Free college, free health care, and government-defined income levels are all increasingly popular notions among the political left in the United States, but they are also raising concerns among opponents that some of the basic tenets of communism are alive and well in the United States.
This month marks 100 years since the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia that led to the creation of the Soviet Union and the murders of tens of millions of people. After a century of economic and humanitarian horrors, the growing embrace of socialist and communist principles in the political and academic realm is clear.
But why are these ideas still popular given communism’s track record of bloody failure?
“Education, education, education. Or maybe I should say miseducation, miseducation, miseducation or ignorance, ignorance, ignorance. It all kind of goes together,” said Grove City College Political Science Professor Paul Kengor, who is also the author of “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Communism: The Killingest Idea Ever.”
“This is the natural byproduct of our K-12 public schools, our government schools, and especially our universities failing to teach people the horrors of communism,” said Kengor.
He says academia at all levels dropped the ball on the atrocities of the past 100 years and beyond.
“They’ve done a bang-up job teaching the evils of Nazism and fascism. But for the 100th anniversary of Bolshevism and the Communist Revolution, which is what we’re at right now in October 2017. Everybody should be able to say, ‘Oh yeah, they killed a hundred million people, didn’t they?'” said Kengor.
Kengor says parents need to stop sending their kids to expensive schools only for their kids to be indoctrinated by ’60s radicals who are sympathetic to communism.
“If you took Johnny or Susie, who you spent the first 18 years of his or her life teaching them the right things and then you send them off to that secular college, that liberal insane asylum, and handed twenty to thirty to forty thousand dollars a year of your life savings and at Christmas-time came back with their own definitions of marriage and gender and telling you why you’re a fascist for not supporting government funding of Planned Parenthood, you helped make this possible. You should not send your kids to these colleges,” said Kengor.
He says knowingly sending your kids to schools to embrace socialist and communist ideas is doing exactly what radicals like Lenin would have wanted you to do.
“These are academic indoctrination centers and if you send your kids to these schools, you are going to be paying for them to have their minds destroyed.
“Vladimir Lenin said, and I quote this in the book, ‘Give me four years with a child and the seed that I plant will never be removed,” said Kengor.
In the book, Kengor says the education on communism is so bad that a survey a few years back showed roughly a quarter of Americans thought George W. Bush killed more people than Joseph Stalin.
He points out Stalin’s death toll even dwarfs that of Adolf Hitler.
“I’m sure that the vast majority of Americans think that Hitler killed more people than Stalin, when in fact Stalin killed – by some accounts, including Alexander Yakovlev – he said Stalin alone killed 60-70 million people. Hitler killed about 10 million.
“Stalin’s not even the greatest killer. Mao is,” said Kengor referring to communist Chinese despot Mao Zedong.
“This is a frightful dangerous ideology. People don’t know that because we fail to educate them,” added Kengor.
Defenders of Marxism and communism suggest bad leaders are responsible for the genocide rather than the ideology itself. Kengor says the record is clear.
“People have done it right. That’s what it comes down to. What other ideology or system that has been tried by so many different people on every different continent and every different ethnic group and nationality, and yet everywhere it goes it leads to a trail of corpses,” said Kengor.
He says genocide is a necessary aspect of communism, and the proof is right there in “The Communist Manifesto” by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
“Like Marx and Engels themselves said, ‘Despotism will of course be necessary in implementing this,” said Kengor.