Alan MacLeod on the “Crucial Communism Teaching Act,” which is now being read in the U.S. Senate, where it is all but certain to pass.
15th Congress of the Bolsheviks’ All-Union Communist Party, 1927. (Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
By Alan MacLeod
MintPress News
Congress has just passed a bill that will see the U.S. spend huge sums of money redesigning much of the public school system around the ideology of anti-communism.
The “Crucial Communism Teaching Act” is now being read in the Senate, where it is all but certain to pass. The move comes amid growing public anger at the economic system and increased public support for socialism.
The Crucial Communism Teaching Act, in its own words, is designed to teach children that
“certain political ideologies, including communism and totalitarianism … conflict with the principles of freedom and democracy that are essential to the founding of the United States.”
Although sponsored by Republicans, it enjoys widespread support from Democrats and is focused on China, Venezuela, Cuba and other targets of U.S. empire. The wording of the bill has many worried that this will be a centerpiece of a new era of anti-communist hysteria, similar to previous McCarthyist periods.
The curriculum will be designed by the controversial Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and will ensure all American high school students “understand the dangers of communism and similar political ideologies” and “learn that communism has led to the deaths of over 100,000,000 victims worldwide.” It will also develop a series titled “Portraits in Patriotism,” that will expose students to individuals who are “victims of the political ideologies” in question.
A Discredited Book
The 100 million figure originates with the notorious pseudoscience text, The Black Book of Communism. A collection of political essays, the book’s central claim is that 100 million people have perished as a result of the communist ideology.
However, even many of its contributors and co-writers have distanced themselves from it, claiming that the lead author was “obsessed” with reaching the 100 million figure, to the point that he simply conjured millions of deaths from nowhere.
Its methodology was also universally panned, with many pointing out that the tens of millions of Soviet and Nazi losses during World War II were attributed to communist ideology. This means that both Adolf Hitler himself and many of his victims are counted towards the vastly overinflated figure.
The book was condemned by Holocaust remembrance groups as whitewashing and even lionizing genocidal fascist groups as anti-communist heroes.
The principal organization promoting the 100 million figure today is the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which has shown a similar level of both anti-communist devotion and methodological rigor.
The group, set up by the U.S. government in 1993, added all worldwide Covid-19 deaths to the victims of communism list, arguing that the coronavirus was a communist disease because it originated in China.
It is these people who will be designing the new curriculum that will be taught in social studies, government, history, and economics classes across the United States.
China Hawks
U.S. Capitol building, February 2021. (U.S. Army National Guard, Ashley Goodwin, Public domain)
One of the central goals of the bill is also to “ensure that high school students in the United States understand that 1,500,000,000 people still suffer under communism.” This is a clear reference to China, a rapidly developing country that, in just two generations, has gone from one of the poorest on Earth to a global superpower, challenging and even surpassing the United States on many quality-of-life indicators.
The bill goes on to detail how the school curriculum will “focus on ongoing human rights abuses by such regimes, such as the treatment of Uyghurs in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region” by the Chinese “regime” and its “aggression” towards “pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong,” and Taiwan, who it labels “a democratic friend of the United States.”
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Furthermore, many of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation’s “Witness Project” case studies – likely the source for the “Portraits in Patriotism” series – are from China.
This includes Rushan Abbas, the founder and executive director of the Campaign for Uyghurs, a pressure group funded by C.I.A. front organization, the National Endowment for Democracy. Abbas was also previously employed as a translator at the notorious Guantánamo Bay torture camp.
The U.S. is currently engaged in a quickly-escalating Cold War against China that includes channeling money and support to separatist movements, including those in Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan, as MintPress News has reported.
In September, the House of Representatives passed a bill that authorized $1.6 billion to be spent on anti-Chinese messaging worldwide.
Latin America: Model & Target
Miami’s U.S. Rep Maria Elvira Salazar in January 2023 at the World Economic Forum in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland. (WEF, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
The other major target of the bill will likely be socialist or communist-led governments in Latin America. The act’s sponsor is Maria Elvira Salazar, a Republican Congressperson representing Miami.
A part of Florida’s famously conservative Cuban-American community, in 2023, she introduced the FORCE Act, which attempted to block any U.S. president from normalizing relations with Cuba unless its government is overthrown. She has repeatedly condemned President Biden for easing the (illegal) U.S. sanctions on Venezuela.
And in July, she denounced what she described as the “socialist curse in Central America and the Caribbean,” singling out Cuban, Venezuela, Honduras and Nicaragua as countries requiring regime change.
