Did you know?
One out of four Americans believe that George W. Bush killed more people than Stalin
The Empire State Building was lit up in Chicom colors to celebrate the anniversary of Mao’s revolution, but the request to light it up for Mother Teresa was refused
The Obama White House Christmas tree featured an ornament with Mao’s picture on it
We started this book with two examples. There was the high school near Gettysburg, home of Lincoln’s iconic address, where the student marching band delivered a merry half-time show stepping to the rhythms of “St. Petersburg 1917.” The land of Lincoln goes Lenin. There was also the 2015 prom theme for a high school in Albuquerque: “prom-munism” was the cutesy title of the big dance for the year. Guys and gals could hop and bop to the dulcet tones of Marx and Engels or the quaint quartet of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and Bukharin.
How tragic, but how fitting. The field of education is precisely the turf where this cacophony is played out. The ongoing parade of ignorance about the horrors of communism begins at the K–12 level and proceeds to get only worse at the college level, where the ideological indoctrination reaches mind-blowing decibels. It is the universities that are the vast left-wing indoctrination centers in modern America. This miseducation has generated an arid landscape of ill-informed Americans of all ages.
Consider these recent shocking findings. According to an October 2016 report by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, almost one-third of Millennials (32 percent) “believe more people were killed under George W. Bush than under Joseph Stalin.”1 And it isn’t only those silly Millennials. More than one in four Americans generally (26 percent) believe more people were killed under Bush than Stalin. That is a deeply disturbing finding.
The report found that the vast majority of Americans (75 percent) underestimate the number of people killed by communist regimes, and a large majority (68 percent) believe that Hitler killed more people than Stalin. Forty-two percent of Millennials are “unfamiliar” with Mao Zedong.
Given these findings, it is not surprising that well over half (69 percent) of Millennials would vote for a socialist. As we have seen, that was reflected in the 2016 Democratic primaries, when Bernie Sanders, a lifelong self-professed socialist, received thirteen million votes. To give you a sense of how significant that number is, Donald Trump got fourteen million votes in the Republican primary—and that was a record for a Republican primary. (Saul Alinsky disciple Hillary Clinton got seventeen million votes in the Democratic primary.)
This is not a failure to teach history; it is a failure to teach communism—that is, the evils of communism. We haven’t failed to teach that Nazism was evil, that Hitler was a mass murderer, that fascism is bad. But we long ago failed when it came to communism, Bolshevism, the USSR, Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Castro, Che, Pol Pot, the Kims, and on and on. And that failure often has been deliberate, arising out of ideological bias. Too often it’s leftists who are doing the teaching. They do not suffer the same historical blindness when it comes to teaching fascism and Nazism. R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., founding editor of The American Spectator, refers to this phenomenon as the political Left’s “outrage imbalance.”2
For years I have traveled to colleges nationwide giving lectures with titles like “Why Communism is Bad,” “Why Ronald Reagan Hated Communism—And Why You Should, Too,” and “Professor Marx? Anti-Anti-Communism and the Academy,” sponsored by groups such as the Young America’s Foundation and Intercollegiate Studies Institute. I did a videotaped lecture titled, “Why We Fought the Cold War,” for the Free Think University online curriculum in partnership with the Leadership Institute. When I speak at these colleges, I read passages directly from The Communist Manifesto and other primary sources. When I cite authoritative sources on the maimed and dead, the students are aghast, eyes wide open. Rarely are their professors in attendance. The students are riveted as I expound upon evils wrought by communist hatred, such as the unprecedented number of dead bodies produced by the ideology.
As I review the casualties, these students are amazed at what they are hearing. They seem especially struck that I always ground every fact and figure in reliable research and authorities—books published by top university presses, quotations from the likes of Mikhail Gorbachev and Václav Havel and Alexander Yakovlev, anti-Soviet appraisals from Cold War Democrats such as Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy and early liberals like Woodrow Wilson, anti-communist assessments by leftist intellectuals and esteemed Cold War historians and scholars of communism including Allen Weinstein, John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, Ron Radosh, Sam Tanenhaus, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., George F. Kennan, and John Lewis Gaddis. I invoke ex-communists and former communists who knew the Party and ideology extremely well from first-person experiences. I rarely use conservative sources because I do not want the professors of these students to be able to later poke holes in my presentation.
