According to a new poll conducted by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, 70% of millennials would likely vote for a socialist candidate. Furthermore, 19% of them see The Communist Manifesto as a surer guarantee of freedom and equality than the Declaration of Independence. 15% think that the world would be a better place if the Soviet Union still existed.
The Conundrum
To many, this may come as a shock. Socialism has failed wherever it has been tried and communism has cost the lives of more people than any other ideology in a comparable amount of time. Historical circumstances produced a near-perfect scientific test of the system in the 20th century. In every case, communism failed – ending in a bloodbath, regardless of race, ethnicity, culture, and development stage.
Simultaneously, near-capitalist societies were tested with those same ethnicities and cultures: East- versus West-Germany, North- versus South-Korea, and Hong Kong versus mainland China. The outcome was as conclusive and decisive as any social experiment could ever get: While capitalism lifted people out of poverty and created largely stable and prosperous societies, communism produced murderous and oppressive hellholes from which people desperately tried to flee.
Given the massive evidence of the positive effects of capitalism and the disastrous results of socialism, a resurgence of communism should have been impossible. How could it happen?
The Long March Through the Institutions
The answer is straightforward: Teachers and professors are bombarding students with communist propaganda. They teach that the U.S. was founded on slavery while conveniently overlooking the fact that western civilization is the only one in the world to have successfully abolished slavery.
They teach that Hitler was the vilest person ever to have existed but conveniently forget to mention that Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Ceausescu, Mugabe, Barre, and Castro together killed far more than 100 million people and enslaved many more across four continents. Students learn about the Holocaust, but not the Holodomor.
The professors are not doing this out of ignorance. After World War II, when it became clear that Marxism could never compete with capitalism as an economic system, the radical left formulated a strategy of achieving their utopia by taking over the educational institutions and indoctrinating children with their worldview.
That would have sounded like a conspiracy theory if it hadn’t been for the fact that leftists have been open about this goal for a long time. In the 1960s, German communist Rudi Dutschke formulated the slogan the “long march through the institutions.” He described it as a way of creating the necessary conditions for a communist revolution by infiltrating said institutions. One of the prominent figures of the so-called Frankfurt School in America, Herbert Marcuse, agreed with this strategy in 1971: "[I] regard your notion of the 'long march through the institutions' as the only effective way ... "
In his recent book The Madness of Crowds, author Douglas Murray documents that leftists in the 1980s saw the working class voting for Ronald Reagan as traitors to the socialist cause and therefore needed to turn their back on ordinary people and instead make minorities the focus of their campaign to destroy capitalism.
The near-unthinkable surge of socialist and communist sympathies among millennials in the freest, most prosperous nation in the world is the result of that 70-year-long march through the institutions.
A Feature, Not a Bug
But why? Why would a group of radical leftists want to destroy the system that has uplifted so many people out of poverty in favor of a system that has murdered millions? In a conversation with Eric Weinstein, Peter Thiel presents a chilling possibility. Mass murder is a feature of communism, not a bug:
“My Stanford professor René Gerard had the observation that communism among Western intellectuals became unfashionable in 1953, the year Stalin died, and the reason was that they were not communists despite the millions of people being killed; they were communists because of it.”
For naïve students, communism and socialism are just idealistic fantasies – but how many of their professors harbor far more sinister motivations?
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