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By Vejas Liulevicius, Ph.D., University of TennesseeThis monument celebrates the leaders of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, which was one of the second Soviet republic after Russia. (Image: Bronks/Public domain)The Hungarian Communist Party

Hungary had been among the defeated powers of the First World War, and in the aftermath, its territory was radically truncated, facing occupation by French forces, Romanians, and Czechs. Hungarians reacted with fury, and the nationalist slogan was to be heard in the streetsNo, no, never.

No mainstream party in Hungary was willing to continue governing, so a power vacuum emerged. In dire straits, the socialists agreed to a fusion with the new Hungarian Communist Party, whose leader Bla Kun, was hauled right from jail to national office.

Kun was HungarianJewish by origin, from Transylvania, and had been a not very successful journalist and trade union official before the war. During the First World War, he had been drafted into the AustroHungarian army and was captured by the Russians in 1916. As a prisoner of war, he joined the Russian Bolsheviks and got to know Lenin, who dispatched him to his native country to agitate.

Kun suggested to Hungarians that alliance with and help from Soviet Russia could be their salvation, and even nationalist Hungarians could support the new state. Coming to power on March 21, 1919, the new regime pushed back the foreign armies, and undertook quick radical reforms in economics and culture.

Instead of trying to coopt the peasantry as Lenin had done, Kuns government proceeded immediately to collectivization. Noble estates were nationalized rather than being distributed to poor farmers, who became alienated from the new government in Budapest. Instead of the land reform they had hoped for, and private farms for themselves, they now faced the prospect of farming for the state. Food supply broke down.

This is a transcript from the video series The Rise of Communism: From Marx to Lenin. Watch it now, on The Great Courses Plus.

The government nationalized banks, safetydeposit boxes and their contents, apartment buildings, and all branches of trade. Culture and social life were also to be revolutionized, starting with a ban on alcohol. Titles were abolished, which shocked an older generation of Hungarians: one countess is said to have fainted when a bus conductor addressed her as citizeness.

Georg Lukcs, the philosopher, was Commissar for Education and Culture. The Commissar of the Interior and Commissar of War, Tibor Szamuely, established a repressive apparatus domestically. Newspapers were shut down, critics of the regime arrested, and brutal gangs of regime supporters who called themselves Lenin Boys terrorized the populace. But food shortages, inflation, and rampant corruption were so bad that even government officials criticized their own regime.

All these took their toll, and when Romanian and Czech armies moved on the capital Budapest again, the regime toppled after only 133 days, collapsing in early August 1919. Kun and his associates fled. Given his experience, he was invited to join the coworkers of the Comintern in Moscow.

In Hungary itself, a repressive national conservative regime took power and enacted counterrevolutionary or white terror of its own, taking an estimated 5,000 lives. Its leader was Admiral Mikls Horthy, who ruled as regent.

Learn more aboutthe revolutionary Russias.

To the west, in southern Germany, the Hungarian uprising inspired radicals in Munich, in Bavaria. That part of defeated Germany had also been aswirl with turmoil and violence. With the end of the war, seven centuries of Wittelsbach royal family rule came crashing down. A new socialist republic was declared by Kurt Eisner, but he was assassinated by a radical nationalist student. In the aftermath, Bavaria was declared to be a Soviet republic.

The new rulers included anarchists, writers, and poets. Locals nicknamed the government the regime of the coffeehouse anarchists. The new regime only had enough time to promise the end of capitalism through the printing of money. Its minister for foreign affairs demanded that Switzerland turn over locomotives to the new state, and when Switzerland refused, he declared war on the Swiss.

These men, however, were soon replaced by more serious and determined revolutionaries. They were led by Eugen Levin, an adherent of Lenin, who announced that the new Bavaria would be a springboard to revolution throughout Europe.

Learn more aboutthe relation of human social systems to evil behavior.

But the central government in Berlin had had enough, and it sent in the brutal Freikorps mercenaries, who had earlier crushed the Spartacus uprising and murdered Rosa Luxemburg. Blood flowed in the streets of Munich in May 1919, with the shooting of hostages and prisoners on both sides. The Freikorps killing spree was horrific.

Incidentally, an unknown German soldier named Adolf Hitler, was on the scene in Bavaria, observing how to mobilize masses and planning for the future.

