Indoctrination: What the Occupiers Believe and Why They Believe It

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NYPD arrest Occupy Wall Street protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge, Oct. 1

“In the hands of a skillful indoctrinator, the average student not only thinks what the indoctrinator wants him to think . . . but is altogether positive that he has arrived at his position by independent intellectual exertion. This man is outraged by the suggestion that he is the flesh-and-blood tribute to the success of his indoctrinators.”
– William F. Buckley Jr., Up From Liberalism (1959)

“We have a class called 21st Century Challenges and Choices. They’re studying the current world. They went on a field trip to see Occupy Denver.”
— Dierdre Cryor, principal, St. Mary’s Academy

“We want them to see the democratic process in action.”
— Celia Bard, Social Studies Department chair, St. Mary’s Academy

“You’re f–king up our future. . . . What do you think we learn at school? This is what we learned about. . . . We’re the 99 percent.”
— 17-year-old student, St. Mary’s Academy

Workers World Party national conference, New York, Oct. 8

“An epic battle is underway for the direction of our country. The Occupy movement is not alone. . . . We stand with the courageous young people who have sparked this movement and join with the occupiers who are putting themselves on the line to transform our nation and achieve a secure and sustainable future. . . . The time has come to put people before profits.”
— “Communist Party heralds Occupy Wall Street movement,” Oct. 18, 2011, CPUSA.org

“How do you tell a Communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.”
— Ronald Reagan, Sept. 25, 1987

During today’s first anniversary broadcast of Da Tech Guy‘s radio show on WCRN, Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom was discussing his video of Catholic schoolgirls who took part in an Occupy Denver protest against last weekend’s BlogCon:

In discussing the beliefs of the Occupiers, including these 17-year-old girls who attend a private Catholic academy where the tuition is $14,000 a year, Jeff suggested they had been “indoctrinated.” This called to mind Buckley’s description of indoctrination in Up From Liberalism, and made me wonder how these girls were taught that they are “the 99 percent” on whose behalf the Occupiers claim to speak.

Born in 1994, these girls cannot possibly have any useful memory of political events prior to the Bush presidency. They were in first grade during the 2000 election and were 14 when Obama was elected. Therefore whatever “knowledge” they have of history is what they have been taught, and the content of that curriculum undoubtedly accounts for their sympathy with the Occupy movement.

 These girls are scarcely alone in that regard. An entire generation of youth has been taught to view the radical protest movements of the Sixties as unquestionably righteous. Young people may never have heard of Mario Savio, Tom Hayden, Stokely Carmichael, Bill Ayers or Abbie Hoffman, but they have been rigorously indoctrinated with the worldview of the 1960s New Left. And so when they behold the spectacle of left-wing protests like the Occupy movement, it touches a chord that resonates, evoking the heroic conception of revolutionary struggle instilled in them by their teachers, by TV and movies, and by the news media.

‘Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out’

Hagiographic treatment of Sixties radicalism convinces young people, who can know nothing of that long-ago era except what they have been taught, that the New Left represented all that was good and right, and that the protest movements of the 1960s were a glorious triumph. One wishes these kids could be de-programmed by exposure to such eyewitness testimony as Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers by Tom Wolfe, or perhaps even some seminal gonzo journalism:

“In 1965 Berkeley was the axis of what was just beginning to be called the ‘New Left.’ Its lenders were radical, but they were also deeply committed to the society they wanted to change.
“Now, in 1967, there is not much doubt that Berkeley has gone through a revolution of some kind, but the end result is not exactly what the original leaders had in mind. Many one-time activists have forsaken politics entirely and turned to drugs. . . .
“The hippies, who had never really believed they were the wave of the future anyway, saw the [1966] election results as brutal confirmation of the futility of fighting the establishment on its own terms. There had to be a whole new scene, they said, and the only way to do it was to make the big move — either figuratively or literally — from Berkeley to the Haight-Ashbury, from pragmatism to mysticism, from politics to dope. . . . The thrust is no longer for ‘change’ or ‘progress’ or ‘revolution,’ but merely to escape, to live on the far perimeter of a world that might have been.”
— Hunter S. Thompson, “The Hashbury is the Capital of the Hippies,” May 1967, collected in The Great Shark Hunt (1979)

Thompson was always a man of the Left, but harbored no illusions about the Left’s failures. He watched young idealists follow the New Left downward, as the movement splintered and descended into a futile festival of drugged and disorganized (yet ironically herdlike) “non-conformity” that became known as the counter-culture.

