Photo 94170171 © Cpenler – Dreamstime.com
A recent Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation survey found that 51 percent of American millennials would rather live in a socialist or communist country than in a capitalist country. Only 42 percent prefer the latter.
Twenty-five percent of millennials who know who Vladimir Lenin was view him favorably. Lenin was the first premier of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Half of millennials have never heard of communist Mao Zedong, who ruled China from 1949 to 1959 and was responsible for the deaths of 45 million Chinese people.
The number of people who died at the hands of Josef Stalin may be as high as 62 million. However, almost one-third of millennials think former President George W. Bush is responsible for more killings than Stalin.
By the way, Adolf Hitler, head of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, was responsible for the deaths of about 20 million people. The Nazis come in as a poor third in terms of history’s most prolific mass murderers. According to professor Rudolph Rummel’s research, the 20th century, mankind’s most brutal century, saw 262 million people’s lives destroyed at the hands of their own governments.
Young people who weren’t alive during World War II and its Cold War aftermath might be forgiven for not knowing the horrors of socialism. Some of their beliefs represent their having been indoctrinated by their K-12 teachers and college professors.
There was such leftist hate for Bush that it’s not out of the question that those 32 percent of millennials were taught by their teachers and professors that Bush murdered more people than Stalin.
America’s communists, socialists, and Marxists have little knowledge of socialist history. Bradley Birzer, a professor of history at Hillsdale College, explains this in an article for The American Conservative titled “Socialists and Fascists Have Always Been Kissing Cousins.”
Joseph Goebbels wrote in 1925, “It would be better for us to end our existence under Bolshevism than to endure slavery under capitalism.” This Nazi sentiment might be shared by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and his comrade Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. Goebbels added, “I think it is terrible that we and the communists are bashing in each other’s heads.”
When the tragedies of socialist regimes—such as those in Venezuela, the USSR, China, Cuba, and many others—are pointed out to America’s leftists, they hold up Sweden as their socialist role model. But they are absolutely wrong about Sweden.
Johan Norberg points this out in his documentary “Sweden: Lessons for America?” Americans might be surprised to learn that Sweden’s experiment with socialism was a relatively brief flirtation, lasting about 20 years and ending in disillusionment and reform.
Reason magazine reports:
Sweden began rolling back government in the early 1990s, recapturing the entrepreneurial spirit that made it a wealthy country to begin with. High taxation and a generous array of government benefits are still around. But now it’s also a nation of school vouchers, free trade, open immigration, light business regulation, and no minimum wage laws.
School vouchers, light business regulation, and no minimum wage laws are practices deeply offensive to America’s leftists.
Our young people are not the first Americans to admire tyrants and cutthroats. W.E.B. Du Bois, writing in the National Guardian in 1953, said, “Stalin was a great man; few other men of the 20th century approach his stature.” Walter Duranty called Stalin “the greatest living statesman” and “a quiet, unobtrusive man.”
There was even leftist admiration for Hitler and fellow fascist Benito Mussolini. When Hitler came to power in January 1933, George Bernard Shaw described him as “a very remarkable man, a very able man.” President Franklin Roosevelt called Mussolini “admirable,” and he was “deeply impressed by what he [had] accomplished.”
In 1972, John Kenneth Galbraith visited communist China and praised Mao and the Chinese economic system. His Harvard University colleague John K. Fairbank believed that America could learn much from the Cultural Revolution, saying, “Americans may find in China’s collective life today an ingredient of personal moral concern for one’s neighbor that has a lesson for us all.”
Are Americans who admire the world’s most brutal regimes miseducated or stupid? Or do they have some kind of devious agenda?
Reprinted with permission from – The Daily Signal – by Walter E. Williams
ALL OF THE ABOVE!!!!!
I invite any American citizen who wants to live in a socialist country to email me. I will be happy to provide a one way airline ticket to Venezuela. The only catch is that you must stay there.
Fight’s on, M/Frs.
I have been in six different countries in my life, One country was a Communist country. I can assure you the Freedoms you have here in the United States is Real Freedom, very different from Socialist or Communist countries. In those countries you are “monitored” continually, while stationed in Cuba I became friends with one of the Cubans who worked on the base, some of the things he told me were scary. Like missing relatives, never seen again, when he got paid they would take his earnings and give him what THEY felt was a fair amount, Savings? no such thing. Ask any Real Socialist how much money they “DARE” to put in the bank ?
Stupid and brainwashed is no way to go through life. So much for the government school system (dept of education? no more like dept of indoctrination). Biggest mistake was letting government run dept of education. Big mistake. Pigeons have come home to roost havent they?
It is shocking that so many millennials favor socialism over capitalism. I suppose we need to experience joblessness, high taxes, and the symptoms of socialism’s despair every few decades in order to prove the merits of capitalism.
