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May Day and the Third Reich
The always astute 
Daniel Greenfield (FrontPageMag.com) points to the New York Times article “When Communism Inspired Americans”:
But the New York Times will run “When Communism Inspired Americans”. It will run it because while Communism didn’t inspire Americans, it did inspire the left to try and turn America into a totalitarian state. It still does. This is the dirty little secret that leaks out of the left.
When the media runs these evocative nostalgic pieces about Communism, it’s the equivalent of a pedophile sharing snapshots of summer camp. It’s the disgusting secret of truly vile people leaking out.
Here’s a quote from the second paragraph. “America was fortunate to have had the Communists here. They, more than most, prodded the country into becoming the democracy it always said it was.”
As cities worldwide start cleaning up garbage left by Marxist May Day activists, there is little discussion about what these people really aspire to. Mainstream media barely focus on their message, rhetoric, propaganda and hysterical chants, but instead, puts these people into a sympathetic downtrodden proletariat class. They purposely withhold educating their viewers as to the hundreds of millions who have suffered or were brutally murdered under Communist dictatorships.
Greenfield compares the Communist horrors to those of Nazi Germany, asking why western media cannot put the two in the same category.
Nazis don’t get a forum to pour out their romantic nostalgia for attending Hitler rallies. Communists do because the left sympathizes with them. It must offer occasional apologies and disavowals, but the love for a horrifying ideology that was totalitarian all the way down, whose mass murder of millions was not an accident of fate, but was always an integral part of it, tells the truth about the left.
He concludes;
This is the left. It returns, like a dog to its vomit, to the dream of the true radicalism of a totalitarian leftist state. It occasionally deals with uncomfortable truths. Circles around them. And then it lapses back into an opium dream of Marxists sitting around a kitchen table and debating whom to shoot first.
We will be interviewing Daniel Greenfield tomorrow and would like to ask a few questions from Ricochet members. If you have a question, please submit below or IM me directly with how your name should be stated (pseudonym, first or whole name).
Published in General
When it comes to teaching history we should most definitely not ensure equality. That’s a commie notion. There is no such thing as a standard curriculum that’s going to be right for the whole country. Different school boards and teachers (and there should be a lot more school boards than there are now) should work these things out together with parents.
Fascinating! I watched the May Day parade portion. My study of Russian films pretty much ended after Battleship Potemkin back in college. Thanks for the time capsule Reticlulator.
I think you are correct when you say the left really doesn’t know what it wants, and I can a shoot hole in the argument about the left wanting to turn America into a totalitarian state when you see them assuming the worst of fundamentalist Christians as depicted in dystopian fiction series like “A Handmaid’s Tale” (Hulu original series), in which they depict Christian fundamentalists running a totalitarian state. If they actually did want a totalitarian state as has been presumed, then they wouldn’t wax so heavily in dread of a future where many of the liberties we take for granted are subjected to the rule of man instead of the rule of law and life is cheap if you don’t totally submit. It might hearten some of us to think that some on the left are concerned about loss of liberties, but for the most part it’s projection. They portray the right being how the world works from their perspective, only they just found themselves on the wrong side. Maybe it’s good for the left to work out their fantasies in fiction because it will help them (some maybe) figure out the fine balance that has been achieved in balancing freedom and good government, which exists to protect liberty, not to treat its citizens as subjects and servants.
Be sure to check out SultanKnish.com. I started following Daniel several years ago and he cranks out all kinds of great writing nearly every day. It will be very interesting to finally meet him in person.
Thanks Dave. Wow, they hit all the conspiracy hot buttons don’t they – depleted uranium ammo in Iraq, chemtrails, vaccines and GMO foods at home to kill the citizens.
Daniel also has articles every day on Front Page Magazine, The Point,
David Horowitz Freedom Center.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/
You may use my full name and just tell him I am a faithful reader.
No. But they don’t now. And it’s not just because Tulsa, Dallas, and Phoenix are superior with a less Zinn approach to the past. Unfortunately in conservative states you have a disregard for history that is easily evident in the fact that many public schools populate history departments with football coaches. Nothing against football coaches, but in states where Friday night lights are so significant, there’s a clear message given about what is important. So what do we get? Grievance culture from one side and ignorance from the other.
