Schools of Leftist Learning

An elementary school class under socialism/communism
Photo: 1965

My first encounter with the daunting public school education system was in a little town in the deep south where I applied to be a substitute. To my surprise, the principal of the local high school told me that they could not “take just anybody off the street,” one had to have a teaching license to be a substitute, just having a degree would not suffice.

As I learned much later, most substitutes were generally glorified babysitters who did not really engage the students academically. They just passed worksheets assigned by the absent teacher and tried valiantly to deal with the behavioral problems of unruly students.

Undeterred, I asked the Superintendent of the small public school system and I got the same answer. I checked to see if a teaching license was required and I got several different answers. This was 1979, the year Jimmy Carter’s Department of Education was established when our public school education began its decline, reaching bottom with Common Core.

Perhaps the administrators believed that a person coming from a communist country could not possibly teach American students any values or history worth learning and were afraid that I might warp their minds with communist indoctrination.

Since I fled communism and had not been indoctrinated at all, I resigned myself that I was not educated enough to be a substitute in their public schools. I had met some of the “licensed” teachers and I was not impressed at all with their overall knowledge and lack thereof.

A 2010 ranking by the U.S. News and World Report placed the following schools of education in the top ten of all graduate colleges of education in the U.S.:  Peabody College (Vanderbilt University), Teachers College at Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, University of Oregon, Johns Hopkins, University of California (Los Angeles), Northwestern (Chicago), University of Wisconsin-Madison, and U.C. Berkley.

In case you wondered where many public school teachers learned their “forward” methods of teaching, their “expert” craft, Marxist ideology, and where textbooks and ever-changing methodologies like Common Core came from, you get an idea from the list cited.

The schools of education around the country indoctrinate future teachers who in turn propagandize socialism and Marxism to our students and degrade the education system with the Common Core methodology and all its ancillary materials.

Then I had my first encounter with higher education in 1982 when I started taking classes at the nearby university and I was shocked to learn that many of my professors who were well prepared in their subject areas, were also not just highly liberal, but some were rabid Marxists. The administration was not yet in bed with communism as they did not give me credit for the mandatory Scientific Socialism classes I attended under the communist school system. 

I was surprised at the high concentration of liberals among academia, professors who worshipped at the foot of Marx and Lenin. The campus was pretty much a socialist enclave where English professors adored deviant behavior and discussed it at nauseam in their classes.

We could not express anti-communist opinions or anything else that was divergent from the college professor’s stated opinions. Students were bullied into submission. They knew that there would be serious consequences to grades and student standing.

Even though there is not one person who has all the right answers, college professors put themselves on narcissistic pedestals on the conference circuit around the country, awarding each other titles and meritorious plaques, letting everyone know that they are the ultimate source of suitable information and, if you have someone else’s opinion, it is not worth having.

I thought, whatever happened to the campus being a place to freely exchange ideas, for polite discourse, examination, and arriving at solutions to a problem?

The darling professors are protected by an old system of tenure which assures them that they can never be fired no matter how outrageous their behavior, what they teach, and how they teach it. The tenure system assures them that they can be activists and teach our children to hate America, its history, and even hate themselves, and still keep their jobs.

This disease called tenure began in America sometime in the late nineteenth century, modeled after a much earlier German tenure system. It was necessary then as industrialists’ ideas (they financed many universities) and the liberal and populist professors’ ideas diverged. That reality is long gone but tenure still exists today.

A professor should be free to discuss politics and philosophy at appropriate times and in appropriate places but all sides of the discussion should be allowed to interject. That is when learning occurs. Bringing up politics in classes with subject matters that do not involve politics is inappropriate.

In addition to student Marxist indoctrination, universities have become enclaves of intolerance and self-selection. Committees choose mostly applicants who believe the same as they do. Consequently, politically conservative professors seldom get hired or tenured by a committee of like-minded liberals. In Ivy league schools, a mere 13 percent of the faculty is libertarian or conservative.