So, the Communist dream of a Red Bridge to Europe was thwarted, and the Russian Communists were faced with the prospect that the Revolution had been deferred.

In the aftermath of the First World War, no mainstream party in Hungary was willing to continue governing, so a power vacuum emerged. The socialists agreed to a fusion with the new Hungarian Communist Party, whose leader Bla Kun became the leader of Soviet Hungary.

Bla Kun had been a journalist and trade union official before the war. As a Russian prisoner of war of the Austro-Hungarian War, he joined the Russian Bolsheviks and got to know Lenin, who dispatched him to his native country to agitate. Eventually, he became the leader of the Hungarian Communist Party and later the actual leader of Soviet Hungary.

Soviet Bavaria came into being after the First World War. A new socialist republic was declared by Kurt Eisner, but he was assassinated by a radical nationalist student. In the aftermath, Bavaria was declared to be a Soviet republic.

The government in Berlin sent in mercenaries to suppress the Republic. The Freikorps undertook a brutal campaign that ended the existence of Soviet Bavaria.

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The Fall of Soviet Hungary and Soviet Bavaria - The Great Courses Daily News

Karl Marx monument in Chemnitz, Germany(Matthias Rietschel/Reuters)A memoir by a student of Communism reveals how socialists, time and again, erase the criminal traces of Communism to save the good reputation of their common ideals.

Marxs first crusade was not against capitalism but against soap. I guess every time he had to take a shower, he was too drunk to do it. Otherwise, he always lived off of other peoples money, he never worked, even when his own children were starving, and he drank enough to deform his liver along with his conscience. Surprise: The first Marxist was a shameless rascal, the type of person who would despise the working class.

Lenin was no different. He was always the spoilt child of the house, surrounded by women who took him for a genius and supported him financially all his life. He never worked, says one of the most influential and controversial Spanish journalists of the last half century, Federico Jimnez Losantos, author of A Memoir of Communism, a colossal work published in 2018 and not yet translated into English.

Jimnez Losantos attempts to answer the key question: One hundred years and one hundred million deaths later, why is Communism still a respected ideology?

Joe Biden wont like the answer: It is socialists who have taken it upon themselves to excuse Communisms crimes. For the first time, a book goes into great detail explaining the reasons for this historical complicity, which still stands, with the help of leftists everywhere, from the Democrats in America to the Social Democrats in Brussels. And it stands in spite of incontestable facts, as P. J. ORourke described them in Give War a Chance: Its impossible to get decent Chinese takeout in China, Cuban cigars are rationed in Cuba, and thats all you need to know about communism.

That Communism goes hand in hand with deceit is well known, especially now that we are suffering the consequences of a pandemic secretly exported worldwide by China, under the auspice of the WHO, which is as concerned about world health as Xi Jinping is about allowing the Chinese to go to Mass on Sundays. Its worth remembering: If China were a free country, its leaders would have raised the alarm in time, and the coronavirus would never have spread to the extent it has today. It is Communism that is to blame for this world crisis.

As Jimnez Losantos reminds us, the first lie about the Communist revolution is that it was a proletarian uprising against czarism. In October 1917, there was no czarism in Russia, but instead a democratic republic with the socialist [Alexander] Kerensky at the head of government, he writes. What Lenin overthrew was not a tyranny, but a democracy. As Jimnez Losantos notes: The only thing the masses really took was the palace cellar. To drink it dry. Perhaps because, really, the proletarians who were said to have been saved by Marx, Bakunin, or Lenin did not want to be saved, but to have their own houses, better wages and working conditions, work, life or accident insurance, in short: to be owners. The truth is that, to be a Communist, you first have to be a millionaire. It doesnt work the other way around.

Over more than 700 pages, Jimnez Losantos composes a politically incorrect profile of the Communist beast, supported by a very thorough bibliography. He knows what hes talking about: He used to be a Communist. But in 1976, at the age of 25, after reading The Gulag Archipelago and traveling to China, he broke up with Communism for good. The political powers that be drove him out of the two Spanish radio stations where hed worked and found success as an opinion leader perhaps they drove him out precisely because of his popularity. After that, in 2009, he started his own radio station and newspaper, EsRadio and Libertad Digital. From these perches, he defends the role of the United States, where he often spends his summers.

