By Cal Thomas
Wednesday, October 19, 2016
Many millennials are OK with socialism, even communism,
according to a YouGov poll commissioned by the Victims of Communism Memorial
Foundation.
Forty-five percent of those polled between the ages of 16
and 20 said they would vote for a socialist, while 20 percent said they could
vote for a communist. Maybe that explains the Che Guevara T-shirts so many of
them like to wear.
Responding to the poll, Marion Smith, the executive
director of the organization, said, “An emerging generation of Americans has
little understanding of the collectivist system and its dark history.” Partial
credit for this should go to former presidential candidate and avowed socialist
Bernie Sanders.
Even more shocking is the poll’s discovery that a third
of millennials believe more people were killed under George W. Bush than Joseph
Stalin, whose regime murdered 20 million people between 1924 and 1953. The
total killed under all communist regimes (so far) is estimated at 100 million.
The poll also found that capitalism, which offers
millennials more opportunities than the socialism and communism so many of them
admire, is viewed favorably by 42 percent of young people, compared to 64
percent of Americans over the age of 65. That so few older adults appreciate
capitalism is also disturbing, though it is a triumph of liberal propaganda,
which tends to base its ideology on intentions and feelings, not evidence and
outcomes.
In part, these results are a product of a public
education system that increasingly treats all ideas and organizing principles —
save democracy and capitalism — as equal. Moral judgments are not to be made,
thanks in part to an emerging philosophy divorced from right and wrong.
The late Catholic Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen brilliantly
summed up the problem with modern society more than a half-century ago; before
it evolved into the morally chaotic nation we are today. He wrote, “America, it
is said, is suffering from intolerance — it is not. It is suffering from
tolerance. Tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error, virtue and evil,
Christ and chaos. Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it
is overrun with the broad-minded.”
When one has lost a standard for judging right from
wrong, good from evil, when anything goes (Cole Porter wrote a satirical song
with that title), then socialism and communism become one more organizing
principle among many of equal value.
That liberal Democrats are succeeding in shaping young
people’s minds is revealed by this finding in the YouGov poll: More than half
of millennials say the capitalism system works against them, while four in 10
call for a “complete change” so that the highest earners pay their “fair share”
in taxes.
No one ever defines what “fair share” means, much less
holds government accountable for the money it wastes, including the failure of
costly programs Congress lacks the will to terminate.
This way of thinking is a triumph of the
envy-greed-entitlement worldview, which believes that if someone is making more
money than you, they owe you the difference, except those higher taxes won’t
find their way into your pocket.
We used to learn from the successful, because they served
as role models and examples of how hard work and risk-taking could improve any
life. Now, we penalize success and, as a result, get less of it. But we feel
better and feelings are all that matter, right? At least that’s how we have
been conditioned to think.
These poll results ought to spur more parents to rescue
their children from an education system that is failing them on many levels.
Maybe a field trip to a communist country would cure millennials of their moral
equivalence. They might start by visiting the prisons in Cuba.
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