Part of the problem is the size of the millennial demographic—there are more of them than there are of us baby boomers. Liberals/progressives/democrats/socialists are not above buying their votes with such enticing offers of free college, debt forgiveness, Medicare for all, and help with housing, food, and everything else that we used to have to pay for. When asked who will pay for it, if they are asked at all, they respond with “The government.” And there’s the other problem; public education neglected to teach them how this country actually works!
And then there’s the example of Anita Dunn, who is the one, I believe, who hung an ornament on The National Tree, during former Pres. Obama’s administration, depicting a likeness of Mao Zedong. Now, if he can get pride of place on The National Tree…
Hi Kim,
Yet another article highlighting the effectiveness of our public education system, completely dominated and controlled by the American Progressive movement (America’s version of the Socialist Party) to mold young, impressionable minds into the “useful idiots” Lenin spoke so glowingly of as the means to transform a country from within. When Jimmy Carter created the Department of Education (1979), he in essence gave license and power to the Progressives already in the federal government to over-ride and remove the last vestiges of locally controlled education standards and impose, from Washington, a national curriculum designed to produce the two generation of “useful idiots” that are now clamoring for socialism. Both the Millennials and the Gen Z’ers have only been exposed to the history books written by people like Howard Zinn and other self-admitted socialists and communists. So their only frame of reference is of course that socialism is wonderful and capitalism is why this country is so evil and in need of transformation into a more fair and just socialist Utopia.
By the way, the science textbooks are just as bad as the what passes for history books these days. More focused on socialist indoctrination and the dogma of politically correctness, than focusing on the hard sciences and teaching critical thinking skills. So Millennials and Gen Z’er’s are generally ill-equipped to understand much of reality or actually compete in the global economic world they will have to work in.
It’s not like most of their parents ever bothered to take a look at what their children were reading in the textbooks. Most parents of Millennials, that being Baby Boomers, took the view that educating their children was the sole responsibility of the public school system. So it’s not like most parents offered their children an alternative source of education in history, science or much else. There are of course some exceptions (home schooling, private schools, much more actively engaged parents), but they are not enough in number to counter the vast majority of the Millennials who have been effectively brainwashed to prefer socialism over capitalism. So the younger generations are accurately depicted in the article.
You are of course correct that Millennials will soon outnumber us Boomers. They will likely achieve that status at the voting pools by either 2020 or, at the very latest, 2022. That is according to the latest census numbers. Assuming the Democrats can motivate them to turn out in sufficient numbers, which isn’t hard when the Democrats will be offering everything for “free”, then we may very well be looking at a much worse repeat of the election results we just experienced. I would normally say that everyone in our age bracket really needs to get off their couches and work diligently over the next two years to educate the young before it is too late. However, I know that unfortunately most people won’t. Just like most people didn’t get do anything over the last two years to ensure we didn’t lose the House to the Democrats. I will of course continue to do my part, along with a handful of other folks I met over the years, but the vast majority of our generation simply expects somebody else to do it or for some magical event to take place and protect the country from its own apathy and indifference.
Like Common Core math. Some “Brainiacs” thinks they know how the human mind works. These so-called experts insist that young people learn math in a certain way because, what?, it trains the brain to do math the “correct” way? It’s funny, since everyone really seems to come to math individually in their development. Of course, some are so traumatized forced learning that they run from math.
From experience, there’s nothing so fun as sitting in a class of graduate level educated parents who are befuddled by what the USDOE wants to put across as the appropriate way to do math.
That is what a bureaucracy of government experts is for, screwing everything up. The unwritten motto of government maintenance is “if it works, we can fix it”.
PaulE- excellent comments.
When my kids were in school, I was one of those active parents who protested about the quality of textbooks. At the time, I was told that those were the ones that were affordable (cheap) and that were approved by faculty and the board of education. I had the textbook in my hand and pointed to examples of lines of thought that I thought were inappropriate for children and that contradicted what I taught them at home. And then they introduced “new math”! Time for some from our side to do the writing!
If there are any AMAC readers who are still unconvinced of the socialists’ dream to commandeer our public schools and turn them into factories for indoctrination need to reread your comment. The liberal fervor for this result, and the lack of conservative will and nerve spell doom for our society. It won’t be until there’s no money left and we begin to look like Venezuela that the American can-do spirit will kick into gear, if there’s any to be found.
As someone old enough to have seen several countries desend into socialism by following the path and policies our Democrat Party is advocating here now, I can tell you that one of primary things the indoctrination process is designed to do is eliminate what you call the American can-do spirit. Destroy what makes the United States so unique in the world. Part of the conditioning process is to foster a total dependency on the government to be the “solver of all problems”. To adopt an unwavering view that only the government can solve or improve things. That personal initiative to do much of anything is a relic of the failed capitalistic system.
If we ever begin to look like Venezuela, don’t expect Millennials or Gen Z’er’s to suddenly manifest the old American can-do spirit to set the country right. They don’t have it, because they have been conditioned to not think that way. They’ll behave just like the citizens of Venezuela do today. Demanding that the government, that they voting in power and watched systematically strip their country of its liberties and wealth, fix the same exact problems that exist in all socialist Utopias.