I agree with this, but they aren’t doing a great job in the South. (See #38.)
You might also ask Greenfield about Dennis Prager’s recent articles on the subject.
Last semester I had an actual Marxist in my class… a kid who had been involved in several riots (for social justice, don’t’cha’know) and felt the United States is inherently all the bad “isms.” Per that student’s prism, free markets do little more than oppress minorities, and those who like free markets perpetuate white supremacy.
While I believe some of the emotion that went with that kid was a product of youth, I had no idea how to say anything to shift that kid’s thinking… not to make that kid believe as I believe but to get that kid to at least seriously consider a different worldview. (The kid just thought I was an idiot… and an evil one at that!)
How does this writer reach people outside his own ideology? OR is he only concerned with preaching to the choir?
Succinct and true Randy. The Constitution does not require, or even say it would be nice, if all had an equal education.
Some ways would be to return education back to states, parents and teachers which Trump is doing, and getting federal out. Elevating good teachers, increasing pay and allowing creativity again. Also creating forums attractive to younger people on social media that talk about history. Some Ricochet members do this well. Making movies like The Promise. Generations of kids don’t know historical truth.
You can’t, and if we can de-centralize education, you shouldn’t use the government as a tool to try. That is what got us public indoctrination replacing public education.
A few pointers:
1. Don’t worry about persuading the one kid in class; your arguments with him will be productive if they sway the rest of the class from adopting his extreme positions, or at least get them to think about them a little before embracing them. Your target audience should be everyone else who is watching.
2. Don’t expect results overnight; argue as best you can, and accept that your opponent or other people watching may not change their mind until months from now when they their fuzzy memory can reattribute your ideas to themselves, at which point they may be more accepting of them.
3. Don’t engage every tangent and don’t try to refute every single point made. Always go straight for the underlying premises that produce whatever they’re saying. You want to knock out the foundation of what they’re trying to say, such that their entire argument crumbles like an unstable building. That may aggravate them a bit in the moment, but it can get them to change their minds later on.
4. Understand as fully as you can your opponent’s argument and premises before engaging. Don’t be afraid to start by asking them questions; this is both informative and will pin them down so they can’t retreat to an easier-to-defend argument later. I feel like this is where most conservatives make mistakes, especially in the post-Fox News era. They act as if they already know what the person is thinking because they think they’re just going to regurgitate whatever the liberal narrative of the day is, so the pre-emptively deploy the counterpoints they heard the night before on cable news. It is better to counter exactly what your opponent in front of you is saying using their own frame and language than it is to repeat something you heard someone else say.
5. Even if you get good at this sort of thing, it’s still really hard to do. Don’t feel discouraged.
In addition to Joe’s good advice, consider this in relation to raising children. Every parent of multiple children I know says that you can’t teach or discipline every kid the same way. Different personalities require different approaches.
That doesn’t change when people become adults. It would be nice if one method worked for everybody, but life’s not so simple. Challenges never cease.
That said, two of the most common barriers to learning are pride and security. Nobody likes being wrong. And our most consequential beliefs are the most carefully guarded. So, the more adversarial another person’s position, the more useful the Socratic method becomes. A long series of questions aggravates. But if you can leave your adversary with one or a few basic questions, posed as an invitation rather than an attack, then hopefully the person will consider those questions long enough to let in a little light.
I just finished the book “Bloodlands” by Timothy Snyder. It details the horrors of both Nazism and Communism and what that meant to the people between Germany and Moscow. It is utterly heartbreaking.
I have wondered for years why the left cannot see communism as the ideology that sent 100 million people to their graves in the 20th century as just as (or I would argue more) evil than Nazism. I think the author here nails it, the left dreams of a leftist totalitarian state and is willing to ignore the reality of what such a state has meant to the unfortunate souls that had to live under one.
Precisely. Without question, the disease is serious. But this cure is worse than the disease. Inequality is an essential element for anybody to succeed.
@lois-lane, on the first day of my “Population Dynamics” class, the prof, giving a quick synopsis of what we were in store for, mentioned the impact of hunger. Then a young man spoke up, saying that he did not believe that was true. He believed that Man could survive solely on meditation and spirituality, that food was a crutch for the inadequately spiritual. Whereupon Prof. T. K. Ruprecht invited the student to put his theory to the test. We never saw him again.
