(Official Washington Examiner editorial, Feb. 17) 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.”
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
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…. 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.”… [The full editorial is at this link.]
