Communists

“Che Guevara’s contribution to the Bay of Pigs victory was crucial,” writes Che hagiographer Jorge Castaneda, also a New York Times contributor, visiting Professor at Columbia, Princeton, Harvard, and NYU, and former Mexican Foreign Minister. “Che’s military leadership was permeated by an indomitable will that permitted extraordinary feats.”

Saule Omarova, President Joe Biden’s nominee to head the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), is refusing to hand over to the Senate Banking Committee her university thesis on Marxism written during her time in the Soviet Union.

America has a socialism problem, and it’s one that’s only growing worse with each school year.

But this is by design.

The Democratic Party’s playbook is to turn the next generation into the best little sheep they can be. Why? The better to solidify party power, of course.

We didn’t need a new poll from The University of Virginia Center for Politics and Project Home Fire to tell us that many Democrats see fascists when they look at Republicans and many Republicans see Communists when they look at Democrats. Forty-one percent of Biden voters and 52 percent of Trump voters at least somewhat agree that the time has come to split the country into red and blue states. There is a widespread feeling on both sides that we are not friends but enemies. All this, we could have guessed.

One author argues that the world and our understanding of it would have benefited

“The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world, in various ways” Karl Marx wrote in 1845. “The point is to change it.”

Marx’s writings laid the groundwork for future Communist leaders such as Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin, who in turn influenced Mao Zedong, Hồ Chí Minh, Fidel Castro, and Pol Pot. Global Communism may have peaked in 1975 when Saigon fell to the NVA. In 1991 a failed coup in Moscow signalled the end of the USSR. Today North Korea is perhaps the last Communist state on Earth.

What other New York Mayor has been as loyal to his mother’s — in this case, very subversive — politics?

Yikes, the recent reports of Bill de Blasio as one “Warren Wilhelm Jr.” were news to me (even as news of his name change was first reported several years ago). Such was the birth name bestowed by his mother, whose maiden name was Maria de Blasio, and his father, Warren Wilhelm Sr., who tragically killed himself when Bill was 18 years old. The parents had bitterly divorced long before that, and the young Warren had steadily pulled away from his father as he was raised by his mother and her Italian family. He identified with them and eventually took her family’s name. It really is a sad story. Bill de Blasio had a tough upbringing.

When communism collapsed in Europe 30 years ago, it seemed vanquished. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics turned out to be none of those things and broke into 15 independent countries. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, McDonald’s replaced Marx, and no one argued anymore that real communism still hadn’t been tried.

Conservatives want us to learn about the red menace

One of the more egregious failures on the part of educators on both sides of the Atlantic over the past 50 years has been their omitting to teach several generations of young people about the communist regimes of the 20thcentury. Now I understand that classroom time is limited, and that these days especially it is very important to decolonise Peppa Pig or whatever, but even so.

That the systems that held entire populations captive, and which enslaved and killed millions, and were run by little men who were worshipped as gods, are deemed too trivial to study is really quite remarkable.