Not everyone in the New Left followed Timothy Leary’s advice to “tune in, turn on and drop out,” however. Many of the radicals made the Long March Through the Institutions. This is how Bill Ayers, a terrorist leader who spent years as a fugitive wanted by the FBI, eventually became an influential academic, along with many others who shared his revolutionary vision if not his penchant for revolutionary violence.

“We are a guerrilla organization. We are communist women and men . . . deeply affected by the historic events of our time in the struggle against U.S. imperialism.”
— Bill Ayers, et. al., “Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism,” manifesto of the Weather Underground, 1974

In all the 2008 uproar about Ayers’s association with Barack Obama, few seemed to take alarm at the thought that, from 1987 onward, Ayers was a professor of education — a teacher of teachers — at the University of Illinois. Ayers’s acceptance within academia suggests that many other administrators and faculty were sympathetic to his radicalism. And if, for the past quarter-century, admirers of Marxist revolutionaries have been so influential in our nation’s most prestigious educational institutions, are we surprised to find 17-year-olds sympathizing with the Occupy mobs?

Understanding Marx and Lenin

Marxism is a philosophy based on a theory of history, and anyone who does not understand this theory — “dialectical materialism,” as it is usually known — is ill-equipped to discuss what the Left believes, and how their beliefs are now propagated through the education system, through news media and through popular entertainment.

A disciple of the German philosopher Georg Hegel, Karl Marx believed and taught that history develops through a dialectical process: Thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

Marx insisted that this process of development leads inevitably to social revolution, as changes in material conditions empower a rising class in their struggle to displace the ruling class, which had attained its dominant position during an earlier era. The supremacy of the ruling class had been made obsolete by new developments, and thus the triumph of the rising class was historically inevitable.

This was how, Marx taught, the era of feudalism had ended with the rise of the bourgeoisie — the capitalistic merchant class, which displaced the hereditary aristocracy in the French Revolution. (It can be said that Marx, like many 19th-century Germans, was afflicted with a bad case of “revolution envy.”) Based on this understanding of history, Marx then prophesied that the very same material conditions that had empowered the bourgeois merchant class — innovations in science and technology, the growth of modern industry, the spread of democratic government — would inevitably lead to another revolution: The rise of the proletariat (industrial workers) to challenge the dominance of the bourgeoisie.

Above and beyond Marx’s specific critique of industrial capitalism as a system whereby the wealthy exploited and oppressed the workers,  it was his belief in class struggle as a permanent fact of human existence and material conditions as a force for revolutionary upheaval that distinguished Marxism from other socialist theories of the 19th century.

Marx boasted that his Communism was “scientific socialism,” which he contrasted to the “idealistic” schemes of others. The famed Communist Manifesto of 1848 advocated specific measures such as the progressive income tax and free public education as part of a party platform, these ideas were not original to Marx and his co-author Friedrich Engels. Rather, the party platform incorporated a list of reform proposals that were broadly popular among socialists of the era. What distinguished Marx and Engels — the basis of their claim to leadership of a proletarian revolution they forecast as the inevitable result of a forthcoming crisis in the bourgeois capitalist system — was their assertion that this was an outcome they had discerned through their scientific understanding of historical development.

The Revolutionary Vanguard

Those who have read Socialism by Ludwig von Mises and A Conservative History of the American Left by Dan Flynn will know that there have been many other varieties of socialism promulgated over the years. Yet it was Marx’s “scientific socialism” that laid the philosophical foundation for the 20th-century revolutions that brought about Communist regimes in Russia, China, Cuba and elsewhere. This was largely due to the work of Vladimir Lenin, which is why revolutionary communism (as contrasted to the slow-motion “reform” methods of democratical socialism, i.e., the European-style Welfare State) is properly known as Marxism-Leninism.

Lenin’s place in the revolutionary pantheon was secured not only by his leadership of the Bolshevik Revolution, but also by his two clever additions to Marxist theory.