Two characteristics mark Federico Jimnez Losantoss personality: independence and the defense of freedom. He has forged his career by denouncing the powerful fighting terrorists, Communists, and lukewarm self-conscious right-wingers alike. The reappearance of Communism in Spain, by the hand of Spains current deputy prime minister, Pablo Iglesias, has pushed Jimnez Losantos to write this great work dedicated to the victims of this totalitarian ideology.

The most novel thing in A Memoir of Communism is its study of the moment in which socialists absolved the revolutionary Communists. December 1917 was the moment when perhaps the most important debate on the left in its entire history took place, he writes. Two months after Lenin seized power by force from the socialist Kerensky, a group of Russian socialists published, in the French newspaper LHumanit, an appeal against the Bolshevik regime; they described Bolshevism as violent, terrifying, and capable of making the very name of socialism hated. Their appeal was not successful. There is also no way to ignore Kerenskys terrible negligence in not condemning to the press Germanys financing of Lenin after the failed coup in July (a dress rehearsal for what would happen in October).

Shortly afterwards, in 1918, when Kerensky reappeared in London and Paris, his criticism of the Leninist coup and the terror unleashed against the opposition produced a phenomenon that would last until our times, namely the socialists and bourgeois Lefts insistence on denying the evidence of the Communist regimes illegality and brutality. Corollary: If you want to ruin the last hope, put it in the hands of a French socialist.

The key to this historical trap is provided in a speech by Kerensky himself: This regime, which calls itself socialist while following the worst methods of czarism, is the worst enemy of socialism, because the bourgeoisie exploits the example it gives and uses it to discredit our ideal.

Jimnez Losantoss thesis is unyielding on this point: With his words Kerensky shows that the Left is not worried about the crimes of which socialists themselves are victims. No, they are distraught that this sinister Leninism might spoil the reputation of their socialist ideal.

The contemporary Left often puts forth a surprising defense when faced with the string of Communisms failures throughout history: that no one has been able to get it right. Its about as reasonable as claiming that serial killers shoot their victims because no one has taught them to hunt ducks. It reminds me of those weekend do-it-yourself experts who, when they see you bend a nail for the tenth time while trying to hammer it into a plank, snatch the hammer from you, screaming, Give it to me, you useless idiot! And naturally they miss the nail and smash their finger. Speaking of the alleged Stalinist deviation from authentic Marxism-Leninism, Jimnez Losantos writes:

In every country where Communism has been applied, the result has been, and still is, crime and misery, but . . . because Communism has not been applied. The key is the but, which avoids condemnation. No one can tell us why we should keep insisting on an ever-failing recipe, and thats because the reason is unutterable: Life is just peachy on the side of Good!

In other words, do you know of any Communist leader who has not notably improved his own financial standing thanks to his Communist status? I dont.

It is not easy to understand Communism without taking a closer look at the personality of its leaders. Lenins driving force was hatred. Jimnez Losantos refers to what the founder of socialist realism, Russian writer Maxim Gorky, said regarding this: I know of no one who felt with the depth and strength of Lenin the hatred, disgust, and contempt for human misery, pain, and suffering. Jimnez Losantos adds that Lenin was indifferent to whether others lived or died, except in relation to The Cause, namely, himself. And then there is the matter of his bad character. Another of the things Lenin shared with Marx was the somatization of his failures, Jimnez Losantos writes. Both of them had outbursts of anger when someone disagreed with them or things didnt go the way they wanted. Sort of like Nancy Pelosis tearing up Trumps State of the Union speech on live TV.

Perhaps that same somatization explains Marxs visceral contempt for workers, something Marxist professors will never tell you at the university:

The self-employed, who in a quasi-service society like London made up a third of the employees, were erased from the chosen class, the proletariat. The peasants as Lenin and the Russian Communists also thought were for him an obsolete reactionary collective destined to disappear with the onset of industrialization.

In 1921, the images of hundreds of people dying in the streets, people sleepwalking or prostrate unable to move, the storming of cemeteries and cannibalism, elicited a feeling of horror among society . . . in those capable of feeling horror. This was not the case with Lenin, who despised the sensitive and who, in the midde of the famine in July 1921, ordered a campaign of intense propaganda among the rural population explaining to them the economic and political importance of paying taxes on time and in full. Often we arrive at the same place: A big problem for the Left is that those that die of starvation cannot continue to pay taxes.