There are many other important reasons why our colleges and universities have become “institutions of leftist learning.” To undo the damage done to our children, universities should end tenure, end the self-selecting committees, abolish the Department of Education, and fire teachers who discuss politics in subject areas that have nothing to do with politics.  Professors must teach students how to think objectively, not what to think, echoing the professor’s beliefs.

It is sad when a student has to agree with the professor’s social and political views in order to get a good grade in class. Students are not there to get a diploma in social justice activism. They are there to learn real American history, science, mathematics, engineering, subjects that will lead to an employable and useful profession. Otherwise, the college diploma is worthless and students are better served in a trade school.

The Tyranny of the Oppressed and of Minorities

"We condemn freedom of speech that hurts other people’s feelings” – student poster photographed at a rally in California

Half of the U.S. population believes that it is a good idea and high time that our country became socialist, on the way to communism. We are told ad nauseam by the highly organized Marxist left that the other communist countries that failed so miserably, oppressed their own people, and killed millions of them, failed because they did not do it the right way. What this “right way” is, nobody really understands or can even attempt to explain. But they repeat it because it sounds right and progressively utopian.

They have carefully listened day and night to the propaganda coming from the labor unions, teacher unions, the academia indoctrinating college students, public school indoctrinating mills, Hollywood movies and immoral starlets who make millions and pretend to be paragons of virtue and knowledge, the main stream media indoctrination, the socialist Democrat Party and its race-baiting members, and NFL players who make millions while pretending to fight for social justice, code word for communism.

It will be interesting to see moronic football players lose their millions and lavish lifestyles while adhering to the communist-dictated equal pay across the board, regardless of effort, talent, training, skill, or education. Living in a two-bedroom apartment made of cinder blocks, without an expensive car and a huge bank account should teach them humility at the barrel of a gun held by the agents of daddy omnipotent government they so desire.

But none are as destructive to our society as the Democrat script readers of the main stream media, pretending to be journalists, graduates of the indoctrinating mills in our many colleges and universities around the country. The pretend-journalists continue the communist indoctrination that started in kindergarten, elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools in every state many decades ago.

The communist tree planted in this country is finally bearing fruit and these fruits are toxic and poisonous to our Constitutional Republic. These rotten fruits want to destroy and replace our Constitution, socially-engineer our demographics, black or white, by allowing any enemy into our country through open borders, and fundamentally changing our society by fascistic means.

I described in my book, Echoes of Communism, what life was like living under communism for twenty years. I have not made any converts though, even among my high school and college students; on the contrary, ever more young people think that how Scandinavian people live is the best – socialism for all.  After all, aren’t they supposed to be the happiest people on earth? I was told this recently by a naïve young lady with bright blue eyes. I asked her if that is true, how come Sweden pays such confiscatory taxes and has been taken over by Islam and has become the rape capital of the world? How is that happiness?

The indoctrination of political correctness (PC), her forfeiture of freedom of speech did not seem to ring a bell that she has lost the freedoms we are so proud of in America when we no longer can express a divergent opinion anywhere without being labeled racists, homophobes, Islamophobias, shunned, lose our jobs, pay fines, and even go to jail.

Political Correctness originated as a joke in a comic strip but it has devolved into Cultural Marxism.  Bill Lind correctly identified Political Correctness and Classical Marxism as totalitarian ideologies. He said,

“The totalitarian nature of Political Correctness is revealed nowhere more clearly than on college campuses, many of which at this point are small ivy covered North Koreas, where the student or faculty member who dares to cross any of the lines set up by the gender feminist or the homosexual-rights activists, or the local black or Hispanic group, or any of the other sainted ‘victims’ groups that PC revolves around, quickly find themselves in judicial trouble.” https://www.academia.org/the-origins-of-political-correctness/

The tyranny of the virtuous and imagined “oppressed” and of minorities has transformed our country into a basket of totalitarian control through fascist and communist methods.

