Why Obama's Communist Connections Are Not Headlines

There's a lot of frustration among conservatives over how Barack Obama's radical past seems to be making no impact whatsoever among the American public. Quite the contrary, the more information that becomes available on Obama's radical associations, the more he seems to widen his lead.

I understand these frustrations completely. I'm also not surprised.

Why? How? The answer is simple: The history and truth about communism is not taught by our educators. That total failure to remind and understand means that Americans are painfully vulnerable to repeat mistakes that should have been forever tossed onto the ash-heap of history. [snip]

Of all the lectures that I do around the country, none seem to rivet the audience as much as my discourse on the horrors of communism. In these lectures I do a 10-15 minute backgrounder on the crimes of communists-from their militant attacks on private property, on members of all religious faiths, and on basic civil liberties, to their total death toll of over 100 million bloodied, emaciated corpses in the 20th century.

... the young people, especially on college campuses, are amazed at what they are hearing. They are especially struck that I ground every fact in 'reliable' authorities - books published by Harvard and Yale, quotes from the likes of Mikhail Gorbachev, Vaclav Havel and Alexander Yakovlev, anti-Soviet appraisals from Democrats like Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy. I rarely use right-wing sources because I don't want the professors of these students to be able to later shoot a single hole in my presentation.

And speaking of those professors, that gets to my point here: As the young people in my audience are fully engaged, hands in the air with question after question -- obviously hearing all of these things for the first time in their lives, as they are eager to inform me after my talk -- the professors often stare at me with contempt. 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. [snip]

When the leftists of the ‘60s took over higher education and the media, they really knew what they were doing. This was brilliant, masterful, a tactical slam-dunk, a tremendous coup for them and their worldview, with ripple effects we can scarcely imagine. The leftist intelligentsia that dominates higher education, and which writes the civics texts used in high schools, and which trains the teachers who teach in high schools, is not in the slightest bit notably anti-communist. So they do not teach the lessons of communism.

What's more, aside from failing to instruct their students in the crass facts about communism's unprecedented destruction -- its purges, mass famines, show trials, killing fields, concentration camps -- these educators are negligent in failing to teach the essential, non-emotional, but crucial Econ 101 basics that contrast capitalism and communism and, thus, that get at the heart of how and why command economies simply do not work. [for long. snip]

When the leftists of the ‘60s took over higher education and the media, they really knew what they were doing. This was brilliant, masterful, a tactical slam-dunk, a tremendous coup for them and their worldview, with ripple effects we can scarcely imagine.

The Santayana aphorism is correct: those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. For decades now, we haven't taught the next generation what it needs to know from its immediate past. And now, to borrow from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, America's chickens have come home to roost.

[excellent piece from someone who would know - MUST READ > ]

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