Emma on Your iPod
In the eighteen-nineties and for years thereafter, America reverberated with the name of the ‘notorious Anarchist,’ feminist, revolutionist and agitator, Emma Goldman. A Russian Jewish immigrant at the age of 17, she moved by her own efforts from seamstress in a clothing factory to internationally known radical lecturer, writer, editor and friend of the oppressed. …a collection of her remarkably penetrating essays, far in advance of their time, originally published by the Mother Earth press which she founded.
The lovely folks at Audio Anarchy have gone to the trouble of recording a series of Emma Goldman’s essays for your listening pleasure. Download them here.
Fab! Thanks for sharing. Long live feminist, revolutionist, agitators.
That crazy bitch and her boyfriend tried to kill Frick like five minutes after they got to this country! They were stark, raving mad! Call me reactionary, but I think you should wait to be a naturalized citizen for like at least a couple of years in the country you decide to start a revolution through assassination of that nation’s leading industrialist.
I reject violence, but Frick was hardly a pacifist innocent. His use of pinkertons was most brutal.
BTW, the trouble with hating people like Frick and Goerge Bush is that assholes inhabit most parties and they will just use your hate to stick you with a lessor asshole instead of someone that is actually good. That is what happned in the Solviet Union as Emma eventually found out. Find someone good to rally behind instead of just being violently against someone.
Dameocrat,
I was hardly defending Frick as an example of Socially Responsible Corporate Leader.
But I would still have to take issue with your suggestion that Lenin was “a lessor asshole.” Lenin was the biggest monster asshole of his generation. And Goldman was his “useful idiot.”
Goldman should have stuck with essays. For many of us, her legacy is terminally tainted by the reality and choice of her activism.
I hardly think the author of a book called My Disillusionment in Russia was a useful idiot for Lenin.
And also, she was never charged with any connection to Frick’s attempted murder, and their standard of evidence at the time was hardly strict when it came to anarchists.
Sam,
You said,
“she was never charged with any connection to Frick’s attempted murder, and their standard of evidence at the time was hardly strict when it came to anarchists.”
Correct — evidence of her support came out later — from her own writings: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/99/
She was involved.
As for her scathing book on Lenin — that also came later. Too late. There was plenty of canoodling before, at a critical period of that bloody revolution, much to her shame.
In a related story:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/SHOWBIZ/Movies/03/13/obit.stapleton.ap/index.html