On a handful of occasions I have had a professor in attendance. In one case, a British professor, who could not stop sighing, squirming, and rolling her eyes as I quoted the most heinous assessments of religion by Marx and Lenin, got up and stormed out of the room. In another case, a professor contemptuously glared at me as if the ghost of Joe McCarthy had flown into the room and leapt inside my body. That is the essence of their criticism: the anti-communism they are witnessing appalls them. Pro-communism doesn’t bother them a lick, but anti-communism sure does. The latter is deemed unsophisticated, boorish, loathsome, illiberal.
American Education, or Chicom Agitprop?
Those same professors write the textbooks used by high schools. We have already gotten a taste of the bias in favor of communism in the texts used in public schools from my extensive review for the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute.3 The treatment of communism in these texts is outrageous. The greatest abuse is the sins of omission: what is not covered. I could not find a single text that listed figures on the total number of deaths by communist governments, even though similar data was provided in other categories, such as war-time deaths or those killed by the Nazis, and despite the fact that widely publicized data on deaths brought about by communist regimes had been made recently available in major post–Cold War works like Harvard University Press’s The Black Book of Communism.
These texts’ failure to highlight the historical scourge of communism stood in stark contrast to their treatment of historical events such as the Inquisition, the Crusades, slavery, the internment of Japanese Americans, and other episodes that featured infinitely lower casualties. So-called “right-wing” dictators like Cuba’s Batista and Chile’s Pinochet were treated more harshly than Fidel Castro, who had persecuted and killed far more victims—and was still in power.
The material on communist China in these texts was especially appalling. There was nothing on the staggering death toll in Red China, nor on the stifling array of human rights travesties. There was not even a word on Tiananmen Square (which, ironically, is also purged from Chinese civics texts by the Chinese government), despite its being so recent in memory.
Several of the texts addressed the population situation in China. The first thing that should come to mind on the subject of communist China and population is the state’s refusal to allow women to have more than one or two children. It is difficult to find a more crass example of depriving people of their most basic human rights. How dare any government tell its people that they are not allowed to have children? But shockingly, many of these awful texts present the one-child policy (recently revised to a two-child policy) as a prudent, caring government step to curb the looming catastrophe of “overpopulation.”
“To slow the population growth,” the authors benevolently tell students, “Chinese leaders have been trying to convince couples to have only one child.”4 Of course, the (unnamed) methods by which the communist government has been “trying to convince” the unwashed masses to obey its (compulsory) limits on the number of permissible children include forced abortion and mandatory sterilization.
Of the textbooks I reviewed, the worst on China’s population policy was probably Patterns of Civilization. “China’s rapidly growing population put severe strains on the economy,” says the text categorically. “To achieve modernization, Chinese leaders pressed forward with a one-child-perfamily policy.”5 This suggests that the cap on children is necessary for modernization. If so, then how can it be that every other nation in history that has modernized has done so without a one-child limit? Moreover, China now, today, has decided it must move away from the one-child policy because more people are needed as the state modernizes.
As we saw in the last chapter, these textbooks praise communism for liberating women and ignore their suffering and oppression under the communist system. World Cultures: A Global Mosaic, for example, credits China’s communist government with granting women equality and celebrates their independence under the communist regime: “Today, Chinese women have become more independent. Almost all women work outside the home, and many hold high-level jobs in the Communist party or as factory managers. The government has set up day-care centers and nurseries so that young mothers can be free to work outside the home.”6
The text includes no mention of the poverty and starvation of women under Chinese communism; the government cap on the number of children they can bear; the forced abortion and sterilization; the horrific mass numbers of abandoned baby girls; the lives of prostitution resorted to by countless Chinese women who believe they have no other effective means of income; or the fact that female infanticide is more prevalent (both absolutely and in relation to the population as a whole) in China than in any other nation. There is no mention that China has 20 percent of the world’s women but 56 percent of the world’s female suicides.7 According to the World Bank and World Health Organization, about five hundred Chinese women kill themselves every day.8 This is a long-term trend that has persisted in China for at least twenty years now.
