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In the late 1990s, this writer took a position teaching history, government, and economics in a New York City public high school. After only two weeks, word circulated that I was a born-again evangelical and politically conservative. One of the senior teachers called me aside and, without any prior argument, said, “Communism is over in the Soviet Union, but it’s alive and well at this high school.” Shortly after that “welcome,” it became apparent that many of the U.S. history teachers were hardcore communists. (This is decades before so-called “wokeism.”)
Howard Zinn’s best-selling communist textbook was not included on the list of high school textbooks because it was a college textbook, but nevertheless, this cell of commies would regularly copy pages out of Zinn’s book, A Peoples’ History of the United States, for distribution to the U.S. History students.
The commie hostility toward people of faith was also manifested in that department. The thought that people of faith and people who don’t believe can co-exist is alien to Marxists, for whom “religion is the opiate of the people.” The left feels threatened by the First Amendment, which leftists believe unduly encourages people to believe in God and thereby takes away from a more realistic assessment of life where one is able to see the class struggle as our top social and political priority. On one occasion, a young female teacher began moving around in front of me in the teachers’ office, taunting me by singing, “I don’t have a soul, I don’t have a soul.” Another older left-winger called to me from across the teachers’ office, “Tell me Mr. Ludwig, is God a he or a she?”
At another point in time, I was saying to another leftist colleague that if we promote a particular political ideology in the classroom, we are advancing our bias, not actually teaching. He replied that “everyone has a bias, so it is better to acknowledge our bias and defend it openly rather than pretend to be more objective.” “But is it not a teacher’s duty to be as impartial as possible in order to communicate with and for all the students?” this writer asked, adding, “There are a range of personalities and viewpoints in our classes.” To this, the communist colleague replied, “So what?”
At one point, that same teacher who had welcomed me with his poisonous comment about the USSR spent an entire month in his teaching of AP European History explaining and extolling the virtues of the Communist Manifesto, published in 1848 by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. A group of students complained to the chairlady of the department, but she did nothing. Another member of the cell regularly distributed to students free copies of the newspapers of the Progressive Labor Party. A third member of the cell became the faculty adviser to the Gay and Straight Alliance. A fourth member advised a left-wing student political club.
In the late 1990s, there were a variety of textbooks so individual teachers could choose to use their preference when teaching. Each of these were written by either one or two authors and attempted to be balanced. Although some were clearly more “liberal” than others, this writer was able to find one or two that were coherent, informed, and relatively balanced and presented America as a unified culture, not as a hodgepodge of grievances, conflicts, and unresolved hostilities.
However, after only a few years passed, a single U.S. history text was bought for all teachers to use entitled The Americans. This 1,000-plus-page textbook was written by so-called scholars, but they were all from sub-specialties of U.S. history. One specialized in geography, another was from ethnic studies, another had written many text prep books, the fourth was an African studies professor, and the fifth specialized in women’s history and was the only woman of the group (surprise!). In addition, there was a long list of “contributors.” Thus, clearly, this was a textbook-by-committee production coordinated and managed by Holt McDougal, publisher of the volume.
It seemed that the book covered every protest march and strike that ever happened in the United States, yet there was almost no reference to the impact of Christianity on our country either during the colonial period or during more recent centuries since the creation of our Constitution. Thus, we have a picture of the country as a divided or balkanized mess. The sense of and picture of a nation with unifying themes, such as Frederick Jackson Turner seeing westward expansion as defining our growth, are entirely missing.
What about innovation? Love of nature? Transition from agriculture to manufacturing? What about the life-and-death struggle to assure that there could not be slaves in a country founded to promote liberty and rights? What about the integration of large and diverse immigrant groups despite some resistance?
While The Americans does not lift up Karl Marx or commies like William Z. Foster, it does fail to call Albert Rosenberg, who sold the secrets of the atomic bomb to the USSR, a traitor. There is no treatment of the use of the term “progressive” by today’s communists in order to connect their re-ordering of today’s society with the icons of American history Theodore Roosevelt (a Republican and independent) or Woodrow Wilson. Although those presidents had some socialist themes insofar as they supported unduly expanding the power of the federal government, they still were not as firmly united with today’s communists as are the present leaders of today’s Democrat party.
Remember that Pres. Harry Truman distanced himself from Henry Wallace, who was too sympathetic with Josef Stalin and the communists and ran for president against Truman on the Progressive Party ticket in 1948. Today’s Democrats have not similarly distanced themselves from the Democratic Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders. Instead, the Biden people came out with a joint statement with Sanders in 2020 that was 110 poorly written pages before coming out with the Democrat party platform. The Democrat party platform, when subsequently published, although only 90 pages, was totally in sync with the earlier signed agreement. Sanders, who calls himself a Democratic Socialist, is neither a Democrat of the Truman or Kennedy variety nor a socialist. He always finds a way to justify the communist countries because he adheres to that philosophy.