It is no coincidence that PC (Cultural Marxism) uses powerful tools to indoctrinate such as revisionist history, pop culture, environmentalism, and sex. They have been used before by Marxists during the communist revolution of 100 years ago.

During my years of teaching, we made fun of political correctness – nobody took it really serious but people knew how to disguise certain ideas or lest they’d never get promoted, get tenure, better offices, or cushy conference circuits.

PC has become today an ideology that is guarded in the halls of academia and enforced in many cases by the power of the state. We now have “hate crimes” with jail sentences which are nothing but punishing people for their political views and thoughts. The prisoners during WWII used to sing a song that is no longer true today, Die Gedanken sind frei (Thoughts are free), meaning that they can imprison your body but not your thoughts. Well, they are imprisoning people’s bodies for their thoughts today.

Conservative students and faculty are terrorized on campuses for their thoughts if they diverge from the approved campus Political Correctness. This happened in communist Russia, fascist Germany, communist China, and fascist Italy and it is still happening in Cuba and North Korea.

PC is destroying our culture and our freedoms, bringing down our tolerant Western culture and capitalism. The idea that wealthy billionaire athletes are kneeling for social justice in a country with the highest standard of living in the world and anarchists in the streets and in academia are shaming Caucasians for their imagined “white privilege,” is appalling.

College professors naming white families and their children and the laws of inheritance as a root cause in perpetuating white supremacy in tolerant America is an unbelievable farcical development that nobody seems willing to address.

We have become a lawless, irrational society ruled by a mob of tyrant collegiate snowflakes, aggressive professors, activist judges, the non-existent “oppressed” and tyrannical minorities who are not satisfied with tolerance, diversity, and Affirmative Action.

Communists groomed by the teachers’ and labor unions are exalting the Soviet Union as the role model of the first socialist state, with no unemployment, no illiteracy, free education from kindergarten to college, free medical care, and living in peace with one hundred different nationalities. These are lies on all fronts but most Americans, who did not pay much attention to factual history or stayed awake in a history class, would never know the truth if it slapped them in the face.

None of the countries where socialism/communism existed had full employment - people pretended to work and the state pretended to pay them. Everybody had a right to a job but the job was not worth having and it did not pay much. People were abused on the job and often killed when they were sent to do dangerous jobs without any protective gear.

Most people could read but were not able to advance to higher education; the number of places in college were limited and reserved for the elites and their children. The rest, if lucky, went to technical middle schools and high schools.

Medical care was appalling and millions died of simple surgical procedures and treatable conditions, died on the operating table, or from lack of simple drugs or vitamins due to chronic shortages. Insufficiently educated communist apparatchiks were not particularly adept at planning centralized economies even five years ahead.

The proletariat and multiple ethnicities lived in peace because the very powerful police and secret police kept an armed iron fist on all citizens, watched them 24/7 and threw them in gulags at the earliest sign of dissention or misbehavior. The police state was very adept at keeping peace through murder and hard prison time.

Individualism and the desire to succeed and invent were squashed while group-think was demanded for the collective good.

The communists and anarchists in this country make promises and set goals they cannot possibly deliver. Overcoming alleged racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia through state laws is not freedom, it is tyranny. The Communist Party USA wants to replace our Bill of Rights with a “Bill of Rights Socialism.”

Just because we are a seemingly wealthy country today with a robust GDP and still have a powerful military, will not guarantee that our foray into totalitarian socialism will be successful. It will be just another form of tyranny that appeared good in speeches and on paper.  The U.S. will not be different than any other country that has tried socialism/communism.  Additionally, America is in debt up to its collective eye-balls, $20 trillion and counting, because Congress cannot stop spending us into unpayable national debt. Even if we confiscate all the wealth ever created in this country, it will only last a mere month at the current rate of spending. And then, what will we do?

