Emma Goldman, born on this day in 1869, was an anarchist writer and activist in the United States whose works, including "Anarchism and Other Essays" and her journal Mother Earth, influenced anarchist movements all over the world.

Attracted to anarchism after the Haymarket affair, Goldman became a renowned writer and lecturer. She and anarchist writer Alexander Berkman, her lover and lifelong friend, planned to assassinate industrialist and financier Henry Clay Frick as an act of "propaganda of the deed".

Frick survived the attempt on his life, and Berkman was sentenced to 22 years in prison. Goldman was imprisoned several times in the years that followed for "inciting to riot" and illegally distributing information about birth control.

After their release from prison, Goldman and Berkman were again arrested and deported to Russia. Initially supportive of the October Revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power, Goldman changed her opinion in the wake of the Kronstadt rebellion, denouncing the Soviet Union for its repression of political dissent. She left the Soviet Union and, in 1923, published a book about her experiences, "My Disillusionment in Russia".

Goldman was an extremely well-known anarchist in her lifetime, with a reputation as a powerful orator. Her writing and lectures spanned a wide variety of issues, including prisons, atheism, freedom of speech, militarism, capitalism, free love, and homosexuality.

"If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution."

  • Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman Archive anarchists

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  • HarryLime [any]
    ·
    1 year ago

    Fighting a lot of the Ukraine war with a mercenary group named after Hitler's favorite composer does kind of undermine the Russian government's message that they're fighting Nazism. They're really not great at optics.

    • CascadeOfLight [he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      'The Wagner Group' doesn't actually exist, the name was invented by US intelligence services for a group of separate but related Russian PMC and mercenary companies and their support services, and then eventually those mercenaries heard about the name and started using it themselves. It's almost exactly what happened with Al-Quaeda, which was another US-invented name for a loose network of extremists (and not-so-extremists) with no actual centralized authority structure, so when you heard about a 'leader' of Al-Quaeda being taken down it was actually just a guy who was connected to more of the network than others. Likewise, Prigozhin keeps being called the 'head' of Wagner, but he's not a commander or a general, just a money guy who funds/controls a large proportion of the 'Wagner' companies. For another example, it's like Wall Street - there is no 'Wall Street Company', it refers to a group of separate banks that nonetheless have enough overlapping interests to be considered one entity.