Communism Is as Socialism Does (and Vice Versa)

 

They argue and split hairs, they fight and break heads, they work together and destroy liberty because they all travel to the same soul-crushing destination. As far as liberty-loving anti-communists are concerned, communists and socialists — and “democractic socialists,” Fabians, progressives, Alinskyites (not to mention most Democrats and an awful lot of Republicans), etc. — believe in the same centrally planned, varyingly totalitarian vision for America that the founding fathers would have had to declare independence from all over again.

To that point of ideological convergence, a couple of quotations

The Communist Manifesto Ranks Third in Assigned University Texts

(flickr/Kevin Steinhardt)

 

 

The Communist Manifesto is the third-most popular assigned book in universities’ syllabi, according to the Open Syllabus Project.

The Open Syllabus Project was made available to the public on January 22. It gathered over 1 million syllabi published on university websites, and set up a Syllabus Explorer to rank the frequency of assigned texts. The project’s founders describe it as an “effort to make the intellectual judgment embedded in syllabi relevant to broader explorations of teaching, publishing and intellectual history.”

Has America Been Influenced by Communism?

 

Many today ridicule prior generations’ concern over Communist infiltration. But current trends are bringing that concern back into focus.

Imagine the United States allying with Russia. If you were alive when Nazi Germany was rampaging across Europe during World War ii, you didn’t have to imagine it. You saw it: The world’s greatest capitalist nation forged a “strange alliance” with the world’s greatest Communist state, the Soviet Union.

When this happened, a peculiar phenomenon surged across America: a wave of popular emotional fervor for the Soviets.

Influential men and media fawned over Joseph Stalin. President Franklin Roosevelt released Communist Party-U.S.A. leader Earl Browder from prison to promote “national unity” between American Communists and the general public.

Yet even during this trying and confusing time, one strong voice cried out a warning against not only the imminent fascist threat from Germany, but the less-understood Communist threat from the Soviet Union.