From Each According To...

Our education system has failed America's young in countless ways. The persistence of fascination with communism (and socialism) ranks high among those failures, as the screen cap at the head of today's bit illustrates. Hitler remains properly reviled, but Che and Lenin and Stalin - each as monstrous as Adolph - are somehow “OK.”

Karl Marx aphorized the ideology he (stole and) popularized as:

From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

Where our communidolizers go awry is in ignoring the first half of that screed. They invariably fantasize about a world where they get to do whatever they want while having their basic needs desired lifestyle paid for by someone else. Thus, JH's "I wanna be an art teacher" response to the question. In a communist system, however, JH would have his or her career decided by people who would evaluate skill, talent, and societal need, and assign a job that best serves the collective.

This, of course, isn't the communism (or socialism) that the young want. They've been taught to be takers, to feel perfectly content with having some higher authority forcibly confiscating a healthy portion of the fruit of others' labor in order to make their own lives easier. All rationalized by a grossly wrong zero-sum understanding of economics and the oppressor-oppressed duality taught to them by the educational industry. In their minds, it’s not only OK to take what others earned, but it’s actually proper.

That this is different from slavery only in degree is something that they'd not only rather ignore, but would be cranked into high dudgeon should it be even mentioned to them. After all, what good is a finely tuned and hair-triggered outrage response if it isn't used, frequently, to dodge logical argument.

The allure of communism/socialism persists because kids aren't taught either their reality or their horrific, blood-soaked history. Raise the latter, and you're apt to get a vague dismissal as "done wrong," or "that's not democratic socialism," or some such excuse. Pursue the matter and you're apt to find out just how much garbage has been shoveled into their brainpans.

Nevertheless, just as seeds take weeks to germinate, challenges to established notions take time to crack those notions. Plant the seeds of doubt, and maybe you can rescue some kid from a lifetime of Bernie-Sanders-esque delusion.

It's worth noting, by the way, that while many believe in the virtues of communism and socialism - or at least in the virtues of the vague, fuzzy, hand-waving forms of communism and socialism they have in their heads - very few, and perhaps none, believe in the virtues of communism's and socialism's close cousin, fascism.

What is fascism, you might ask a youngster. They are probably unable to define it, but it's always bad and it's only ever perpetrated by people on the other team.