She is, however, an avid supporter of the far-right president of Argentina, Javier Milei, accepting his invitation to attend his inauguration. Argentina, she said,
“is going to set the course and point of reference for the rest of Latin America as to the way that a country should be governed… Free market economy, small government, individual liberties, freedom, private sector, no corruption, that’s what we’re trying to do.”
Perhaps the only foreign country she praises more than Argentina is Israel, whose actions she has supported at every step, even going so far as to denounce what she called the “one-sided pressure for a ceasefire” in Gaza.
Salazar’s bill passed easily, 327-62, with limited opposition from Democrats or Republicans, who voted for and against it in roughly equal measures. Even many members of the Progressive Caucus voted in favor, proving that anti-communism is as popular on the left as it is on the right.
A New McCarthyism?
Karl Marx recruitment poster on Holywell Street in Oxford, England, July 2023. (Daniel Michael Perry, Wikimedia Commons, CC0)
The imminent passing of the Crucial Communism Teaching Act harkens back to earlier anti-communist periods in American history, namely the Red Scare of the 1910s and the McCarthyist era of the 1940s and 1950s.
During those times, organized labor movements were ruthlessly attacked, workers from all professions, including professors, government officials, and teachers, were fired en masse, and some of America’s brightest minds had their careers derailed due to their political leanings. This included singer Paul Robeson, actors like Charlie Chaplain and Marilyn Monroe, playwright Arthur Miller and scientist Albert Einstein.
The point of these operations was to break any opposition to the power of the state and big business and ensure the United States maintained its capitalist course. Today, however, fewer Americans than ever are happy with the current political and economic system.
1977: Roy Cohn, chief counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy during the McCarthy hearings, debates American author Gore Vidal on McCarthyism.
A recent Gallup study found that only 22 percent of the public are satisfied with how things are going, with a majority responding that they are “very dissatisfied.” Living standards have been stagnating or dropping for decades, and alternative economic systems are becoming more desirable.
A 2019 poll from Axios found that 48 percent of adults under 35 prefer socialism to capitalism, including 57 percent of female respondents.
There are some signs that Washington is slowly moving towards a new McCarthyist era. President-elect Donald Trump [whose lawyer in the 1970s and 80s was McCarthy counsel Roy Cohn], for example, has promised to carry out mass deportations of leftists once he becomes president, stating:
“I will order my government to deny entry to all communists and all Marxists. Those who come to join our country must love our country. We don’t want them if they want to destroy our country … So we’re going to be keeping foreign Christian-hating communists, socialists, and Marxists out of America.”
“At the end of the day, either the communists destroy America, or we destroy the communists,” he explained. But he also stated that American citizens espousing anti-capitalist views would be purged. “My question is, what are we going to do with the ones that are already here, that grew up here? I think we have to pass a new law for them,” he said.
That Trump would actually deport millions of American citizens en masse appears like too drastic a step right now, but it is clear that both Democrats and Republicans are serious in their anti-communist convictions. Therefore, the Crucial Communism Teaching Act will likely only be the start of this campaign.
Alan MacLeod is senior staff writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.
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Is it Communism that gave the citizens of the U.S. a predatory health care system? Is it Communism that drives our military and governmental agencies to subdue, transfigure or mollify by direct murder so many Muslim nations? Is it Communism that created a surveillance chain of governmental agencies and social media empires to connect the dots leading to each of our probable future detentions inside our own borders? Is it Communism that is erasing the same Constitution which our elected leaders are sworn to uphold, and yet are willing to sell (along with our rights) to the highest bidder? If China is the problem, why did the US invite them to join the WTO in 1998? There are many reasons for all our problems in the US, but Communism would be, by default and by definition, at the very bottom of the list. This whole argument blaming Communism for the problems which our own government refuses to be accountable for is just authoritarianism, pure and simple. If the bloodless corpse of Goebbels rises up and is given a 24 hour news show, I guess that would be Communist infiltration also.
It should be obvious that capitalist banking practices are destroying the value of the currency making everything unaffordable. But inflation is blamed on everything but Capitalism when it IS Capitalism that causes inflation by the billions in loans that all require the “interest” be added to the cash value of the product of the loan. Inflation consequently causes the devaluation of the currency. This legislation ignores the main cause of inflation like every other rant about inflation in its attempt to defend capitalism.
America has learned nothing and is hastening its demise with its demented policies.
China and Russian are not ‘communist’, in the McCarthy sense, anymore. They have learned and moved on.
America, and the west in general, cannot comprehend a world where there is no war and the government(s) actually use its monies to help the country and all its peoples.
When will ‘the people’ finally figure out who their real enemy is ?
