Move over Groucho, Harpo, Zeppo and Chico — meet Marto and Robbo.
The producer and director of “Merchants of Doubt,” the new documentary smearing climate skeptics, has an interesting brother. Director Robert Kenner is the little brother of 1960s radical leftist Martin Kenner.
In 1969, Martin Kenner co-edited a book of Fidel Castro’s speeches called “Fidel Speaks.”
Lest you think this is some innocent academic compendium of Fidel Castro rants, consider the book’s dedication to Communist Cuba and North Vietnam helping bring communist revolution to North America:
In the preface to the book, we learn that Martin Kenner belonged to the pro-Communist Cuba group Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
But wait, there’s more.
According to ex-leftist David Horowitz’s autobiography “Radical Son“, Martin Kenner worked in the “inner sanctum” of the communist Black Panther Party in the 1960s.
Below is a 1960s-era photo of Martin Kenner at a press conference with fellow radical Jennifer Dohrn (the sister-in-law of Barack Obama pal and former Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayres).
By the 1980s, though, Kenner seems to have given up his radical activities. According to Horowitz, Martin became a commodity speculator — making “a handsome profit on an earthquake in Peru that killed several thousand people as it drove the price of coffee to new highs.”
None of this, of course, means that Robert Kenner has followed his big brother’s footsteps in trying to bring about global revolution. But it should be noted that Robert’s last documentary “Food Inc.” is anti-food industry. Robert also directed a PBS film on the Vietnam war, “Two Days in October“, which is touted as spotlighting the day American public opinion began to turn on the Vietnam War.
This all ties directly into “Merchants of Doubt” in the scene where “Merchants of Doubt” author Naomi Oreskes sneers at skeptics for thinking that global warming is all about advancing the radical left’s political agenda. (Transcript below).
There’s a bit of a mystery. What do all of these things have in common? All of these issues are issues that involve the need for government action. That’s when the penny dropped. Because I began to realize none of this is about the science. All of this is a political debate about the role of government. So in a number of places, we actually found these people saying they see environmentalists as creeping communists. They see them as reds under the bed. They call them watermelons — you know, green on the outside, red on the inside. And they worry that environmental regulation will be the slippery slope to socialism.
Finally, there is this recent exchange on Twitter with Oreskes endorsing the agenda of anti-capitalist global warming hysteritrix Naomi Klein (see e.g., “This Changes Everything“):
For the comrades, this is all just Another Night at the Opera.
As everyone knows Obama is a Muslim who was born in Africa and is a close buddy of Bill Ayers.
That Democrats continue to deny all this just shows how clueless they are.
I’m not sure history is so absolute. The totalitarian state of Norway? The totalitarian state of Sweden? While Soviet and National Socialist systems provide two horrifying examples (and there have been even worse) there are also many successful varieties of socialist economics in the world. Just as there are lots of unsuccessful varieties of capitalism. And vice versa. Along with blends between the two. That is what makes the world so very interesting.
As is the norm, the global warming crowd won’t debate the science (because that’s settled, you know).
All they do is attack the real scientists and call them names. And make a documentary to try to add some gravitas to their name calling.
That’s right, judycross. Socialists, as well as any other kinds of collectivists, ultimately morph into totalitarians. All individual talent, creativity, freedom of expression, initiative, and self-direction are ultimately subordinated to the will of the state under socialism as it was in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and in NAZI Germany under the National Socialists.
When I see creative people, i.e. artists, actors, writers, and so on, supporting socialism, it tells me that they really haven’t thought it all through. What they are supporting will ultimately curtail their activities. In fact, that is just what happened in places like Russia and Cuba when the communists came to power. It became necessary for the government to line up and shoot all the “useful idiots” once they had realized what they had helped to bring about. And those unfortunate people thought they were intellectuals? Spare me. They certainly couldn’t think their way out of their own executions. Yet, somehow, each new generation of “socialists” thinks that things will be different this time. Go figure.
It is not “socialism”, but their tendency to totalitarianism that worries me.
The price of coffee is subject to climatic conditions: drought will gradually drive the price up while moist weather will increase yields and lead to lower prices. There is always room for a modest profit for someone who follows such trends. My question is “How do you arrange an earthquake?”
Besides Lee Oswald (who may have put the address of the office of Guy Banister, an ex-FBI agent who was involved in anti-Castro and intelligence activities on his leaflets simply to embarass the guy) other ‘useful idiots’ who supported the FPCC were were William Appleman Williams, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, James Baldwin, Jean-Paul Sartre, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Waldo Frank and Carleton Beals – socialist ideologues every one.
Fair play to Jack Ruby, he wasn’t a member of the Cuba committee.
This is disputed. For a while he handed out FPCC leaflets on the street in New Orleans, but the address on the leaflets was apparently not a FPCC office.
Yes.
Fair Play For Cuba Committee? Wasn’t Lee Harvey Oswald a member of that group?