The following was posted at American Thinker by Paul Kengor of Grove City College, who wrote GOD AND RONALD REAGAN, one of my favorites.
It is a sad day when we must live in the shadow of oppression instead of the sweet sunshine of Liberty. As for me? I had rather scratch out a living in the soil of my ancestral homeland, living day to day in poverty and yet be free, than have an oppressive world government micromanage my life, deny my family even the most basic of freedoms, but still have my IPOD. How about you?
Capitalism is based on private ownership; communism on public ownership. Capitalism thrives on small government and taxes; communism on large government and taxes, typically progressive income-tax rates and estate taxes -- both advocated explicitly by Marx -- and much more.
This stuff isn't rocket science. It is easy to teach, if the professor desires. The problem is that it isn't being taught. Consequently, Americans today do not know why communism is such a devastating ideology, at both the level of plain economic theory and in actual historical practice. It is a remarkably hateful system, based on literal hatred and targeted annihilation of entire classes and groups of people. (Nazism sought genocide based on ethnicity; communism sought genocide based on class.)
Most Americans generally know that the USSR was a bad place and that it was good that the Berlin Wall fell; they lived through that. But they know little beyond that, especially young Americans in college today, born around the time the wall fell -- Obama's biggest supporters. Nowhere in America is Barack Obama worshipped as he is on college campuses, by students and professors alike.
What does it all mean for November 2008? It means that millions of modern Americans, when they hear that Barack Obama has deep roots with communist radicals like Bill Ayers and Frank Marshall Davis, don't care; they don't get it. Moreover, the leftist establishment -- from academia to media to Hollywood -- will not help them get it. To the contrary, the left responds to these accusations by not only downplaying or dismissing them but by ridiculing or even vilifying them, given the left's reflexive anti-anti-communism. The left will create bad guys out of the anti-communists who are legitimately blowing the whistle on the real bad guys.
When the leftists of the ‘60s took over higher education and the media, they really knew what they were doing. This was brilliant, masterful, a tactical slam-dunk, a tremendous coup for them and their worldview, with ripple effects we can scarcely imagine.
Does this mean that the McCain camp, talk radio and conservatives generally shouldn't bother exposing these things? Not at all. The truth is the truth, and needs to be told. Moderates especially need to be informed that Barack Obama is not your typical liberal: he is the most hard-left Democrat that his party has ever nominated for the presidency. It is absolutely not a coincidence that the man with these far-left associations just so happens to be ranked -- quantifiably, objectively, by non-partisan, respected sources like National Journal -- the most far-left member of the U.S. Senate, which is no small thing given the leftward drift of the modern Democratic Party. In other words, Obama's extremist associations matter; they are fully revealing, illustrative of the political-ideological realities that the pro-Obama media will not expose. His voting record bears this out.
That said, I warn my fellow conservatives: Be prepared to be really, really frustrated when few people seem to care.
Another way to look at Bill Ayers and those radical 60's terrorists is to ask, "How would the media treat McCain if it were to come to light that he had started his presidential campaign in the living room of Timothy McVeigh (the Oklahoma city bomber)? Or David Duke (who never actually bombed anyone but simply said things people didn't like)? Sphere: Related Content
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