 Lenin’s first innovation was the concept that became known as “democratic centralism.” In a complex argument (elaborated in the 1902 treatise “What Is to Be Done?”), Lenin set forth his principles of leadership, advocating both his own party’s role as the legitimate “vanguard” of the proletarian revolution and the party leadership’s authority to act without internal dissent. Mocking socialist rivals whom he accused of “infantile playing at ‘democratic’ forms,” Lenin demanded “the consolidation of militant Marxism” to make it “the genuine vanguard of the most revolutionary class.” This argument was, in essence, Lenin’s way of issuing himself a license for dictatorship.

The second of Lenin’s innovations was the concept of imperialism. Marx had taught for decades, until his death in 1883, that the crisis of industrial capitalism was both inevitable and imminent. By the early 20th century, however, even Marx’s most devout disciples could see that this crisis had failed to arrive. Capitalism was flourishing and the economic condition of workers were improving. In his 1916 treatise Imperialism, Lenin offered an explanation: Through their colonial empires, the leading industrial nations were parasitically expropriating resources from undeveloped parts of the world. The excess wealth thus gained was what had prevented the crisis prophesied by Marx.

“Imperialism . . . means high monopoly profits for a handful of very rich countries [and] makes it economically possible to bribe the upper strata of the proletariat,” Lenin wrote.

We can view the concept of imperialism two ways: First, as a genuine effort to explain the delayed crisis in capitalism, and second, as a cynical effort by Lenin to undermine socialist support for the World War that was then raging. The two greatest “imperial” powers were England and France, with whom Russia was allied. Russia was also an empire, of course, but was not a major industrial power and did not have overseas colonies like the English and French. By attacking “imperialism,” then, Lenin was accusing the Tsarist regime of helping its allies defend their own empires which, according to his theory, were being parasitically exploited to shore up decadent bourgeois capitalism.

As subversive wartime propaganda, then, “Imperialism” served many purposes, and it is remarkable to note how it is also during wartime that the American Left revives Lenin’s ancient accusations. Bill Ayers and his Weather Underground comrades saw themselves engaged in a “struggle against U.S. imperialism,” and isn’t this what anti-war protesters meant when they accused the Bush administration of fighting a “war for oil” in Iraq?

Marxism by Osmosis

Certainly, the teenage prep-school girls who made that field trip to Occupy Denver never read Marx or Lenin, and they probably wouldn’t know Bill Ayers from Justin Bieber. The same can be said for most of the rest of the ill-informed mobs who have assembled themselves under the “Occupy” banner. They cannot articulate any rational agenda, but are motivated only by a general resentment of “the rich,’ whom the Occupiers vaguely understand to be unfairly exploiting “the 99 percent” in some way.

If the Occupiers are in any sense Marxist, then, they have absorbed their Marxism by some mysterious process of cultural osmosis, because it is impossible to imagine any of those nitwits taking time to work their way through “Imperialism” or “What Is to Be Done?” (And forget about Das Kapital, a book so notoriously unreadable that I doubt even the most devout Communists ever got past the second chapter.) What is important to understand is that Marxism is a belief system, and that a person may be influenced by Marxist ideas without ever realizing the origins of these ideas.

During the 2008 campaign, Obama’s critics often called him a “radical,” a “socialist” or even a “Marxist” and were either dismissed as hysterics or condemned for “McCarthyism.” It was not widely noted that, for those too young to remember America’s Cold War struggle against Soviet tyranny, the accusation of “Marxism” doesn’t carry much weight, while “McCarthyism” is at most something they’ve read about in books. (Stan Evans’s Blacklisted by History probably isn’t on the collegiate reading list.) Voters who were 25 in 2008 were in first grade when the Berlin Wall came down. If they have some idea that the Soviet empire was a bad thing, they have little idea of why it was bad. And this ignorance is no accident.

To explain why the Bolshevik experiment failed so spectacularly would require that students be taught the errors of socialism, which would necessarily require an explanation of the superiority of the market economy to the socialist planned economy. And the left-wing orientation of today’s academic establishment — “Down With Capitalist Education!” to quote a sign in a protest today by Cal State university faculty — pretty much prohibits any such explanation.

