothers and sisters I was the ninth child my father had and it's interesting I have a I have an example of how his own faith crumbled in at least some some ways in contrasting how I grew up to have my older brothers and sisters grew up but you know the late motif of say my older brother of Adams life just to pick one of them so Adam is 15 years older than me some of that very very roughly so they're all old men helpful skies and my oldest brother's I think are about 20 years younger than me something that they're round numbers here but you know Adam what he was always taught by my father was the morally uplifting quality of work that working in a factory like elevated you Willie spiritually I think that's a good way to put it in communism that repetitive mindless labor doesn't matter can be in a sock Factory and a woman that same brother he did actually work in a an anorak factory with a winter coat factory he had some factory jobs in his day you know kind of the lowest and humblest job as a janitor or a factory worker that this was somehow morally and spiritually uplifting so you know the belief in the future revolution and communism and someone is old is all linked into this and I got to see that by the time I was growing up my father had lost that faith and actually I think one of the things that shook it I was reminded as never mentioning rabbis one of my uncle's was a rabbi there's actually my great uncle and I remember he had this theory of human psychological development that was all about leisure and play so there are different philosophers who talked about that including Aristotle but I think some of the big psychiatrist like Jung and so on the idea of just having time sitting and playing having disorganized education but disorganized time at leisure and and play this was important for both adult and child psychological development and I remember my father must've just hit some breaking point where you know he recognized no drudgery is drudgery like you don't learn anything from having a meaningless you know blue-collar job that standing in a factory or working in construction and this kind of thing and the this so I mean he never explicitly discussed that with me but I saw a lot of indirect discussions where I could see he had lost his faith he lost his faith in work you know and when I finished college I actually applied for and was offered I got a job on a demolition crew so that's part of the construction history that's literally taking a sledgehammer and breaking up cinder blocks which yes and my girlfriend is smiley she doesn't begin to that just the sheer brute physicality of that of showing up and you know demolishing and hauling off pieces of scrap metal and that's though you know just didn't that every day and my father was so shocked and so horrified and he refused to let me do the job and it totally incoherent wire yeah for him at least that that fell apart so anyway look I think I was the most cerebral and self-aware of all my brothers and sisters about this stuff that I really thought about the doctrine of communism in my early childhood when I accepted it and I really thought about it and consciously made a shift a transformation when I rejected it and thinking about what I was rejecting and even in school textbooks about history that I was finding the raw material that both supported and challenged the narrative about the history of the world that I was raised you know to believe but you know I mean I guess just one other thing to say finally I guess one positive thing about parents raising their kids communists is that it doesn't teach them that they're special it doesn't teach them that they're a gift to the world they're doing is impossible it teaches you if you want to do something positive for Humanity you've actually got to get out there and make it happen right sorry that was the other thing I want to say here so you've got to get there and make it happen and yes I had examples like the revolutionaries in Vietnam who went out and lived in a cave with a machine gun in that kind of really extreme military uprising form of communism and even Cuba and stuff they tell lies in their version of Cuban the Cuban Revolution is really different from reality but anyway Vietnam is a good enough example and you know at that time also there were kind of that there was the communist version of the history of South Africa of how the Communist Party challenged apartheid and fought for the upliftment of black people in South Africa again communist version of history but you know obviously there's some truth to it terms of what the Communist Party was doing so that every but you know the other big thing that came out of it I was thinking of this yesterday is we're walking in in the streets of Dijon France the idea of meant to be an intellectual and to form a salon you know of the history of the Enlightenment in Europe because again if you're anti imperialist what made European civilization special not imperialism not the Empire not England and France conquering the Caribbean and enslaving native people what made your special or exceptional well the answer is the Enlightenment in this the Enlightenment is an historical period and then the emergence of science and new philosophies from the Enlightenment what meet the Enlightenment happen well you know this reaction against the oppressive church but these small groups of men ultimately gathering in coffee shops but it could be 15 guys or something and yes some of the more aristocrats and some of the more bourgeois businessmen and a few were honest working poor men who were somehow brilliant or inventive but you know like a whole box and helvetius the bar wound the whole box if you guys want an example who was one of the first to really publish without atheism in an explicit way because course was censored for that and forming small groups of intellectuals who wrote about literature and history and politics and science and it created new encyclopedias that also definitely had a formative influence on me where I could see things like okay science fiction which is very appealing the most children but maybe especially male children okay I saw what it meant to be an author of science fiction someone like Robert a Heinlein who I've read as a child then it would see someone who just writes books or makes them movies and stories and then I could see over here then there are these creative writers who are trying to change the world and the difference is precisely politically organizing that some all that group that social circle whether it's in the sciences or literature or philosophy or directly politics or what-have-you and I guess it's definitely true from the first moment I came here on YouTube still that ideas I said so many times look you need five people 15 people you need people who come together and pour pool their efforts and resources in time and criticize each other's work engage in productive of each other's writing you know this is not a game one man can play alone that you need that Simone you know you need that again in the in the kind of 18th century sense an academy of people not meaning an actual university or institution but an academy that could be 20 guys who meet at a coffee shop once every two weeks you know before the internet that was really the engine of social change that made that made the Enlightenment happen and it is it is ultimately as the harbingers of enlightenment European thought to the world that communism took on its sense of moral purpose that for China for Vietnam and even for most of Russia that it was them catching up with something really special that happened in Western Europe when people threw off the chains of medieval Catholicism you know at the end of the at the end of the Renaissance