Topic: The more things change, . . .

[RickZ]

Trostsky giving some advice to the US.  [From dear ol' bonz.}

[IronDioPriest]

Yup, saw that one floating around on facebook a few days ago. It is daunting to see so many people blindly walking straight into the same ideological traps that plagued the 20th century with so much evil carnage.

If it was a new brand of evil, it might be easier to understand. But it's an old and familiar evil.

[John Florida]

 All it shows is how patient they are.

[Glock32]

Yup, saw that one floating around on facebook a few days ago. It is daunting to see so many people blindly walking straight into the same ideological traps that plagued the 20th century with so much evil carnage.

If it was a new brand of evil, it might be easier to understand. But it's an old and familiar evil.

Few people today truly understand the degree of evil perpetrated by communism in the 20th century. To the extent that they even associate communism with the word "evil", it's to mock Reagan's phrase "Evil Empire" as some hokey, ridiculously over-the-top right wing paranoia of a Soviet bloc that was in truth far more threatened by us than we were by them. Or of course McCarthyism.  That's what the official narrative of the Cold War is in the modern public education system: a socialist bloc forced into a posture of aggression as a feint against the capitalist West -- who were the true belligerents.

Mine was one of the last generations to be aware of the Soviet Union and the Cold War. The skulls full of mush born since the late 80s grew up in a post-Soviet world. And the products of liberal education are nothing if not visceral. If it can't be touched, felt, or directly experienced then it may as well have never existed.  That "tribute to communism" video in the other thread is a perfect example. I would be surprised if your typical high school student is aware of anything in that video. In fact I would be surprised if many people under 40 are.

Even when the USSR was still a powerful entity and recognized as the bad guy, useful idiot academics in this country constantly ran cover for it or tried to excuse its abuses as unfortunate necessities. The contrast with how they told the history of the Nazis was telling. Even though they were enemies, the ideology of Nazism and Soviet Communism had some major commonality. If you were to narrow it down to their defining distinctions, it's that the Soviets were internationalists and the Nazis were nationalists. Otherwise they both advocated total subjugation of the individual to the collective. But in history courses across this country only one of them is painted as evil.

[TeachX3]

Wow.  Gonna share this one!

[Libertas]

All it shows is how patient they are.

And it shows how lazy and stupid we are.  PT Barnum really nailed it, but I think he failed to understand the stupendous scale.

Once McCarthy got muzzled and marginalized the Left won, it just took a while to get to the point we are at now.  For those of us who lived through most of the latter half of the 20th century we saw the changes (the incrementalism), when the Soviet Union collapsed Leftists were stunned, they had to shift to Cuba as the new model of modern socialism, and once Reagan left office and the GOP reverted back into its big government/E-GOP rut, the clock for America began to run backward for perpetuity.

[Pandora]

Yup, saw that one floating around on facebook a few days ago. It is daunting to see so many people blindly walking straight into the same ideological traps that plagued the 20th century with so much evil carnage.

If it was a new brand of evil, it might be easier to understand. But it's an old and familiar evil.

Few people today truly understand the degree of evil perpetrated by communism in the 20th century. To the extent that they even associate communism with the word "evil", it's to mock Reagan's phrase "Evil Empire" as some hokey, ridiculously over-the-top right wing paranoia of a Soviet bloc that was in truth far more threatened by us than we were by them. Or of course McCarthyism.  That's what the official narrative of the Cold War is in the modern public education system: a socialist bloc forced into a posture of aggression as a feint against the capitalist West -- who were the true belligerents.

Mine was one of the last generations to be aware of the Soviet Union and the Cold War. The skulls full of mush born since the late 80s grew up in a post-Soviet world. And the products of liberal education are nothing if not visceral. If it can't be touched, felt, or directly experienced then it may as well have never existed.  That "tribute to communism" video in the other thread is a perfect example. I would be surprised if your typical high school student is aware of anything in that video. In fact I would be surprised if many people under 40 are.

Even when the USSR was still a powerful entity and recognized as the bad guy, useful idiot academics in this country constantly ran cover for it or tried to excuse its abuses as unfortunate necessities. The contrast with how they told the history of the Nazis was telling. Even though they were enemies, the ideology of Nazism and Soviet Communism had some major commonality. If you were to narrow it down to their defining distinctions, it's that the Soviets were internationalists and the Nazis were nationalists. Otherwise they both advocated total subjugation of the individual to the collective. But in history courses across this country only one of them is painted as evil.

Indeed.  See the Youtube of the "professor" averring Stalin never killed anyone?  (It's around here somewhere.)