Anarchist community organizers and communist labor union leaders do not mention that the wealth that has been created in this country and the powerful military have been bought and paid for by successful capitalism, not communism or socialism. If you look at the Fabian socialist economies of Europe, their governments are bankrupt despite high taxes, and have little military to defend them and not enough police to protect citizens from the enemies within.

America under totalitarian socialism/communism will not be a society of free individuals; it will be a society akin to the college campuses where any dissention and divergent opinion will be silenced through violence and oppression using fascistic tactics.

Communism has never worked and will never work because individuals are not altruistic enough to give up all their work and their free time in the service and enslavement to other individuals who are lazy and unmotivated to work or to contribute their fair and equal share. Communism breeds a welfare- dependent society that looks up to the omnipotent government to care for them from cradle to grave. That is not freedom.

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The Inconvenient "Gypsies"

Who are the Roma? They have nothing to do with Rome and are not Roman. Roma, as the politically correct crowd calls them, are what history and tradition have called for generations, “gypsies.” The term “gypsy” is also incorrect since they were erroneously assumed to be nomadic tribes from Egypt. They are nomadic tribes from Northern India.

One theory connected them to a military caste in Northern India that moved west into the Byzantine Empire. Johann Christian Rüdiger connected in 1782 the Romani language to Hindustani, subsequent research supporting the hypothesis that Romani shared a common origin with the Indo-Aryan languages of Northern India. The Roma speak a New Indo-Aryan language (NIA).

Another theory suggested that Roma are related to the Dom people of Central Asia and the Banjara of India. A 1992 study showed serological similarities between Romani and the Jatt clan of Northern India and Pakistan, connecting the two genetically. The Roma did not originate from Eastern Europe as previously thought. Romani language bears no similarity to Latin languages.

The Roma or “gypsies,” have always balked at national integration because they prefer their nomadic and free lifestyle centered around a campfire. They love dance and music. They do not like to be tied down or follow the laws of civil society. In spite of efforts to educate them, the school dropout rate is the highest. They prefer to marry off their children very young. If they are given apartments, they strip them bare, sell the parts, and move into the courtyard in tents.

The Western Europeans treat their Roma better than Eastern Europeans. They receive RVs and other generous social benefits. They do not fear the law, on the contrary, the law fears them. We have been terrorized for twelve hours on the midnight train from Nice to Paris by a group of “gypsies” who frightened hundreds of passengers. Even the train police hid from them.

It goes without saying that civil society must treat minorities equally and fairly. Nobody has the right to ignore, mistreat, or abuse vulnerable groups. But they also have the right to live as they choose, according to their traditions.

I have seen the “gypsy” life and culture up close, integration in society is not part of their culture. Their work ethic is quite different than the average person’s work ethic. Every train station, bus station, or tourist attraction in Europe is besieged by “gypsy” pickpockets as young as five or perfectly healthy adults begging on street corners while cradling a baby or pretending to be handicapped.

Since Eastern European countries have become part of the EU, their “gypsy” problem became the problem of the EU. Countries like Italy have been sending Roma back to their original countries because the increased begging, the crime, and the theft were affecting tourism. But they keep coming back.

Some Roma groups have settled into communities of their own choosing where they have built gaudy palaces, mixing different styles of architecture with marble to mimic the palatial homes they’ve seen in their European travels. These palatial homes are often not attached to electricity or water.

The idea of permanence conflicts with their culture. I have asked many of them why they do not settle in one place, why wonder constantly. It is in their blood. A few do settle down in villages and work the land. Others settle on the outskirts of a town and send their kids to railroad crossings to wipe down windshields of stopped motorists in exchange for a few pennies instead of sending them to school.

To solve the problem of the migrating and inconvenient Roma, the European Commission approved the EU Framework for National Roma Integration Strategies up to 2020. (http://ec.europa.eu/justice/policies/discrimination/docs/com_2011_173_en.pdf)

EU governments are thereby asked to create plans to socially include and improve the well-being of their Romani citizens in hopes that the Roma will stay within the boundaries of their countries and not migrate to the western part of the EU.  