That is why while I have sympathy for the people of Venezuela, I don’t think we should be considering allowing a mass migration of Venezuelans to the United States as some are calling for. They, after all, voted for both Chavez and Maduro. They bought the whole “free stuff” and “social and economic justice” message hook, line and sinker. They sat back and watched Chavez and Maduro nationalize business after business and all the banks, while doing nothing but waiting for the government to “do sonething”. They watched the judicial system, opposition media outlets and the country’s legislature being shut down by Chavez and Maduro, while doing nothing. Even now, the protests aren’t calling for a return to the capitalistic model that existed before the peopke voted for socialism and that made Venezuela the richest country in South America at one point. Instead they calling for Maduro to somehow make socialism work, instead of realizing that socialism there is already working as it has worked in every other country where it was adopted. Frankly, I don’t want to import people who think the socialistic model just needs to be fine tuned to produce a better outcome. We already have enough idiots like that here already. We don’t need to add to their ranks.
Kim. by some quirk of fate I missed being of the Boomer generation and fall into that generation improperly called The Greatest. Boomers did not create this failed ideology any more than have the coming generations. All have done their part through ignorance, avarice and greed.
The differences between communism and socialism and fascism are minor. The most obvious element of each is central control and elite planning for the masses to live under as useful idiots and subjects (serfs) to the elites.
Boomers happened to be born during an upsurge in economic prosperity for America as the only remaining industrial nation still standing after slaughter of two consecutive generations of European young men from the two World Wars, and many of our youth as well in our on-going policing of the world.
In recent history, Boomers owned about 80% of our nations wealth and had roughly 50% of discretionary spending to their benefit. This may soon be over as prosperity is concentrated in the elites’ hands.
The EU planners have taken over Europe with unelected bureaucrats in Brussels.
The US planners have taken over America with unelected bureaucrats in D.C.
So, the push from below with the young socialists/communists of America are augmented by those from above in the halls of government to create that utopia they profess as their goal.
This will not end well for Americans, nor for any others of this world. What may follow from our two Americas at odds with one another may well be a civil war–a hot one. We already have a Cold civil war going on, but it is getting warmer each day.
Solutions depend upon knowledge, which at present is in short supply. Even when supplied, it is rarely acted upon. Too few of us bother to spread the word of liberty, independance and personal responsibility.
The Communist Plank is alive and well in America, and especially in those concrete prisons we still call cities.
So, wish for better solutions; work for them while we can. Ask others to get off their duffs to save what’s left of liberty and free enterprise.
True, Ivan, each generation has its share of socialists and communists. Their relevance is stepped up when those few on the fringe gain in numbers (the “charismatic” Ocasio-Cortez) and a sheepish following. Their formerly outlandish ideas gain currency, the MSM talk incessantly about them, and before you know it, they’re a force to be reckoned with. MSM are fully complicit in the degradation of our society.
Yes, this results from the promise of free stuff. Why bother work hard any more if the government is willing to give it to us? Of course, the gimmiecrats never bother to go to the next step—to ask how it will be paid for. All they care about is what’s in it for them and how they can get their hands on more.
Since Washington, D.C. elites think we’re “stupid”, we should just shut up and vote for them, to continue getting free stuff. The incentive of greater reward for greater effort is lost. Groupthink rules!
As PaulE described, Venezuelans voted (of course, no voter fraud there…) over and over for the socialist model, so now any “can-do” chromosomes have been bred out of their society. Eternally optimistic me thinks that, after bouncing along the bottom long enough, a new breed of self-reliant capitalists will say, “The heck with this. I can do better on my own!” Will it take another French-Revolution-type uprising for people to come to their senses? And on the issue of socialists immigrating here and dragging down our economy, I wouldn’t want to see that either. Difficult economic conditions are not an admittance ticket for asylum. There’s enough population shift going on right here where I live, with northern liberals moving here and turning the landscape blue. Our city council’s 9 seats are now 100% democrat.
The conservative message needs to be updated and tailored toward the young. Public schools must teach classes that reflect why the Constitution is a good blueprint for a free and prosperous country. Good luck with that, considering the current shape of our schools.
The French revolted against the two powers that owned most of the resorces and property, the Church and the Royals. Turning on their own, they even beheaded Robespierre.
Looking to the history, revolutions usually end without the revolutionists in charge. Ours was an exception, but we may be facing another one. The enemies of liberty have amassed many more resources, organizations and useful idiots at their behest than in the past.
The pincher between National and International Socialism (or Communism) is squeezing the life out of what’s left of our Republic.
Whenever you want to check on the Fabians (British or European Socialism ) for a beginning, look up George Bernard Shaw and the Webbs, Beatrice and Sidney.
Remember, their mascot was the wolf in sheeps clothing. Just take a guess as to whom they were referring to as sheep.