This is a post I wanted to do a few days ago but life has just gotten in the way. It is a bit chilly here in the hinterlands of the high desert. Temps are forecast to drop to 0 to 5 above tonight, tomorrow night and remain very cold for the rest of this week. If it drops BELOW zero, I would not be surprised at all. Just toss more wood into our now recently EPA banned , illegal wood stove. At the moment there is not enough firewood for this winter but I am working on that. There are three pipes that freeze every year unless the stove is stoked way up and I place space heaters on the vulnerable lines. The same drill almost every winter. No, I have NOT split any wood as I would have so many people on my case if I did and like I can right now? No, and this is what teenage slave labor is for and I have exploited the kids of the gulag quite well.
I grew up learning how bad communism and socialism were. This was taught in school, we saw in this in cartoons we watched, it was taught in books, history classes and through many guest speakers. This was all before the communists, now re-branded as progressives had seized control of education, media and Hollywood. My history professors in college were not brainwashed communists or liberals who hid behind the cloak of modern liberalism. Every one of them were from a military background or the product of an education that warned us not to follow in the steps of those who had failed to see the dangers from communism and socialism.
This is what is wrong right now. We have failed to learn from history and now must fight this war again. I pray our children will learn and learn very fast.
PatriotUSA
From
American Spectator.
*******************
The Cold War We Lost
By Paul Kengor
What the HELL is going on???” emailed a colleague of mine after reading my
most recent column for The American Spectator, regarding Bill de Blasio’s mayoral victory in New York. “Absolutely stunning.”
My
friend was amazed that New Yorkers could—by a 50-point margin—elect a
man who was so pro-Sandinista in the 1980s that he peddled subscriptions
for the Marxist regime’s newspaper; who was so pro-Castro that he took
his bride to Fidel’s Cuba for their honeymoon; who, in an earlier
romance, sojourned to the Soviet Motherland; who now peddles his beliefs
under the banner of “progress” and “social justice.” With finely honed
Obama-like class-warfare rhetoric, Bill de Blasio preaches income
leveling and attacks the rich who
never pay their fair share.
He now calls himself, as so many ex- and current communists do, a
“progressive.” And he wins election in a landslide, with the proletariat
rolling out the red carpet at city hall.
As I related in my article, New Yorkers have elected their first
Red Diaper Baby Mayor to go with their
first Red Diaper Baby President, who they likewise gleefully elected in landslides.
So, to repeat my friend’s plea: “What the HELL is going on???”
The
answer, coincidentally, arrived in my email box moments earlier. It
came from a college student, and was the sort I receive
all-too-frequently. I’ve deleted his name and college to protect him
from persecution by the tolerance-preaching academic left. Here’s what
he wrote:
I had a Communist Prof. last semester and we
were talking about communism in class and he stood in the front of the
room and talked about how great communism is. He even held up his little
red book a few times and yelled “Long live chairman Mao.”... If it
wasn't the biggest class [the college] offers, there [were] 120 kids in
the class, and if not 9 in the morning I probably would have said
something. I have a reputation for speaking up…. I once told my English
prof. that what he was saying was full of, pardon my speech, but
bulls—t…. The stories I could tell you about my time at [college
deleted] … I could write a whole New York Times best seller….
Mired in the academic gulag, this poor soul sought reprieve by watching an on-lecture I recently did, titled, “
Why Did We Fight the Cold War?” It moved him to email me. It was totally unlike anything he had heard at his college—or most colleges in America.
Of
course, none of what he wrote of his academic experience is a surprise.
It also contains the answer to my friend’s plea. Indeed,
this is the HELL that’s going on. And I saw it coming.