What today’s political pundits are calling woke (or some form of communism) has been on the march for decades. It was alive and well in the late 1990s and had already been in place for decades. It has gone mainstream in recent years and openly is embraced by many who were more careful not to be seen as sympathetic to Marxist ideology. It is anti-God at its core, and it clearly wants government to take over the means of production. The radical hope is to dignify the move toward undermining our republic, natural rights, private property, and the family by painting the words “anti-racism” and “gender equality” on the hammer and sickle. Then talk about electric cars and reducing carbon footprints, and hope the fear generated will change our society forever.
Thank you, Mr. Ludwig, for writing your article. I wonder how many of those convicted and self-described Marxists have ever lived under Socialism, and/or Communism? How many of them have witnessed firsthand what life was like for the average person behind the Iron Curtain?
As for God, the comment by that other teacher, as you described it, was amusing. That teacher seemed to reject the notion of the existence of God. I wonder what was their compelling empirical evidence that proves decisively that God does not exist? Indeed, could that person defy the scientific method, the laws of logic (formal and informal), and the corpus of philosophical thought to demonstrate how one proves a negative thesis?
Thus, so-called “scientific socialism” seems little more than a kind of Medieval metaphysical piffle.
I visited the worker’s paradise of East Germany in 1980, before the Wall fell. Just riding through it in a train, was mind numbing. People were just hanging around, looking depressed and defeated. Clothing was old and worn, war damage hardly repaired and when it was, it looked horrible. Cars parked with wipers removed because there was a 10 year wait for replacement. Mine fields, barbed wire fences, machine gun emplacements and large guard dogs, were at every train station we passed through. It was like a horrible episode of The Twilight Zone….that was not a fantasy…it was reality for millions of imprisoned and subjugated of people. To get off the train in Berlin, into a free world, was a relief. I didn’t want to imagine having to live on the wrong side of the wall in “The German Democratic Republic”…which is nothing but a massive sham and oxymoron.
The commies I met in the public schools are delighted with their anti-Americanism. They find the capitalist worldview to be selfish. Yet one of them left his wife when she was diagnosed with cancer. Then, when his new girlfriend was diagnosed with cancer, he dropped her as well. Yet he never tired of saying capitalists are “selfish.”
The ones who really crack me up are the Politically Correct Woke University professors and teachers who think they are socialists.
They spend their career teaching their students that America is a systemically racist and evil white male patriarchy.
They teach their students that America is the source of all of the injustice in the world and the most evil and racist country that has ever existed.
They teach their students that Israel stole land from the poor Palestinians and that the Palestinians who murder, rape and kidnap Jews are justified in resisting the evil colonialist Jewish state because they are Oppressed.
They teach their students that Western Civilization is just a racist white male invention and the most racist and evil civilization that has ever existed and the source of all suffering and misery in the world.
They teach their students that capitalism is evil and the reason for all suffering and inequality throughout history and around the world.
They teach their students that they all vestiges of Western Civilization and capitalism must be destroyed.
Except, of course, for their tenured positions and six figured salaries. Those must be preserved.
They don’t even realize that their jobs and their salaries are the products of Western Civilization and capitalism.
The only thing worse than inequality is forced equality. Forced equality ends in genocide and disaster every time. Every single time.
I wonder if these communist high school teachers ever had the guts to leave this country to live in the worker’s paradise, in any of the eastern bloc countries. My guess is no. And that would make them chicken shyte hypocrites.
These losers just had it too good here, while they infected so many minds with their effed up political theories and their hatred of this country.
When it came to the Environment the Commies are the worst China is a example and after the wall came down the Enviromental mess of Russia was far worst then anything
Reading this essay makes one realize that one of the truly great things Trump could do would indeed be to shut down the Dept. of Education.
I witnessed with my own eyes the former Soviet Union, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Poland during the Cold War. All were repressive police states. No one was free. There was no such thing as the concept of natural rights. People went about life in a kind of automatonlike state. No one smiled. People lived in poverty. They had no voice. They were told what to do. They just obeyed. The only exception to all that were the Communist elites, all of whom lived well. So those Western teachers who are enamored with Communism are ignorant fools.
Brilliant and informative article.
Thank you for expressing your appreciation.
If you want to understand the enemy, read the Communist Manifesto, especially Marx’s “Ten Planks.” These educators are nothing more than left wing pseudo-intellectual bomb throwers.