Seventeen-year-olds taught that they are “the 99 percent” and that advocates of economic freedom are “f–king up our future” have not been merely miseducated, but have been quite literally indoctrinated. But as Buckley said, they would be “outraged by the sugggestion” that they have not arrived at their beliefs “by independent intellectual exertion.”

 These young people have not been taught Marx and Lenin. Rather, they have had their heads stuffed with nebulous ideas about “equality,” “rights” and “social justice” by teachers (and journalists and movie producers) who cherish romantic mythology about the righteous glories of Sixties radical movements.

“We want them to see the democratic process in action,” their teacher said, as if obnoxious trespassers attempting to disrupt a conference are the essence of “the democratic process.”

Jim Hoft asked the teacher whether she’d ever taken her students to a Tea Party rally, and she said no, “This is the first time we’ve done anything like this.” OK, so why now? What was it about Occupy Denver that deserved a field trip, whereas the past two years of Tea Party events never merited study as part of “the democratic process”?

By Reagan’s definition, the Denver teacher and her students are neither Communists nor anti-Communists, having neither read nor understood Marx and Lenin. In the past five decades, however, the New Left’s worldview has been sufficiently diffused throughout our culture that many people readily believe what are essentially Marxist ideas: Greedy capitalists are engaged in exploitation of the downtrodden toiling masses, and mass movements that demand punitive action against the rich are part of “the democratic process” — in a way that Tea Party rallies in defense of economic freedom are not.

We naturally recoil at the thought that a Catholic girls’ school would teach its students to take up the revolutionary banner of class struggle, but this is indeed what we must conclude when we hear a 17-year-old declare, “We’re the 99 percent.”

Somewhere, Bill Ayers must be smiling.

 

 

UPDATE: Linked by POH Diaries and The Lonely Conservative — thanks! — and I was impressed with commenter B.L. Beamer’s summary of the Marxist beliefs common to the Occupier mentality:

1. Social conflict is based on class conflict which is caused by ownership of private property. Therefore,
2. there is nothing reprehensible about an act of violence which abolishes or destroys private property since it will ultimately lead to more social unity.
3. Unity of the individual and society is the highest form of freedom, and those who fail to conform deserve — at the least — disdain. A good Marxist would say they deserve destruction.
4. Under capitalism, people have no control over the condition of their lives.
5. Socialism refutes or deposes objective economic laws.
6. All economic failure can only, ultimately, be an effect of the resistance of the possessing class (the 1%) to social unity.

Indeed, this contemptuous attitude toward the wealthy, and the belief that “the System” (i.e., capitalism) is the source of all social ills, is now so pervasive on the Left that many people take it for granted.

When I deride the Occupiers as “the kind of commie scum who give commie scum a bad name,” this is taken as a jest and why so? Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, even conservative Americans have ceased to think about communist subversion as a serious threat. Yet as shown by the photo of the Workers World Party conference and the quote from CPUSA at the top of the post, there are still avowed Marxists among us. If self-declared Marxist organizations have difficulty attracting members nowadays, it is not necessarily because of the declining popularity of Marxist ideas, but rather because of competition from the Democratic Party, where such ideas are now warmly embraced.

UPDATE II: Welcome, Instapundit readers! And this is probably a good time to point out that I am a greedy capitalist blogger. IYKWIMAITYD.

 




 


103 comments

  3. “Russia was also an empire, of course, but was not a major industrial
    power and did not have overseas colonies like the English and French.”

    To be absolutely fair to Vladimir Illych (and I was in Soviet Studies, so I did read “Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism”), he regarded Russia’s Empire as incorporating and exploiting in a colonial fashion the  non-Great Russian peoples of the Empire. His point was that the colonialist powers were in a conflict with the non-colonial but industrial powers to hang on to the wealth of the colonies and exploit their resources.

    It’s a curiously ordered view of the conflict that led to WW1, and not one that serious scholarship can support.

  4. You know if I were 20 years younger and knew that there were cute chicks like that at the OWS …. I’d still give it a miss because seriously.  It’s hard to stay on the hotness when you’re trying to keep upwind.

    And speaking as a former US Marine rifleman.  20 years ago I could put up with a lot for a cute chick.