Besides failing to address human rights crimes like the one-child policy, the texts offer rosy descriptions of life in the contemporary Chinese classroom and of “youth groups” like the Young Pioneers. One text, titled Global Insights,9 served up this glossy sidebar on Chinese “Young People”:
Although Chinese students work hard at their studies, they still find time to participate in activities outside of school. Many young people are involved in youth organizations. The Young Pioneers is a children’s organization to which about 50 percent of China’s youngsters belong. Its purpose is to train children to be good citizens. The Communist Youth League, on the other hand, is an honor organization for high school students. To become a member, a student must be at least 15 years of age and have an excellent academic and political record.10
This brief cheery section, which includes no critical examination of the political indoctrination of Chinese children into history’s most murderous ideology in these groups, is followed up by a touching profile of a Chinese Olympic gymnast. This American high school history textbook reads like official agitprop from the PRC’s Central Committee. We should expect to see Chinese children reading this propaganda in their communist schools, not American children in their public schools.
The same text makes the indefensible claim that Mao’s Great Leap Forward (which, it neglects to note, created the largest mass starvation in the history of the world, with roughly fifty to sixty million deaths in about four years) enabled China to “make significant economic gains under communist rule. By the mid-1960s, it was ranked among the ten leading industrial nations in the world.”
Putting a Sunny Face on Oppression
And it’s not just in our education system that communist atrocities get treated with kid gloves. Liberal dupes in the American media have whitewashed communist revolutionaries and the oppressive regimes they created from the Bolsheviks to Fidel Castro to Hugo Chávez. A recent Associated Press piece titled “One-Child Policy a Surprising Boon for China Girls” cutely, coyly credits China’s perverse population policy with helping Chinese women to advance. The smaller pool of women, the article argued, has opened opportunities for women—at least, the women lucky enough to have not been aborted.11
Here is another picture of shameful ignorance, compliments of liberals in (where else?) New York City: In October 2009, New York City’s Empire State Building was aglow in red and yellow. Why? To commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the victorious communist revolution that established the People’s Republic of China. This celebration took place not in Beijing, or Pyongyang, or Havana. It was done in New York City, in 2009, at the very symbol of the Empire State. New Yorkers were basking in the glow of the Maoist ideology and government that killed more people more quickly than any nation in world history—the glorious colors of Chinese communism.
An Unlikely Combo
President Barack Obama’s communications director, Anita Dunn, resigned not long after Glenn Beck had the temerity to broadcast her jaw-dropping affirmation, made in a church no less (at a high-school baccalaureate ceremony) that her two favorite philosophers were Mao Zedong and Mother Teresa.14
Had this happened in America sixty years before, Harry Truman would have thrown a fit. Joe McCarthy would have called hearings to find out who was responsible. And that was before Mao’s killing-machine really got down to business.
New Yorkers were apparently oblivious to such implications as they strolled along Madison Avenue slurping smoothies and reading their New York Times under a blood red (and yellow) sky.12
Chairman Mao must have been chortling in his grave. And the old atheist was surely laughing even harder when the same gang of clueless New Yorkers rejected a request by the Catholic League to light up the Empire State Building for Mother Teresa on the centenary of her birth. They lit up for Mao, but not for Mother.13
This is the same New York City that honors Ethel Rosenberg, the American quisling who helped deliver atomic-bomb secrets to Stalin’s Kremlin. In September 2015 the New York City Council enacted a resolution honoring convicted and executed spy Ethel Rosenberg on the centenary of her birth. The council declared September 28, 2015 “Ethel Rosenberg Day of Justice in the Borough of Manhattan.” The enlightened New York City progressives commended comrade Ethel for her “great bravery.” There could scarcely be a more apt gesture from a city that long housed Communist Party USA, the Daily Worker, and Columbia University, and whose current mayor is Sandinista propaganda peddler, Bill de Blasio.15
Wait, Stalin Liberated Normandy?
We expect such pro-communist political-ideological jackassery in New York City, but not in rural Virginia. But alas, the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia, has one-upped the Empire State. The memorial has erected a statue of Stalin.
Flagging this outrage was the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which created a website (www.stalinstatue.com) to call attention to this moral-historical slander. The site features a petition to remove the statue, with thousands of signatures from every state and dozens of countries, including some really upset folks from the former Soviet empire. Addressed to the National D-Day Memorial Foundation and President Obama’s secretary of the interior, the petition demands that the “true history of World War II must be protected from distortion and misinformation which threaten to erase or alter well-established and documented facts.” Among those facts: “neither Joseph Stalin nor Soviet forces played any part in the D-Day landing at Normandy.”
