Seeing Red

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  • April 2, 2020 at 3:05 pm #113284
    wv
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    I’m reading a bio of Dorothy Healey. She was in this documentary: Seeing Red.

    April 2, 2020 at 3:06 pm #113285
    wv
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    April 3, 2020 at 5:33 pm #113301
    wv
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    I’m reading an auto-bio of Dorothy Healey right now. She had a lot in common with Scott Nearing.

    Part of my month-long, personal excursion into the
    “what happened to the american left?” question.

    One rather black-and-white part-answer to that question is/was — The Smith Act, otherwise known as the Alien Registration Act. The law was passed in 1940, and until the Supreme Court more-or-less gutted it, it allowed the Government to imprison anyone who advocated overthrowing the American Government using violence.

    Cept the way the law was written and interpreted it allowed individual commies to be imprisoned if they were, say, Marxists or Leninist. Just the fact they ‘believed’ in Marxism or Leninism was enuff.

    The Prosecutor would simply read some of Marx or Lenin’s writings in Court, and to the Jury. Thats it. That was enuff. Reading from a Marxist book and then linking the book to the individual American communist.

    The Courts allowed Individual Commies to be convicted based only on reading excerpts from Marx or Lenin, etc. The individual commie could be a peaceful pacifist. Didnt matter. It was surreal.

    Anyway, in 1957 the S.Court finally said people actually have to DO something wrong. Not just believe in Marxism etc.

    Its still a bit of a gray area, though.

    Many a commie leader was jailed, harassed, threatened, pressured with that law. Dorothy Healey was one.

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