Despite caterwauling from the Left, Florida would be doing the right thing by requiring its schools to establish a factual curriculum about the history of communism. Other states should emulate this educational initiative.
The Sunshine State’s legislature seems likely to mandate an “age-appropriate and developmentally appropriate” lesson plan about the “events of the Cultural Revolution in the People’s Republic of China and other mass killings from Communist regimes,” along with the “threat of Communism in the United States and our allies through the 20th Century.” Many of those of the “progressive Left,” who share with communists the desire to expunge history, are naturally unhappy that school students might learn the facts. Democratic state Rep. Patricia Hawkins-Williams said the curriculum would be “something in the classroom to divide them. Hatred.”
This is nonsense, of course. There should be nothing divisive about learning the history of communism — unless perhaps Hawkins-Williams thinks the mass murders and totalitarian terrors that litter that history should be celebrated. Without asking for even the slightest shading or interpretation, without denigrating any American child, the simple facts about communism are both indisputable and appalling. Its own original theoreticians said communism’s implementation would require massive violence, and that’s what it delivered. The documentary evidence is clear: Mostly by evil design, and partly by communism’s sheer unworkability, its regimes have killed or caused the deaths of some 100 million people and enslaved well over a billion. This isn’t divisiveness. It is historical reality.
“There is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated,” wrote Karl Marx, “and that way is revolutionary terror.” His partner Friedrich Engels called for the forcible “disappearance from the face of the earth … of entire reactionary peoples.”
Soviet communist funders Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Josef Stalin were perfect purveyors of the mass murder envisioned by Marx and Engels. Citing plenteous files, historian Winston Groom wrote that one practice of Stalin’s forces “was to seal naked prisoners into barrels studded with inward-pointing nails that would then be rolled around for sport until the victims died from shock or loss of blood. Some were sealed in casks with rats that eventually ate them; others were thrown through holes in icy lakes to drown or boiled in tar or melted lead. It was Stalin’s and Lenin’s aspiration for the terror to cow the entire Russian population.”
Later, Stalin’s deliberate, state-sponsored famine and murderous repression of family farmers killed 3.9 million Ukrainians, part of the 20 million “excess deaths” in the Soviet Union that Stalin caused by a combination of deliberate policies and communism’s inherent idiocies.
In China, as is detailed by the comprehensive and incomparably researched Black Book of Communism, Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution killed — as in Russia, by both design and brutal indifference and incompetence — some 65 million people. Cambodian communists killed 2 million people, as did North Korea’s. In Ethiopia, the death toll was 1.7 million, in Vietnam 1 million, and so on through a mortifying litany of communist nations.
In sum, communism’s evils weren’t and aren’t the result of mere bad implementation in one place: They are endemic in the system itself, virtually always and everywhere.
Nobody respectable would argue that students should not be taught the horrific facts about Nazism, so why should it be controversial to do so about communism? We know the answer, of course. Many on the Left still do not own up to the horrors of the ideology to which they and their intellectual forebears subscribed.
Florida’s legislation has a wise safeguard, too: It would set up a “history of communism task force” to make sure lessons would be “age appropriate and developmentally appropriate.”
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Year after year after year, reliable surveys reveal extraordinary ignorance of history and civics among students. It is no wonder that growing numbers show low patriotism, pride in, or even appreciation for the blessings of American liberty.
If Florida’s legislature does pass this bill, at least one state will be fighting back, as all should, against this trend. Legislators and governors from other states must take note. Communism isn’t controversial. It is always and everywhere calamitous.