And Stalin was morally complicit in the deaths of all those (non-Russian) boys who stormed the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944. As is detailed earlier in this book, it was the August 1939 Hitler-Stalin Pact that started World War II. Immediately after the pact’s signing came the joint invasions of Poland, the Katyn Woods massacre, and Soviet support of and to the Nazis (until Hitler betrayed Stalin). Celebrating one of the world’s most monstrous tyrants at the D-Day Museum simply makes no sense—outside the inverted values of the Left and the stunning ignorance of our education system.
But those inverted values prevail in large swaths of America today—wherever leftists have influence in America. The Obama White House considered banning a crèche at Christmas in 2009 while, simultaneously, sanctifying the White House Christmas tree with a most curious ornament. An article in the New York Times noted that inside the Obama White House “there had been internal discussions about making Christmas more inclusive and whether to display the crèche.” But while the display of a crèche was in question, happily hung on the historic White House Christmas tree was a rather novel ornament: a glistening, glimmering Mao Zedong.16
How’s that for inclusion? Baby Jesus—maybe, maybe not? Chairman Mao, yes!
The bad boys at Fox News noticed the twinkling little chairman in the background of a warm and fuzzy photo of Barack and Michelle Obama in front of the White House Christmas tree. They blew the whistle. And of course the liberal faithful heaped righteous indignation on Fox, with the left-wing publication Salon blasting Fox for a “dopy right-wing attack” against poor President Obama.17 It was another sin of anti-communism. (How would Salon feel if, say, the Christmas tree at the Trump White House had an ornament boasting a grinning Nazi?) Positive images of a mass murderer of tens of millions—adorning a Christmas tree no less—doesn’t concern them; raising any objection to it, however, means you’re a dopy red-baiting McCarthyite who sees communists hiding under every bed.
Not the Reason for the Season
Needless to say, Mao is not traditionally associated with Christmas. He persecuted Christians, hated Christianity, and did his best to wipe it out in China. One of the first things he did when taking over China in October 1949 was boot out the Western missionaries, which was a mere mild infraction and casual warm-up to his full-throttle persecution of religious believers, which continues in Red China to this day.
How We Lost the Cold War, After All
In the fight against communism, America has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. We won the battle against communism on the world stage. But we lost the ideological battle here in the United States. We won the Cold War abroad but lost the war for truth at home—in our universities, riddled with ’60s radicals; in our public school classrooms; and in the hearts and minds of the American people.
So those of us who understand the very real dangers of communism have a major fight on our hands. We can’t afford to let the growing percentage of the American population that hankers for socialist distribution take American down the path of socialism or some form of pro-communism. But in these dire circumstances—with the universities and many of the public schools and much of the media doing the bidding for the other side—it may be encouraging to remember that America’s victory in the Cold War was itself achieved despite the concerted opposition of much of the press and elite opinion.
Consider the reaction when President Ronald Reagan, speaking to a group of evangelicals in Orlando, Florida, on March 8, 1983, described the Soviet Union as the “focus of evil in the modern world” and called it an “evil empire.”
If anyone was more upset by Reagan’s words than the Kremlin, it was American liberals.