I’ve always wondered…
A national standard will always be captured because the organized interests can concentrate on Washington and text book companies just want uniformity so they can have greater economies of scale, they don’t care about content but will back teachers unions and ideologues because they try harder, spend more to create uniformity. Standards, like everything else, must emerge from the bottom up and spread through competition because they’re superior and change as the nation changes and learns. As long as public schools also have to compete for budgets by attracting students they’ll improve along with the rest. We could do something like New Zealand, allow students to go to any school, including public schools and the money followed the students. New Zealand even eliminated school boards. Each school had a board composed of parents and teachers who ran the school. While they had national standards, New Zealand is tiny and homogeneous, and schools could still choose how they would differ from each other, some concentrated on science, some music or art. Parents and teachers decided these things. We can have minimum standards on math and reading skills, the results, not the methods, the rest can be up to the schools, or at most the states but schools must be free to improve on everything and to innovate with no money, control or mandates from the Federal government. Monopolies simply do not work well and everything the Federal government touches eventually rots.
Need more info on how this works.
The Fresh Prince of Bill Ayers
From Quora:
Jered Wasburn-Moses, Mathematics educator and associate director for tutoring programs
Written 17 Dec 2015
You have it kind of backwards: many history teachers are also PE teachers or coaches.
The reason is simple: there is an over-supply of history (and ELA) teachers. The ones who can bring “something extra” to the table–like coaching–are more likely to get hired.
I just went to sultan knish and read a great article: Culture of Contempt. I’m wondering what Greenfield thinks freedom-loving comedians would look like. Are there any? Would snark work for the right or is it better not to go that way?
I don’t know if snark is ever the way to go, but I do wish we’d use humor and ridicule more often. If we had a Saturday Night Live, it would go a long way toward the furtherance of our ends. Humor and ridicule can change hearts and minds, but snark just preaches to the choir.
New Zealand lost largess when the Brits joined the EC so they had to deal with their welfare state which was going broke. In the course of fixing it’s economy, New Zealanders discovered the miracle of the market and began letting the market solve most it’s economic problems. After some delay it did the same to its top down one size fits all lousy education system that was bureaucratic and at the bottom of the developed world. So they got rid of the educational bureaucracy, all of it, and turned public schools over to boards of the teachers and parents of each school. They allowed any student in the country to go to any public school in the country and the money followed them. Schools competed for students. Bad schools lost them or got better, good schools grew and got better. There was a standard curricula that covered the basics and established minimum standards. This was easy for New Zealanders to agree to, New Zealand is smaller than almost all of our states and more homogenous than any of them. Each board was free to do with some of the curricula, I think it was about 10%, whatever they wanted. In just a few years they’d improved their test results to below Singapore and Finland above most of the rest of us. Their tax reform and approach to resource management were miraculous as well.
Nice theory but it doesn’t hold up to real examination because the quality of the teacher is not important… only the quality of the coaching. The history certification exam is pretty easy–I missed one on the entire thing–and standards on tests are extremely watered down.
People who want to coach go into history majors in part because they think it’s easier to teach than other subjects, not because of an interest in the material.
The state perpetuates this by keeping standards low.
I’m not sure why you limit your criticism only to “the South,” or why you so look down on us and on conservative states in general. Not to mention history teachers.
Yup, it’s the “it would work if we just tried it with the right people” nonsense.
I read Bloodlands, of the many history books I’ve read, that was probably the most troubling. Just brutal.
I am a daughter of the South and a history teacher in the South, but I’ve lived in more than a dozen states, so I have points of comparison.
I am not looking down on the people of the South and certainly not down on my students. I am looking down on the system, which isn’t great and isn’t as focused as it might be on the subject of history.
Sorry but US schools in general aren’t great, and schools in general in the South have nothing at all to brag about when it comes to teaching my favorite subject.
Also, some coaches are great teachers, but many teachers are mostly concerned with great coaching.
Friday Night Lights was not just a TV show, and football is not secondary to academics in many schools in Texas. I wish this wasn’t the case, but it is.