What’s with Those ‘Socialist Summer Camps’ Anyway? Here’s the Truth
The camp newsletter reports:
In Brooklyn get dozens of emails every day from our far flung friends involved in various progressive activities: Kinderlanders protesting pipelines, fracking, illegal frisking, Kinderlanders promoting fair wages, health care reform, union and workers rights. It‘s always good to start the day knowing how many of us are out there working for and caring about ways to build a better world. Over a particular few weeks we kept getting bulletins from Zuccotti Park near Wall Street; we knew something powerful was happening there, and soon we, along with the rest of the world, were witnessing the astonishing set of events known as Occupy Wall Street.
…
Dozens and dozens of Kinderland campers, staff, alumni and friends turned out to raise their voices and declare the power and the promise of the 99%. We Shall Not Be Moved; Banks of Marble; Solidarity Forever and This Land Is Your Land rang out, along with a catalogue of other high spirited movement hymns. We sang for hours, our songsheets making their way far beyond our Kinderland circle in ever widening ripples, till it seemed the whole park was singing along. It was a day of continuity and hope, as our youngest campers sang alongside alumni grandparents; as the words of the lyrics we sing all summer at camp took on new life and new meaning in the context of the Occupy movement spreading throughout the nation and the world. It really did feel like a new world might be born in the ashes of the old.
So the camp indeed keeps on with the tradition of nourishing a new generation of little Commies, the very purpose for which it was first created by the CPUSA in the 1920s. It is certainly as they brag: “True to the vision of its founders.”
And let us end with Rachel Maddow, who writes:
Yes, conservative media is now interested in the historical roots of summer camps where obscure administration nominees used to send their kids. We can only hope lengthy congressional hearings begin immediately. And the right wonders why it’s so difficult to take conservative media outlets seriously.
Personally, I wonder if Maddow will consider telling the truth about these camps and the role they played in politicizing a whole slew of young leftists, ever ready to carry on the battles of their grandparents and parents in the 21st Century. She calls them “liberal Jewish summer camps.” Hey, Rachel, they weren’t liberal — they were Communist. But you know that, don’t you?
Wow. Never heard of these before.
And “the stage bedecked with the Soviet flag and hammer and sickle during World War II.”
SO much hidden history. Only those initiated into the Mysteries know.
Thanks, Mr. Radosh!
Let’s see, 69 Jamat-al-Fukrah camps, 24 Shahab camps, 8000 mosques (most built after 9/11)… and Columbia School of Journalism! So much hope for the future of administrative management.
thank you, Mr Radosh, for explaining why movies about camps with scrubby, anarchic little kids triumph over the camp with cared for, clean, tall, well-loved children.
and thank you for writing about the camps at all.
and, my, what lying. what lying, what wrapping in darkness, their deeds.
I send my kids to a religious camp. I expect it to help form them into religious adults. I know they sing hymns all day, I know they pray all over the place. Why wouldn’t camp songs to communism shape those youngsters, as well?
This makes them commies?
“Kinderlanders protesting pipelines, fracking, illegal frisking, Kinderlanders promoting fair wages, health care reform, union and workers rights.”
Wow! Got thru the PJM censors with my incendiary comment on only my 3rd try!
Nobody’s going to censor you; your idiocy is too entertaining.
She sent her children to Camp Kinderland. It was never alleged that she was subjected to the Camp that retains the vision of its communist founders (according to their own website)
Obviously, she wanted her kids to experience being enveloped in a “progressive” indoctrination camp, which leads any reasonable person to believe that she shares those values.
Imagine if it had been a camp founded by the KKK? Do you think anyone would be defending her decision to send her children there?
“Imagine if it had been a camp founded by the KKK? Do you think anyone would be defending her decision to send her children there?”
Who needs the KKK when you have the Boy Scouts?
My late, beloved father, for 46 years a superb professor
of chemistry at Brooklyn College, had been a
counselor at Camp Woodland and later one of
four partners at Camp Tunis Lake. At Tunis he
had a business partner named Brickman: any
relation to Marshall?
Disgusted by Stalinist groupthink and anti-
Semitism, my father left the CPUSA in the
late 1940s. Ever scholarly, in retirement he
taught himself enough serious economics to
read Keynes, Hayek and Friedman. And to appreciate
the refusal of postwar British Hong Kong
authorities to assemble too much data on
the economy: less temptation to intervene.
Just to be clear:
Jesusland = The evil heart of middle-America brainwashing innocent children to become racist haters of science.
Kinderland = Sunshine, s’mores and song.
“If Ms. Groshen is good enough for Furchtgott-Roth, she’s good enough for me.
That is a problem. It matters not whether Ms. Furchtgott-Roth is a card carrying Republican nor that the BLS is a vast bureaucracy that supposedly cannot be twisted to the whims of the director.
What matters is that anyone with an outlying ideology is in control of said agency will by subconscious action twist said agency to such out of control ideology. She is wholly unfit for the office.
Quit putting the fox in charge of the hen house.
People think that socialism is that bad. I really don’t think it’s THAT bad.