Anthony Lewis of the New York Times denounced the speech as “outrageous” and “simplistic,” before ultimately concluding it was “primitive—the only word for it.”18 In The Washington Post, Richard Cohen called Reagan a “religious bigot.”19 Henry Steele Commager, historian at (where else?) Columbia University, judged Reagan’s address “the worst presidential speech in American history,” because of its “gross appeal to religious prejudice.”20 The New Republic, longtime flagship publication of the American Left, bellyached that the rhetoric of “Reverend Reagan” was “deeply divisive,” and insisted that his history was “very poor.”21
While the American press was denouncing Reagan’s characterization of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire,” those actually inside the Soviet Union—and particularly those inside the Gulag—had a very different reaction. Anatoly Sharansky, for example, a religious Jewish dissident and an inmate of Permanent Labor Camp 35, upon learning what Reagan had said, jumped for joy inside his prison cell and tapped in Morse Code to his fellow prisoners the good news that “someone had finally spoken the truth.”23
The Exception That Proves the Rule
One Western journalist—an aging British gentleman named Malcolm Muggeridge—sent a letter of support to the president. Assuring Reagan that his history was not only not poor but right on target, Muggeridge recalled that when he was a young reporter in Moscow in 1932 he encountered “anti-God museums, the total suppression of the scriptures and related literature, the ridiculing of the person of Christ and his followers, the whole force of the most powerful and comprehensive propaganda machine ever to exist, including the schools and universities, geared to promote Marxist materialism and abolish Christianity forever.” Muggeridge explained the fundamental difference between Christianity and Marxism: “Christianity happens to be true, and Marxism. . . .unresisting imbecility.’”22
And once Soviet communism finally collapsed, we heard honest testimonials from Russian government officials who were finally free to speak their mind. In August 1991 Andrei Kozyrev, Boris Yeltsin’s foreign minister, said of the USSR, “It was, rather, [an] evil empire, as it was put.”24 Sergei Tarasenko, the chief assistant to Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, summed up: “So the president said, ‘It is an evil empire!’ Okay. Well, we [were] an evil empire.”25
But before that collapse, even some who saw the moral bankruptcy of communism as clearly as Reagan did despaired of ultimate victory. Ronald Reagan’s favorite book was Whittaker Chambers’s 1952 classic, Witness, a captivating memoir of one man’s sojourn out of the clutches of atheistic communism and a life of duplicity as an agent for the Kremlin. (Chambers exposed a number of closet American communists, including State Department official Alger Hiss.)
A Book You’re Not Supposed to Read
Witness by Whittaker Chambers (Regnery, 2014 reprint edition).
Reagan was taken not only by Chambers’ gripping story, but also by the ex-communist’s rich philosophical understanding of how communism violated the very nature of man. Reagan could quote passages from Witness verbatim off the top of his head. He shared these thoughts on Chambers in a March 1983 speech:
Whittaker Chambers, the man whose own religious conversion made him a witness to one of the terrible traumas of our time, the Hiss-Chambers case, wrote that the crisis of the Western World exists to the degree in which the West is indifferent to God, the degree to which it collaborates in communism’s attempt to make man stand alone without God. And then he said, for Marxism-Leninism is actually the second oldest faith, first proclaimed in the Garden of Eden with the words of temptation, “Ye shall be as gods.”
The Western World can answer this challenge, he wrote, “but only provided that its faith in God and the freedom He enjoins is as great as communism’s faith in Man.”
I believe we shall rise to the challenge. I believe that communism is another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages even now are being written.26
Reagan insisted that he and his fellow Americans should rise to this challenge and defeat Soviet communism. It was up to them to save the world from this godless force. They could win the Cold War.
In this, Reagan differed from Chambers, who believed that he had left the Soviet side for the losing side. Reagan, the quintessential optimist, disagreed. Ronald Reagan believed that America could and would win.
Come On, Let Us Know What You Really Think (Iron Lady Edition)
“A monstrous parasite which consumes the flesh of its host and leaves behind a shell which is designed to conceal the change by which the Party has itself become the State.” —description of communism by Margaret Thatcher in an October 1991 speech at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, where a young priest and theologian named Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II, had once taught
Reagan’s hope and determination—and that of his fellow Cold Warriors such as Pope John Paul II and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher—should inspire us. And in our current circumstances we could use inspiration!
The first generation of Americans born after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and USSR are now young adults. They did not live through the mass repression and carnage that was Soviet communism. They have no personal memories of Stalin’s and Lenin’s monstrosities or of Mao’s and Pol Pot’s mass murders, or any clue of what Fidel and Che really advocated. And, as we have seen, they have certainly not learned about any of these things in school. Nobody has drawn their attention to the communist horror stories still going on today in places like Cuba, North Korea, China, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe—even as these living museums to Marxist madness implode before our very eyes in our very times. Young Americans should have learned about these atrocities, just as they were taught about the evils of Nazism. But they didn’t. And so we shouldn’t be surprised if they’re ready to march to the triumphal strains of the Bolsheviks’ “Communist Internationale.” God help us if stepping to that tune one day leads Americans anywhere near the same blood-drenched path that has been trodden by every people in history foolish enough to believe the communists’ idiotic promises.
It’s our nation’s stupidity that is on parade.
A Book You’re Not Supposed to Read
A Pope and a President: John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and the Extraordinary Untold Story of the 20th Century by Paul Kengor (Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2017).