However, the balance of victims is difficult. Jimnez Losantos reaches a conclusion:

The terrible figures of Communist humanicide can only be discovered in the mathematical coldness of statistics: In 1924 there should be 17 million more in Russia but, after Lenins stint, they are not there. In addition to the deceased that Communism kills off, there are also those that Communism does not allow to live, to be born, to grow old, or to become ill without dying.

As for the murderous record of Chinese Communism, he reasons: The only difference between Mao and Lenin and Stalin is that the Chinese were more numerous than the Russians, and by doing the same as them, Mao was able to kill a great many more.

Among the Communist massacres, the particular violence against Christians stands out. The antagonism between Communism and Christianity is unconditional, despite the absurd attempts at reconciliation by the left-wing advocates of liberation theology. In Christianity, each life is unique and invested with a special dignity; each person is a child of God, created to be free. In Communism, the individual has no value and freedom is forbidden. For Lenin and his infinite children, property and freedom are one and the same thing, says Jimnez Losantos. You cannot take away someones property without morally taking away his freedom and physically taking his life. Thats why Communism is the most atrocious form of modern slavery.

The terrifying religious persecution unleashed against Catholics, in the lead-up to and during the Spanish Civil War in Spain, is paradigmatic. In the massacre of the Paracuellos martyrs in 1936, Jimnez Losantos sees a replica of the massacres perpetrated by the Russian Cheka, the Bolshevik security forces that slaughtered many thousands of counter-revolutionaries during the Russian Revolution. Although the Spanish one, for a population six times smaller, was the worst in the history of Christianity since Diocletian, the Soviet one reached very similar figures. A Memoir of Communism reminds us of the religious massacre in Spain with the grim image of the desecrated body of a nun, displayed in the middle of the street, leaning against a wall, before the indifferent gaze of passers-by.

Only a few days ago we saw Joe Biden promising more Islam in American schools. No one can be surprised by the flirtation of the Left with Islam. First, because of their hatred of Christians, and second, because of the Lefts historic alliance with the faithful of Allah. Russian Communism since the 1970s, made a pact with its secular or social Communist versions and, after the Fall of the Wall, the Communist regimes made a pact with the radicals, Jimnez Losantos explains. The close alliance of Castro and Chvezs post-Communism with the Iran of the ayatollahs is evident the same connection that Iranians have today with the Spanish Communists of the Podemos party.

Communism is not dead. If the greatest success of the Devil (or of Evil) is to convince people that it does not exist, the survival of Communism is based on the death certificate and the consequent moral pardon that so many historians have extended to it as an exquisite, infinitely researchable corpse, says Jimnez Losantos, Communism has been unremembered, history not forgotten, but destroyed.

In this hour, the United States is fighting the same battle against cultural Marxism as Europe, although the Old Continent has been on the losing side for a long time. The memoir concludes:

To know if a country is sick with totalitarianism, if it is incubating the egg of the Leninist snake, one must check its relationship with history. If, in the name of multiculturalism, grammatical genre is erased to satisfy feminist or LGBT sexism; if reference to race is obscured in the news of gang crime; if the [Spanish] Reconquista is condemned so as not to disturb Islam or be found guilty of the horrendous crime of Islamophobia; . . . if, in the end, classic literature, from Cervantes to Mark Twain, with which for centuries Western children have learned to read, is banned from all schools and even in Oxbridge, for being white only, Greek philosophers are suppressed for not conforming to the multiculturalist criteria imposed by the Left and observed by the Right, then Communism is still alive and is grooming society for tyranny.

If you think your country is safe from these horrors, go out into the street, go to a bar or a college campus, try to talk like Jordan Peterson, and tell me how big the snakes egg is.

Translated by Joel Dalmau

Read the original here:
Why Is Communism Still a Respected Ideology? - National Review

Actress Olivia de Havilland looks on after she was awarded with the Legion dhonneur at the Elysee Palace, France, September 9, 2010. (Philippe Wojazer/Reuters)After discovering the true nature of a Communist front group, she worked as a double agent to help bring them down.

When Olivia de Havilland, the grande dame of the Golden Age of Hollywood, died last week at age 104, the tributes and memories for a life well lived poured in. She was the last surviving cast member of the epic Gone with the Wind. She won two Academy Awards. She was romantically pursued by everyone from Jimmy Stewart to Howard Hughes to a young Jack Kennedy. She challenged and helped change punitive film-industry practices toward performers.

