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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
This is a part that I’d like to read even more details about. If you have any sources, I’d be grateful if you pointed me to them.
I’ve served on local curriculum committees in our public school district back in the days before the state began imposing its own standard curricula. When it comes to subjects like history and science there is always an ideological battle where people fight to have “their” favorite stuff included in the standard. You say the New Zealand standard allows for 10 percent local discretion. For history and science I’d like to see it more like 50 percent.
I was there when the tax cut and resource management was already marketed and could see the miracle results but not the education reform had not begun. Indeed I had decided to pull my kids out of their schools, but was transferred before I had to. A decade later I discussed the changes with a visiting Kiwi economist who had been part of the revolution. He spoke of the education reform among other things and I asked what they did with the education bureaucracy, his answer was we got rid of it. What do you mean? “We got rid of all of it” and replaced all of it with the school based boards. As to the freedom to craft a schools curricula I totally agree. NZ is small and very homogeneous they’d be more like a county school board or even a gated US community, than any state board, and so can agree on many things Americans would never agree on. There is nothing lost in that for us and much to gain. Indeed I’d say kids need only a few basic minimum standards, the rest will emerge as the economy changes, some things work and others don’t and best methods emerge.
Shouldn’t Pinochet at least get an honorable mention. The progs love to hate him. There is no discussion with a commie that does not end up with him saying, sooner or later, “But Pinochet!”
So mass murderers should get participation trophies? Pinochet was a piker compared to these mega-murderers.
According to this guy, Pinochet’s count is a goose egg.
But Pinochet!!!