  8. “What is important to understand is that Marxism is a belief system, and
    that a person may be influenced by Marxist ideas without ever realizing
    the origins of these ideas.”

    Hello Hollywood and Che chic. It’s like peanut butter and jelly.

  9. Er, more like ‘slightly misunderstood.” But I had to read it; I don’t imagine you actually spent much time on it.

    Besides which, you’re right that it’s bogus, so it’s essentially moot. Consider my remarks more along the line of the very first sentence – being scrupulously fair. Which, when it comes to Lenin, requires a lot of effort.

  11. These Marxists will fail more rapidly than those who have come before them. Efforts to implement Marxism fail because the theory is based on incorrect premises. For instance this new “Vanguard of the Proletariat” has failed to notice that there is no more “Proletariat” and the “Masses” who might follow this new vanguard are not toiling anybodies. Actual “toil” would kill them. As far as fermenting revolution they think that is accomplished by having their arrest shown on YouTube and thus shaming Wall Street and the government into overthrowing itself.

  12. “To explain why the Bolshevik experiment failed so spectacularly would
    require that students be taught the errors of socialism, which would
    necessarily require an explanation of the superiority of the market
    economy to the socialist planned economy.”

    And the tragedy of that is that the remnants of that specific failure persist to this day. It’s not like you have to board a wayback machine to experience it. Soviet satellite states from the WWII era that were given the opportunity to escape the communist boot when the Berlin Wall was torn down suffer still from the devastation of centralized planning. Many of the natives were either killed outright or shipped to Siberia for later death, their properties seized and the collectives forced. Soviet bodies and mindsets repopulated them and they simply cannot escape the Soviet legacy. Nations remain mired in an economic quagmire wherein they still lack the infrastructure and intellectual heft to build themselves out of what communism wrought. It’s difficult to fathom just how destructive Marx/Lenin/Stalin were just as it’s equally unfathomable to not recognize what can still be seen.

    But we have domestic academia that desperately and proactively hides the obvious which really helps. Incredible that The Church seems to be doing the blinding. I wonder if Ms. Cryor, the President of St. Mary’s Academy, bothers having her teachers teach about Pope John Paul II and his contributions to liberty?

  13. I like to boast that I’ve read more Marx than most Marxists, but I haven’t read as much Lenin. I had read a good deal about  Imperialism,” and my description was based mainly on that reading. Evidently I slightly misremembered some of it. I notice you had no criticism of my summary of “democratic centralism,” so I take it I got that part right.

    BTW, in The Quest for Cosmic Justice, Thomas Sowell dismantles “Imperialism” in the space of two pages. Lenin was playing games with statistics to misrepresent the alleged “exploitation.”

  15. I understand the desire to be scrupulously fair, but with Lenin and his ideological peers (not to mention his ideological successors running around the planet today), that’s a wasted courtesy.  

  17. The best sentence of the entire piece: “What is important to understand is that Marxism is a belief system, and that a person may be influenced by Marxist ideas without ever realizing the origins of these ideas.” And whom are we to blame for the spread of this poisonous rhetoric? It’s easy to blame the J schools and the academic establishment, correct as though those criticisms may be. Reagan left conservatives with a baseline template on how to properly govern which the GOP promptly threw in the trash. Sure, the pinko media/academia complex sucks but that does not excuse conservatives for failing to make their case. One mans opinion.

  18. Marx’s great book Das Kapital is at once a monument of reasoning and a storehouse of facts.
    –Lord Milner, member of the British War Cabinet, 1917, and director of the London Joint Stock BankWith that quote, I’d love to also point out that most, if not all, of the indoctrination programs in public schools begin in a tax-exempt nonprofit foundation. Where is the money for the foundations coming from and the goals of the people behind them?Check out the Deliberate Dumbing Down of America for more info and sourcing on this idea.

  24. It’s been apparent for decades the young people in their teens and twenties have had no clue what their “beliefs” entailed.  The first casualty of government control of education was the encouragement of critical thinking. 

    Marxist socialism isn’t taught as one ideology used to support totalitarianism, it’s taught as basic economic fact.  And students are not taught to use a “dialectical” process in their thinking of the precepts handed down in school, they are taught to accept it uncritically.  Challenges to dogma are to be shouted down.