But one chapter in her life was missing from almost all the tributes. In its 3,000-word obituary the New York Times failed to mention the key role she played in defeating the Communist subversion of Hollywood in the 1940s.

The Washington Post devoted not one word of its 2,400-word obit to it. Neither did the Los Angeles Times, Hollywoods local paper, in its 2,200-word sendoff.

But the story is a fascinating one and needs to be told even as it still makes many on the political left (for whom the Hollywood Blacklist is an honor roll) uncomfortable. While much of it has been recounted by others, Ive been given exclusive new details from the diaries of a top FBI agent who worked with de Havilland to extricate her from a Communist front group and then to neutralize the group.

The broad strokes of the story have been admirably told by historian Ronald Radosh in his recent Wall Street Journal essay De Havilland Saved Hollywood from Stalin. Briefly, after meeting President Franklin Roosevelt at the White House in 1940 as a 24-year-old actress, she jumped at opportunities to support him. In 1944, she joined the pro-FDR Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions, a group whose 3,000 members included Bette Davis, Gregory Peck, and Humphrey Bogart in its Hollywood chapter. I thought, Ill join and try to be a good citizen,' de Havilland, who had only become a U.S. citizen in 1941, told journalist John Meroney in a 2006 interview.

But in reality, the group was riddled with Communists.

Its leader, Hannah Dorner, was a secret member of the Communist Party. By October 1945, she was leading the Citizens Committee in opposing the incipient native fascism of the Truman administration.

In executive meetings of the Citizens Committee, de Havilland also found that the group wasnt as independent as it publicly professed. It always sided with the Soviet Union even though the rank-and-file members were not Communist. I thought, If we reserve the right to criticize the American policies, why dont we reserve the right to criticize Russia? she told Meroney. I realized a nucleus of people was controlling the organization without a majority of the members of the board being aware of it. And I knew they had to be Communists.

De Havilland also told Meroney that she felt betrayed that the Communists had used her, other celebrities, and New Deal liberalism as covers for their subversive work. She hadnt been told that the Kremlin had declared in 1945 that Communism and capitalism could not coexist in the world and that war with the U.S. was inevitable.

Convinced she had a chance to recapture the Hollywood chapter from the Communists, de Havilland took the lead in gathering a small group of writers, actors, and producers at her home for meetings. Their goal was to fashion an anti-Communist declaration by the committee that would appear in newspapers and make the groups independence clear.

She invited Ronald Reagan, with whom she had worked in 1940, in Santa Fe Trail. She was impressed with Reagan. We told Ronnie what we were about, she told Meroney. And he volunteered to take on the writing of this declaration. He came back and read what he had written. But de Havilland said she encouraged him to take an even tougher stand on Communism. I said, Ronnie, its not strong enough. Its not strong enough. It has to be stronger than that or I wont accept it, she said.

When de Havilland tried to introduce Reagans revised declaration in July 1946, the Citizens Committee meeting that discussed it became so heated and contentious that I thought, This is it, she recalled. I had fought long enough, and as hard as I could, and I resigned. Reagan, James Roosevelt, and others from her dissident group soon followed her.

Dalton Trumbo, then Hollywoods most famous screenwriter, denounced her efforts as nothing but a denunciation of Communism and Red-baiting. But she had the last laugh. As Meroney writes:

De Havilland succeeded at making a Communist-controlled organization irrelevant because without her, Reagan and other noncommunists in the forefront it lost its potency. Many in key positions in the organization, such as screenwriters Dalton Trumbo and John Howard Lawson, later publicly confessed to being Communists.

And Ronald Reagan went on to become the most implacable enemy Communism ever had. In 2004, on the occasion of his death, the Economist magazine put Reagan on its cover as The Man Who Beat Communism. Olivia de Havilland was both pleased with that and her role in mentoring Reagan.

De Havillands own recounting of this story is vivid and impressive. But scholars have noted that she is vague on the details of how she found out about the Communist infiltration of the Citizens Committee. Lloyd Billingsley, the author of Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s, has wondered whether there mightve been more to the rest of the story.