We
won the Cold War in the 1980s, defeating the forces of communism and
the left generally from Managua to Moscow, from Havana to Prague, from
Berkeley to Manhattan. Ronald Reagan won a major ideological battle. Not
only had communism been trounced, but so had liberalism, to the point
that it eventually had to change its name to “progressivism” to make it
more palatable to the uninformed. In tapping the “progressive” label,
the left resurrected an old brand that the current wide-eyed generation
knows practically nothing about. Communism was on the ash-heap of
history. So was socialism. Their sister variants and off-shoots,
including liberalism, were pretty much finished. There was no way a
Democrat would win the White House in 1988, and in the 1990s Bill
Clinton had to run as a moderate “New Democrat” preaching that “the era
of big government is over.”
Sure, class warfare and redistribution
still had welcome arms and eager demagogues in the Democratic Party,
but they didn’t have much currency. Most of all, any politician with a
communist past didn’t have a political future in America. Very few
Americans in 1989 would have voted for such a person.
But alas,
it’s a generation later, and something crucial happened in the interim:
the political left retained control of higher education and much of
education generally, not to mention Hollywood, television, and media.
Positioned in the right places, the left controlled the most influential
forces in the country and culture. This meant that the next generation
never learned the vital lessons about the Cold War, about communism,
about the pitfalls of the left’s penchant for centralization,
collectivization, redistribution, government fiat, moral and cultural
relativism, militant secularism, and on and on. The nation’s youth was
ample prey for the left’s cynical misuse of phony slogans like
“diversity” and “tolerance,” which the academy preaches mightily but
doesn’t dare apply where it matters most in a university: ideas. Thus,
the post-1989 generation learned the bad ideas that lost, not the good
ones that won; the latter were refused and repressed.
Again, I saw
it coming. I watched it up-close, personal. Around the country, I would
speak to college audiences—on communism, socialism, progressivism,
collectivism, redistributionism—where I’d repeatedly warn:
We’re not learning these lessons. This stuff isn’t being taught. This will come back to haunt us.
Many times I’ve given a speech titled “
Why Communism Is Bad,” often sponsored by the excellent
Young America’s Foundation. Frustrated college students, captive to the likes of the aforementioned Maoist, beg me to come to their campus: “
S.O.S. Please help!” As I speak, holding up primary sources ranging from
Marx’s Manifesto to the Harvard University Press book
The Black Book of Communism, laying out everything from communism’s war on property to
war on religion,
students are riveted. Left or right, Democrat or Republican, liberal or
conservative, they’ve clearly heard none of it before. And they can
tell I’m not lying to them. Facts are facts. You know truth when you
hear it. That’s the beauty of truth. You hear it and nod; you
intuitively get it.
And guess who’s not sitting in those
classrooms as I speak? The professors. They rarely, if ever, attend. The
one or two occasions where I recall a professor in attendance, she just
shook her head in disgust, staring at me contemptuously as if the ghost
of Joe McCarthy had flown into the room and leapt inside my body.
But
here’s the bigger picture: Amid these lectures over the years, from
attentive students to angry professors, I’d wonder if we really had won
the Cold War.
Well, we did. We won the Cold War. In an important
sense, however, we also lost it at home. We failed to teach the
essential truths to the next generation. As my friend Herb Meyer likes
to say, we’ve forgotten what we knew.
The left ensured the
forgetting. It took over the necessary institutions to secure its
triumph. And thus, the ugly stepsisters of communism—socialism,
“progressivism,” communism and socialism cloaked as “progressivism,”
centralization, collectivization, etc., etc., etc.—are now prevailing.
It explains how the likes of de Blasio, Obama, Pelosi, Sebelius, Boxer,
McAuliffe, get elected. It’s how Sandra Fluke becomes a “progressive”
heroine rather than a public outrage. As they expand government and
encroach on basic civil liberties (especially religious freedom), as
they advance their postmodern nostrums and ever-expanding list of new
“rights” and entitlements, their young foot soldiers have no idea that
their ideas are really nothing new—rooted in the extremes of an ideology
we had vanquished a generation ago.
Speaking of that vanquishing,
the architect of victory, Ronald Reagan, said that freedom is never
more than a generation away from extinction. Every new generation has to
fight anew. That’s where we are. We have to fight all over again. It’s
frustrating, yes, but the battle never ends. That, too, is the truth.
Source is here.
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