    Lenin was hardly an intellectual, he was merely the best at finding justifications in Marx, Engel, or thin air for whatever the revolutionaries wanted to do – it didn’t need to make sense, only to sound plausible enough to make a cadre of murderous thieving brutes feel all warm and fuzzy about killing people and stealing their property. 

    Marx was a excellent chronicler of conditions he observed, but his concepts of causes and predicted resolutions were entirely incorrect. 

  25. I completely agree that Marxist nonsense can be heard and repeated and even absorbed and internalized without knowing it.

    The evidence of Marxist influence among many of OWS Supporters is right out in the open for all to see, if they will only see it.  Just a few examples of Marxist themes I have seen or heard expressed among Occupiers:

    1.  Social conflict is based on class conflict which is caused by ownership of private property.  Therefore,
    2.  there is nothing reprehensible about an act of violence which abolishes or destroys private property since it will ultimately lead to more social unity.
    3. Unity of the individual and society is the highest form of freedom, and those who fail to conform deserve  – at the least – disdain.  A good Marxist would say they deserve destruction.
    3. Under capitalism, people have no control over the condition of their lives.
    4. Socialism refutes or deposes objective economic laws.
    5. All economic failure can only, ultimately, be an effect of  the resistance of the possessing class (the 1%) to social unity.
     

  27. Heh. I liked your comment so much, I fixed the numeration. Because we greedy capitalist bloggers are nice like that.

  28. “An entire generation of youth has been taught to view the radical
    protest movements of the Sixties as unquestionably righteous.”

    More than one, Stacy. As Chris can attest, this was common in the ’70’s and 80’s where we went to school. Where do you think these radicals went right after the “revolution” failed? They didn’t start teaching college right away, but grade school. That’s where Ayers got his start, right after being acquitted on a technicality (thank you Deep Throat!).

  30. Yes, some curious misconceptions there on the part of the “99%”. 

    The deified ’60s protests weren’t about anti-imperialism or anti-government or anti-capitalism. They were anti-draft. I don’t think it’s possible to explain to anyone who wasn’t around at the time about this black cloud which hung over everyone (well, guys only, of course) who should, at that age, have been launching their own futures – starting their serious education (colleges were relatively serious in those days), launching their work careers, or starting families (people [often] did that deliberately then, rather than drifting into “relationships”). A two-year dead-end government-sponsored detour at those points was seen as an unpredictable disaster. The pseudointellectual communist rubbish was tacked on later. 

  31. Those 200 elections were crazy!  That is back when they had Occupy the Colesseum, followed shortly thereafter with the Great Christian Persecution!

  32. She is cute.  I have put up with a lot of nonsense from Cute Chicks.  But I have also found lefty girls are generally not that great in bed.  Ironic really.  What’s the point of being a radical if you are not a libertine in the sack? 

  33. Going back to Lenin for a moment: somebody, I think Terry Pratchett, has suggested that there is something in the human psyche that says “Kings. What a great idea.”

    There seems to be at least a large minority of people who long for somebody else to make their choices for them, thus relieving them of some of the major difficulties inherent in getting through life. For centuries that was the “nobility”, and one of the strongest indicators that the thesis is true is that we can identify noble classes in societies that differ from those of the West, sometimes in important ways. The democratic reforms taking hold in the World in the 1800s were specifically disparaging of the idea of “nobility”, and people who accepted them uncritically but still longed for “Daddy fix” were left unsatisfied.

    One of the things Leninist theory does is provide, in the “Vanguard of
    the Proletariat”, a new nobility-equivalent to replace the old one. That made it comfortable as an old shoe, especially in the Europe of the time, dominated by the people remaining after the individualists had split for the United States. For them, “meet the new Boss, same as the old Boss” is a feature. That left the field wide open for the folk who are confident that they would be really excellent Kings, Dukes, &ct. if only the old ones could be deposed, and they soon came to dominate the Movement, as we see today. As Stacy and some commenters note, arguably they’re the ones who originated the Movement in the first place.

    Regards,
    Ric

  34. I wonder if Ms. Cryor, the President of St. Mary’s Academy, bothers having her teachers teach about Pope John Paul II and his contributions to liberty?