That is indeed the question. Most USAmericans are either unable, or unwilling, to accept that they live in the belly of the beast. The corporate state is regressing politically, determined to take the whole world down with it and it seems it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets any better. I would like for this not to be the case as much as anyone else, but you take a good look around and it’s like “Hope? What hope?”
McCarthyism!…not only in the 1950s. I had to sign away my rights to free speech and thought in the 1960s to get student aid at university in Florida.
Reading through the comments, I cannot share the view that such a bill and its consequences are some last ditch effort of the plutocracy to retain power and control; it seems to me that the geopolitical world is moving rapidly toward a neo-feudalism of the most dramatic kind. Such a condition might be lived through and overcome if there was a stable supporting biophysical environmental substrate, but every action of the oligarchy, and now almost every effective action in support of social values, end up challenging environmental stability, further exacerbating the confusion and disorganization of the people and empowering and speeding a neo-feudal agenda….and running this iteration of the living experiment out of time.
I agree with you. I have felt for some time now that we are entering a new epoch of neo-feudalism in the West.
@james kaye:
yanis varoufakis, former finance minister of greece,
titled his latest book “techno-feudalism”. to the point.
and quite a number of underlings love their chains.
which is the system’s point: if you love your chains,
you do not feel the need to break them.
with all the proxy wars & environmental destruction
going on, their might not be time to do so, anyway …
Another false basis for the insane war in Ukraine aginst “communist” Putin?
Neoliberal economic and political policies do not benefit ordinary people. They are just a means for moving wealth from the ordinary people who create it to the elitists who hoard it. Of course, for people like Salazar, it’s all a communist plot rather than simple thievery. Seems like the insanity genie has escaped the bottle and is now running free. The rest of the world had better stand out of the way while the accumulated bullshit in the US and Western countries drowns them. Perhaps we’re approaching our “Old Yeller” moment.
“let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution.”
Way to speed up the revolution. They know it’s coming. Their unconstitutional laws won’t save them.
The US – where it’s ok to be a white supremacist and a Nazi, but you better not speak out against capitalism and the uber wealthy.
Freedom is a Lie.
I learned this lesson young, as I figured out that in this great, free, marketplace of ideas, that anyone promoting anything except capitalism was banned, shunned, and if necessary, jailed or killed. Freedom is a Lie, and you find this out the first time you try to speak against the Rich.
Democracy is also a Lie, as pointed out by this piece. When only 22% are ‘satisfied’ with the way things are going, but a ‘majority’ is very dissatisfied … then this is not a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
But the same Congress and Elites are telling you that you must go and die for this Freedom, and that you must die for this Democracy.
The Fear mongers.
hxxps://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2024/11/21/china-builds-port-peru-us-old-trains/#comment-16997
Officially stated and defacto Chinese foreign policy is:
– mutual respect
– peaceful coexistence
– win-win cooperation
Defacto US foreign policy is:
– me master, you slave
– perpetual war to ensure perpetual US war profiteering
– I-win you-lose / zero sum game / my way or the highway.
Chinese overseas projects:
State managed, using brand new components constructed to high engineering standards, yielding little to no short term profits, but to serve long term foreign infrastructure needs that will facilitate long term win-win trading relationships.
US overseas projects:
Private vulture capital managed, involving “sale” of obsolete 40 year old castoff crap, while imposing extortionate short term price gouging that will maximize immediate profits for US share holders / investors. Long term: trap those dumb foreigners in unserviceable debt slavery which forces them to sell their resources to the USA for peanuts.
Ideal US – Foreign relationship:
USA bombed the Nordstream gas pipeline even as Oaf Scholz welcomed being buggered in the arse while grinning like a halfwit and pretending it wuz dem six drunken Ukies dat dunnit.
USA then “sold”* superexpensive fracked LNG trans-Atlantically to the stupid Germs who were consequently unable to operate their infrastructure or to manufacture products affordably, causing the ever accelerating industrial and economic collapse of the Germs.
(*US LNG cannot be sold to suckers anywhere else in the world because it is way more expensive than any other gas source.)
Meanwhile US passed the “inflation reduction act” to entice Germy corporations to relocate factories to the USA, decimating Germ jobs further.
Why, oh why, does the rest of the world not see the superduper benefits of signing up to team USA?
Everyone should aspire to be like the invertebrate, arse buggered, democratic Germs and resist those damn authoritarian Chinese commies.
Message to Peruvians:
You are stupid to be trapped into a future of peace, progress and prosperity offered by authoritarian China, when the good ole liberty loving USA offers you freedomaceous poverty, deprivation and debt penury in perpetuity. I mean, how dumb can you get?
This legislation shows how frightened and desperate both Republicans and many Democrats have become as Americans become ever more angry at predatory economics.