Did you know?
American high school students have recently put on events celebrating communism
To school teachers, the real villains are the “red-baiting” anti-communists
Communism killed ten times as many people as Nazism
Graduating seniors at Cottonwood Classical Preparatory school in Albuquerque, New Mexico, picked the perfect theme for their 2015 spring prom. The killer concept they picked for the premier dance of the year? “Prom-munism.”1
The grand event would unfold under the banner—the literal red flag—of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Marx, and Castro. For their big party, the students looked to The Party. They invoked a different kind of Party animal—the rapacious mass murderers whose marquee event was a carnival of carnage, a legacy of over a hundred million dead victims.
Now there’s something to dance about.
Perhaps North Korea’s Kims could spin some records? The Kim boys—Kim Il-Sung, Kim Jong Il, Kim Jong Un—were wild party animals. The second Kim was Hennessy’s number one private purchaser of cognac, which he guzzled along with his personal harem of bleach-blonde party girls—the permanent sex slaves that comprised his “Satisfaction Corps” of women specially trained by the state to administer to his sexual gratification.2 He also boasted the world’s largest private collection of pornography, which he bequeathed to his son, who has partied with some of America’s best—notably, NBA bad-boy Dennis Rodman. The current Kim’s harem is known as his Pleasure Squad. And his regime peddles Rohypnol, the notorious date-rape drug.3
Mao Zedong, too, was quite the party animal. Not only was he responsible for between sixty and seventy million dead Chinese. He also sired hundreds if not thousands of Chinese children—and passed along his venereal diseases to the countless virgin girls supplied for his satisfaction by his Red Guard.4
“Our students are in the International Baccalaureate program, so they are very academically focused,” said one Albuquerque school official, explaining the educational inspiration for the concept. “One of the classes they enjoy the most is a world history class.”
A student named Cole Page—a sensible sophomore who betrayed an insight into communism the seniors somehow hadn’t gleaned from the high school’s history classes—expressed a different perspective: “I honestly don’t think it’s that funny.”5
“Glee Meets the Russian Revolution”
Unfortunately, “Prom-munism” wasn’t a fluke.
Three years earlier, in September 2012, a band at New Oxford High School near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, home of one of the great moments in American history, gave a salute to one of the worst moments in history. They performed a halftime show titled “St. Petersburg 1917,” a musical commemoration of the Bolshevik Revolution. The band’s website posted a photo of the beaming students holding the hammer and sickle, the symbol that Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky elevated in St. Petersburg in 1917.
Here again, not everyone was laughing.
“There is no reason for Americans to celebrate the Russian revolution,” said one irate parent. “I am sure the millions who died under communism would not see the joy of celebrating the Russian revolution by a school 10 miles from Gettysburg.” He added, “It was Glee meets the Russian Revolution. I’m not kidding you. They had giant hammers and sickles and they were waving them around.” He asked, “Who thought this was a good idea?”
Said another parent, “If I was Lithuanian, Estonian, or Ukrainian, I’d be a little hot. I’d be really hot. It’s insulting to glorify something that doesn’t need to be glorified in America.”
The parent wondered what the reaction might have been if the band had chosen a Nazi theme, “celebrating the music of 1935 Berlin.”
The superintendent of the school defended her students. “It’s a representation of the time period in history, called ‘St. Petersburg 1917,’” she objected. “I am truly sorry that somebody took the performance in that manner. I am.” She continued: “If anything is being celebrated it’s the music. . . . I’m just very sorry that it wasn’t looked at as just a history lesson.”6
As a history lesson, it deserves a giant F.
How is this happening, in America today, a century after the Bolshevik Revolution that launched a global killing spree from Kiev to Cambodia, from Havana to Hungary?
What Americans are witnessing here is a direct by-product of decade after decade of little to no education—correction, miseducation—on the malicious menace of deadly communism, which America devoted so many precious lives and resources to defeat. We won the Cold War in the political arena, but lost it in the classroom. If and when communism is taught at all in American schools, the communists are often lauded for their idealism, their devotion to equality for women and minorities. Their actual track record—the politically created famines, the wars of aggression, the body count in the tens of millions—is too frequently passed over in silence. It’s not that no villains are called out, but they’re the anti-communists like Senator Joe McCarthy. At best, the teacher assumes a position of moral neutrality, as if, to borrow from President Ronald Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech, the Cold War was simply “one giant misunderstanding,” in which the free West occupied no moral high ground.
Back in the time of the Cold War, Reagan exposed the folly of moral equivalence between the communist world and the free West. He urged Americans to “beware the temptation of pride—the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire.” He urged his countrymen not to remove themselves “from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.”