    My guess probably not.   But schools (even Catholic ones) tend to reflect the politics of the parents.  If the parents were up in arms, the school would not be allowing this nonsense.   

  35. It may have been true, as you say, that radicalism was commonly applauded in the schools of the Pacific Northwest. However, I was raised in Georgia, where commies and hippies and other such pinko trash were regarded as a subversive menace.

  36. Stacy, 

    Excellent article.  Another book recommendation (in addition to Sowell’s Quest for Cosmic Justice) would be Stephen Hicks’ Explaining Postmodernism, which links Marxism to the rise in academia over the last 30-40 years.

  37. All you need to know about Vlad Lenin is that by the time he was in power for about three years, Russia was in such a shambles he had to initiate the pro-capitalist New Economic Policy in order dig Russia out of the socialist latrine he had dug for it.

  39. True, but you were fortunate to miss it in time as well. And they had to start somewhere as well as somewhen. And it wasn’t necessarily applauded, but it didn’t take that to infect – mere tolerance was sufficient.

  40. That means that OWS folks have essentially won.  There will be a next generation of William Ayers and Reverend Jeremiah Wright that will influence the next generation. 

    The chick getting the Catholic school education will grow up and raise the next generation of bitter and angry kids.  But what is more galling is this generation will scream loudly and demand that their debts be forgiven.  And people will knuckle under.

    There are people in this Administration are thinking:  Let’s help these kids out, introduce legislation to make it easier to forgive their student debts.  After all these are our kids, America can’t do this to our kids,  why do we always think about money?  Where are our morals?  Why can’t we help?  Why don’t we care? 

  41. You have it dead wrong, I’m afraid. These Marxists will never give up because they are the final triumph of Communist indoctrination: they will fail, yes, but they will also be literally too ignorant to be at all capable of understanding that they have failed.

  42. Somebody wrote a book about this. I think it was called “Escape From Freedom,” but whatever the title, the argument was that many people fear the atomization of society (rightly so) and have a not-to-subtle desire to have Somebody in Charge.

  43. When I first saw the slogan “we are the 99%” two thoughts
    came to mind.  First, what a bizarre
    claim.  Second, the claim of majority
    status has its roots in the term “Bolshevik” which is Russian for majority.  It was a term used to hide the fact that
    Lenin’s faction was no more than a splinter of the riots that were taking place
    in Russia.   Like the Bolsheviks, the OWS
    groups are actually small in number, often no more than a handful while life
    goes on around them.  Yet their slogan
    claims that they represent virtually everyone. 
    For some reason, the reaction against them has been to point out that they
    are filthy, violent, disease ridden, incoherent, and a magnet for the mentally ill,
    but not to the ridiculous claim that they are the 99% – the new
    Bolsheviks.  I have a new idea for the videographers
    who cover these events.  How about a
    chant:  “you.are.a.pimple.on.an.ants.ass.”

  44. Essentially, the Bolshies desperately had to come up with a ‘fix’ to Marxism, which proclaimed that Russian backwardness precluded a proletarian Revolution there in near future. Trotsky supplied the ‘permanent revolution’ and Lenin supplied ‘Highest Form of Capitalism.’ Russia thus becomes a weak link of Imperialist States which can supplement actual proletariat with the ‘global proletariat’ of the colonized minorites.

  46. All you need to know about revolutionary movements is that they don’t have to be realistic in order to win.  They just have to survive and perpetuate themselves.  When the society they inhabit weakens, they’re already in place prepared to take over.   That people die of pneumonia proves nothing about the superiority of pneumonia. 

  48. So what happened to me.  I was indoctrinated in classical Marxist thought.  I went to SUNY Albany.  I was actually taught by a Communist  who made me read all of Marx.  I read Frances Fox Piven, Richard Cloward and John Kenneth Galbraith.  I even read the official biography of Vladimir I Lenin as written by Progress Progress (the official organ of the Soviet Union).  I even read Granma (the official organ of the Cuban Government).  I just like saying official organ.

    So where did I go wrong?  How come I am not an avowed Commie. 

  49. Interesting factoid – former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is a graduate of the Saint Mary’s Academy cited at the top of the article.

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