Last week, I got a note from economist Mark Skousen, a friend who runs the annual FreedomFest in Las Vegas. He told me that his late uncle Cleon Skousen had left him a journal he had kept throughout his life, which included his time as police chief of Salt Lake City in the 1950s and as an FBI special agent in Los Angeles in the 1940s. A portion of the journal was devoted to the de Havilland story, but Skousen vowed that it would not be published until after her death. Cleon Skousen himself died in 2006 at the age of 93.

What follows is a section of his journal that has been edited for brevity and clarity. The full journal will be published in a forthcoming book that Mark Skousen and his wife, Jo Ann, are editing: There Were Giants in the Land: Episodes in the Life of W. Cleon Skousen.

The Olivia de Havilland Story

By W. Cleon Skousen

I was FBI liaison to the Hollywood studios (in 1946) and it was requested that I make contact with her and see if we could swing her away from the Communist group to which Olivia was contributing rather large contributions each month.

I made an appointment to visit her at the beautiful home she and her sister had in Hollywood, but like all of the stars, they had a very pretentious mansion in front but lived in a condo-type of apartment in the rear.

I told Olivia how impressed Director Hoover had been with her portrayal in Gone with the Wind, and he felt that if someone refreshed her mind on the great record of America in fighting for freedom, and how oppressive Communism had been, she might want to help our side. She immediately assured me that nothing would induce her to turn against her friends.

With her permission I gave her a 45-minute summary of the great obstacles America had overcome to raise up the first free people in modern times. She remained unconvinced and said she would remain with her friends who loved her. Nevertheless, she asked me to thank Mr. Hoover for his kindness and that was the end of the visit.

However, Olivia did not know that we already had a plant in the group and this undercover agent had made a recording of all their proceedings. I went back to headquarters and listened to these tapes and found that when Olivia was absent, they called her old money bags and schemed different ways to get her to contribute to certain causes for which she would be a sucker.

After making a 30-minute transcription of their insulting remarks, I took it back to Olivia and asked her to listen to it. I told her I would wait out on the porch until she had finished. She only listened to about five minutes and then came out on the porch swearing like a mule skinner. She said she would never go to their meetings again or send them any more money.

I told her there was one way she could get even with them. I suggested she make one more small donation and then furnish to us everything on how the Communist unions were planning to take over the studios.

She agreed to help the FBI as a double agent, and I sent a daily report on her information that was turned over to the Internal Security Committee of the Senate. The Communist plans for the takeover of Hollywood were broadcast coast to coast. I then suggested to Olivia that she tell the leaders of the party she wouldnt give them another cent until they found out who the stool pigeon was that was leaking information to the Senate Internal Security Committee. They never guessed that it was her.

I worked with Olivia for some time, and we succeeded in getting her to help us root out the Communist takeover of the film industry.

***

Regardless of the details on just how Olivia de Havilland became the first major Hollywood liberal to call for ending the alliance between liberals and Communists and their fellow-travelers, many historians agree that it was an important moment. As Radosh notes:

She asked Hollywood actors to choose between being advocates for liberal democracy, and giving support to the Soviet Unions line during the start of what became the Cold War. That effort deserves to be celebrated, and de Havilland praised for her courage and the integrity of her action.

Excerpt from:
How Olivia de Havilland and Ronald Reagan Beat the Hollywood Communists - National Review

A scene from a popular show on The Disney Channel is resurfacing online this week because of its anti-communist rhetoric. Accusing Disney of promoting capitalism to children, social media users have described the scene as deranged.

Posting a clip from comedy series Girl Meets Word, which ran from 2014 to 2017 and is now available on Disney+, Twitter user @ayynicko posted reminder that Disney is actively giving your children anti-communist propaganda alongside the video.

The scene, taken from a season two episode titled Girl Meets Commonism, shows three schoolchildren embracing communism by working together on a test. Despite scoring 100 on it, they each receive a C grade with the teacher embarking on a lecture about individualism.

When you get everything right, but you dont do it yourselves, it makes you average, he says. A divided by three is a C. Look at you. Youre all the same. Youre average. Youre common.

Commonism, main character Riley replies. This is why it fell? People didnt wanna all be the same?

Without incentive, theres no motivation. Without motivation, theres no advancement, the teacher responds.

The clip has now been viewed almost 4million times on Twitter with over 3000 replies of people debating its contents. This explains why Americans have an irrational fear of communism, one social media user replied. Theyve really been conditioned to associate that word with negative emotions.