One of the Open Society Foundations programs is called, "Making the Most of the EU Funds for Roma." The Chairman of the Board, Kalman Mizsei, wrote an article on December 20, 2012, titled, “Robbing the Roma.” (http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-growing-isolation-of-europe-s-roma-by-kalman-mizsei)

Kalman Mizsei stated that the Roma are suffering more because of the euro crisis and the intolerance, especially in countries with a larger population of Roma: Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Greece.

Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania are chastised for being “the most laggard spenders of EU funds, particularly from the European Social Fund.”

The most egregious, the Romanian government, has only spent 10 percent of the $5.9 billion received from the European Social Fund on improving the Roma poor living conditions, low life expectancy, and low rates of school attendance. 

Nomadic people have always had low life expectancy and low rates of school attendance, they are on the road all the time, don’t go to doctors, it is their lifestyle choice. When they marry their daughters at the age of 12, with matrimonial contracts sometimes signed at birth, going to school is not a priority, they are groomed for marriage.

Can you change centuries of tradition by offering or withdrawing money as incentive? Since the EU suspended the money coming from European Social Fund, the Romanian government stopped reimbursing the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who were running programs to help the Roma.

The EU bureaucrats blame the situation on the general population’s unjust view of the Roma that “they prefer stealing and damaging other’s property to working; that they receive disproportionate and undeserved social benefits; and that they produce children in order to qualify for more public assistance.” Having lived around Roma, I am not so sure that some of the views are so unjust.

I recently strolled down the street in my hometown where many Roma families live, incorporated since the communist regime. They never moved except for the occasional trip that the head of the family took to the Western EU to make money, returning home with suitcases full of goods, cash, and brand new automobiles. How they managed to buy a brand new car in such a short period of time is a mystery to me.

Aside from a few newer and cleaner houses, these Roma lived in dilapidated, smoked, dirty homes, with yards filled to the brim with trash. A brand-new automobile with Great Britain, Spain, France, Germany, or Italy license plate was parked in the street.

I photographed a lavish wedding on the same street a few days earlier – I counted 30 foreign made cars in the procession, decorated with flowers, accompanying the wedding entourage to the reception hall. Until then, everybody trudged through the pot-holed street, singing and dancing next to a fenced-in property with a burned home which had been turned into a make-shift trash dump. No amount of tickets from the city hall made the owners clean it up or dispose of the ruins. Twice a week, with total disregard for noise pollution and their neighbors, traditional Roma music blared from loudspeakers for hours across several streets.

“Physical exclusion” of the Roma is a dangerous trend, said Mizsei. “Under communism, significant efforts were made to assimilate Roma; they were given jobs, albeit at the bottom of the economic pyramid, and were assured housing.” It is true, Roma had meager jobs and meager apartments just like everybody else, but they destroyed their housing, having no appreciation for a permanent lifestyle and all responsibilities of a non-nomadic society.

Even former French President Nicholas Sarkozy is raked over the coals for having ordered in 2010 the expulsion of illegal Roma and the demolition of their temporary eyesore camps.

Where the Roma robbed? I have seen documents claiming that some Roma leaders were robbed of their gold coins and jewels during the communist regime under the guise of safe-keeping. Because of their migratory lifestyle, Roma tend to carry all of their wealth in gold and silver jewelry attached to their bodies or sewn into their clothes. I am not sure if they were reimbursed when the communist regime fell.

How do you integrate a group of people into a society at large when that group does not want to be integrated, the members of the group prefer to live by their rules in self-appointed ghettoes? Can you blame their neighbors for not relishing the idea of living next to such a temporary encampment?

It appears that the last bastion of hope for the Roma is the EU bureaucracy – they have the power and the money to force the other EU members into compliance – change centuries of nomadic traditions of the Roma and integrate them into society with the help of Romani NGO leaders who are tasked to change social policies. Problem solved, one step closer to global governance, fitting everyone into a predetermined template.