The fact is, there was right and wrong and good and evil in the battle against Soviet communism. And though America, as Reagan admitted, had its faults—indeed, its “sins”—it could not hold a candle to the blowtorch of fiery evils emanating from behind the Iron Curtain.
The “Softer Side” of Communism
I could fill this book with story after painful story relayed by my own students—a parade of appalling ignorance in our education establishment. One former student named John, Grove City College class of 2000, told me about his first assignment as a teaching assistant in a nearby high school history class. He had been a double major in education and history, so he told his supervising teacher he’d be happy to cover the Soviet Union in the 1930s. She agreed. So John methodically taught about the famine in the Ukraine, Stalin’s purges and Great Terror, and the Hitler-Stalin Pact. He gave carefully sourced figures on the millions of victims.
John was pleased at how the students were engaged by the lessons, with many hands in the air. Clearly, they were learning all of these hideous things for the first time. But he also noticed the dirty looks from his supervisor stationed at the back of the room, arms folded, eyes glaring. At the end of his presentation, the teacher testily reprimanded him, “Look, John, I want you to ease up on the Red-baiting and commie-bashing. Besides, these students are going to get a decidedly different view on communism from me.” She promised to teach “a softer side of communism.”
Imagine if the teacher had said something similar about Nazism: Look, John, I want you to ease up on the Nazi-baiting and Hitler-bashing. Besides, these students are going to get a decidedly different view on fascism from me. What if she had promised to teach a “softer side” to the Third Reich?
Another student of mine—Sean, Grove City College class of 2001—told me about the elite Christian private school he attended in northern Ohio where a newly hired teacher fresh out of college from a major university in Pennsylvania told the students that he was a “Christian communist.” In fact, he argued that anyone who is a Christian should be a communist. “Communism is misunderstood,” was the teacher’s refrain.
Too bad Karl Marx wasn’t there to tell the shockingly ill-informed teacher that “communism begins where atheism begins.” In the Soviet Union, Christians literally could not be members of the Communist Party. And teachers could not be Christians.
Harry Truman Explains the Difference between Christianity and Communism
President Truman colorfully said he was willing to believe in an ideal “Honest Communism,” with Christians holding all their goods in common as “set out in the Acts of the Apostles.” But every actual instance of communism, he pointed out, was something quite different: “They all start with a wrong premise—that lies are justified and that the old, disproven Jesuit formula, the ends justify the means, is right and necessary to maintain the power of the government.” He said, “Russian Godless Pervert Systems won’t work.”7
JFK on Why Communism and Christianity Are Incompatible
According to John F. Kennedy, communists allow “no room for God”: “The claim of the state must be total, and allow no other loyalty, and no other philosophy of life, can be tolerated.” They “make the worship of the State the ultimate objective of life.”8 President Kennedy spoke of the “struggle for supremacy between two conflicting ideologies: freedom under God versus ruthless, godless tyranny.”9
A freshman student in a 1996 course I taught at Robert Morris University told me about the successful propaganda of one Allegheny County school district teacher, who convinced the entire class that Marxism was a “wonderful” but “misunderstood” system that had never really been tried. “He absolutely brainwashed us,” she told me bitterly. The teacher did a bang-up job covering the calamities of Nazism, and rightly so. The leftists who dominate education are never negligent in exposing the atrocities of an ideology that they consider an extreme “right-wing” one. They do yeoman’s work hammering the Holocaust and its catastrophe, as they should. But high school teachers who give equal time to the evils of the communist ideology, which killed ten times the number of people the Nazis annihilated, are vanishingly rare.
These are just three anecdotal examples from my own backyard—which, incidentally, is a fairly conservative backyard. Pittsburgh isn’t San Francisco. Western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio are not New England and Chicago. Robert Morris University is not Columbia University. The incidents I have recounted here are the tip of the iceberg. I speak on the crimes of communism at colleges all over the country, and I hear accounts like these everywhere.
Honestly, I have never given a talk where some young person has not paused to tell me stories like this. The students are often quite resentful, knowing they have been misled, misinformed, and betrayed.
We talk about “educating for excellence.” But in reality, in American high schools and colleges across the West, we are educating for ignorance.
This Politically Incorrect Guide® to Communism, which is really simply a Politically Accurate Guide to Communism, endeavors to provide the corrective. It is a stake in the chest of the Marxist-Leninist monster, the Bolshevik vampire that deserves to be forever interred aside Vladimir Lenin in Red Square. Expose the hissing creature to the sunlight of truth and watch him shriek and shrivel.
So, dear reader, grab a stake and a hammer (but not a sickle)—and maybe even a cross and a little holy water. Let the pounding begin.