This speech also makes... no sense...?? screenwriter Sophia Benoit added. Like outside of it being weird capitalistic propaganda, its nonsense.

Naturally, the replies have since descended into a conversation about whether communism or capitalism is better but the more jarring question should be, why is The Disney Channel promoting either to kids in such a big way?

The kids are made to feel stupid for even attempting to embrace communism

The teachers words are delivered with passion, the kids are made to feel stupid and common for even attempting to embrace communism. Ultimately, the children watching may darent even ask about it for fear of being embarrassed in a similar way.

Whatever social system you believe is best for countries to follow, the fact The Disney Channel is promoting any of them to their target audience of pre-schoolers, pre-teens and young adolescents is concerning.

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This Disney Show Scene Has Been Accused Of Promoting 'Anti-Communist Propaganda' To Kids And It Is Wild - Grazia

Former featherweight world champion Barry McGuigan once said that "Cuban boxers are genetically predisposed to boxing, and when you look at their success rate at an amateur level, its hard to disagree. Since 1972, fighters from the Carribean island have won 37 gold medals at the Olympic Games in boxing, more than any other nation.

It could, and should, have been more. Of those 35 gold medals, three were won by Tefilo Stevenson in the heavyweight division, perhaps the finest amateur boxer to ever step foot in the unpaid ranks.

Stevenson, born in Puerto Padre in 1952, took the heavyweight gold medals at the Munich, Montreal and Moscow Olympic Games in 1972, 1976 and 1980 respectively, becoming only the third boxer after Hungarys Lazlo Papp and fellow Cuban Felix Fabre to win three Olympic golds in boxing. It could have been five, an achievement never before seen or likely to be ever seen, but Cubas withdrawal from the 1984 and 1988 Olympics, along with many several other Communist nations in response to a US-led boycott in 1980, meant that Stevenson would never get the chance at fighting for immortality.

Affectionately known as Pirolo in his native Cuba, Stevenson was famous for his crunching right hand, deft technique and footwork that laid the groundwork for many Cuban pugilists that followed, and was a gentleman inside and outside of the ring. Were it not for Cold War politics, Stevenson could have been one of the most famous, and richest, fighters in the world.

To illustrate the sort of money Stevenson could have made, while the Cuban was the undisputed king of the amateurs, there was a lot of talk in the US of matching up Stevenson with another, much more famous heavyweight in a potential fight of the century - the heavyweight divisions greatest ever amateur against the heavyweight divisions greatest pro; Communism vs Democracy; Red vs Red, White, and Blue: Stevenson vs Muhammad Ali.

Stevensons prime in the 1970s coincided with Alis own glory years, so much so that American media often dubbed the Cuban as Alis Communist twin. The fight sadly never happened for a number of reasons - Stevenson had no intention of relinquishing his status as a Cuban amateur and when the two finally met in Havana, they disagreed on the number of rounds. Stevenson preferred three or four round bouts, whereas Ali wanted the standard championship fifteen. Ironically, as Stevenson was fighting for his third gold in 1980, Alis career was essentially ended by Larry Holmes. Stevenson was quick to point out that maybe it should have been The Louisville Lip that had picked three or four rounds.

Stevensons narrowly missed dance with Ali wasnt the only attempt to bring the gifted amateur into the big time. Bob Arum was interested and where theres money to be made, you better believe Don King is lurking in shadows. The wacky-haired promoter said Stevenson "would have been phenomenal as a pro, he could have been in the same class as Muhammad Ali or Joe Frazier. But we'll never know."

Sadly well never know what he could have achieved or how much he could have earned but to Stevenson it was irrelevant - he was a king in Cuba and had no remorse over supposed missed opportunities. I prefer the affection of eight million Cubans, he once said.

There was an appropriate outpouring of grief in Stevensons homeland when, aged 60, he died from a heart attack in 2012. At his funeral, hundreds of Cubans flocked the streets of Havana for his final procession. The Cuban sporting family was moved today by the passing of one of the greatest of all time, read a statement on Cuban news.

Hell never get the worldwide recognition his Democratic twin Ali had, but to the people in his home country, Tefilo Stevenson, the greatest ever heavyweight amateur, is just as beloved.

Continue reading here:
Alis Communist Twin: The Boxer Who Turned Down Millions To Stay Amateur - The Sportsman