New York Times | The Fertile Ground of French Communism New York Times Mr. Mlenchon, who also had the support of the French Communist Party, or P.C.F., obtained 19.5 percent of the first-round vote, though he came in fourth and couldn't participate in the runoff. By refusing to give Mr. Macron (in Mr. Mlenchon's eyes a ... |
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The Fertile Ground of French Communism - New York Times
Special to WorldTribune.com
By Ileana Johnson, Fairfax Free Citizen
A bill narrowly passed the house in California, repealing part of the law enacted during the Cold War era in our countrys history when communists were really active and infiltrating our government, attempting to overthrow it.
The bill proposed to eliminate the section which allowed the firing of public employees if they were members of the Communist Party. The bill now goes to the Senate and its author, Democrat Assemblyman Rob Bonta, hopes that it will pass.
Assemblyman Randy Voepel, a Southern California Republican who fought in the Vietnam War, said communists in North Korea and China are still a threat.
Assemblyman Travis Allen, also a Republican, said that this bill is blatantly offensive to all Californians. Communism stands for everything that the United States stands against.
Why the Cold War era laws suddenly need changing is puzzling to other Republicans in the California legislature.
It should not surprise anyone, given the fact that California is now ruled by a one party system, the Democrats; they have become advocates for communism, illegal aliens, and a sanctuary for law breakers.
Judging by the communist stance of academia on campuses around the country and the curriculum taught in our public schools, the Antifa fascist anarchists, Black Lives Matter, SEIU, and other progressive organizations around the country, communism is their way to attain social, environmental, and gender justice, a utopia that the UN is pushing through its many octopus organizations.
Why communism?
The youth in this country have been taught revisionist history for a long time. Many have been purposefully asleep, in a drug stupor, or absent during their history classes.
Communist teachers with an agenda of their own have glossed over the atrocities that various totalitarian communist dear leaders have committed against their own people.
Communism has been repackaged as globalism, global citizens, no borders, no national language, no culture, and no sovereignty under the rule of a few billionaire elites and the United Nations.
And the Democrat Party has been hijacked and is run by communists who are no longer hiding their destructive agenda. Atheists are pushing hard for communism since atheism is the communist states sanctioned religion.
In a recent PragerU video, Dennis Prager wondered, Why Isnt Communism as Hated as Nazism?
If you consider the almost 100 million victims of communism and the six million victims of the Nazis, why is Nazism always cited as evil but communism praised?
Dennis Prager explained that communism enslaved entire nations, Russia, Vietnam, China, North Korea, Eastern Europe, Cuba, and much of Central Asia. They ruined the lives of well over a billion people.
Prager gave the following reasons why communism does not have the evil reputation Nazism has:
1) Widespread ignorance of the communist record. Leftists (not liberals) have never loathed communism; they teach communism as a viable and desirable solution to crony capitalism.
2) The Nazis carried out the Holocaust. The communists killed many more of their own people, but they never carried it out in the systematic genocide that the Nazis have engaged in against every woman, man, and child of Jewish descent.
3) Communism is based on nice-sounding theories, Nazism is based on heinous sounding theories. Teachers have focused their attention on the horrifying atrocities of Nazism, and the academia glossed over the evils of communism, calling them perversions of true communism.
4) Germany took responsibility for the evils of Nazism and attempted to make amends for the atrocities committed while the Russians did not apologize for Lenins or Stalins horrors, such as the Holodomor in Ukraine. Lenin, the father of Soviet communism, is treasured in Russia today. People still deny, by assertion or implication, Stalins holocaust, said Russian historian, Donald Rayfield, from the University of London. Mao Zedong is still honored in China.
5) Communists murdered mostly their own people. Nazis killed very few of their own fellow Germans. In the world opinion of academic circles, murdering your own countrymen does not carry the same weight as murdering people from other nations.
6) The Left considers the last good war fought as WWII. Lefties do not look at wars against communist regimes as good wars. Thus, academia considers the Vietnam and Korean Wars against communism as bad wars and the soldiers who fought in them were spat upon when returning home. But Jane Fonda, who sympathized with the Vietnamese and took pictures of herself on their tanks, was glorified by the Left.
WWII was a good war because the Nazis had occupied many European nations that were subsequently liberated at the end of WWII.
Most high school and college students have no idea what happened to millions of innocents under communism, despite testimonials from many of the survivors of communism. And we were saddened to see anarchists in D.C. cowardly photographing their arms and hands while flipping the Victims of Communism Memorial.
Young leftists mocked those who tried to educate by telling them the truth. They have been so thoroughly brainwashed by their schools that they no longer discern rational thought. They see themselves so diversely open-minded, yet their brains had fallen out long time ago.
Why communism gets a pass from our Democrat Party-dominated culture, Why communism gets a pass from our one-party system and culture, WorldTribune.com
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Why communism gets a pass from our one-party system and culture ... - World Tribune
A bill making its way through the California Legislature to remove membership in the Communist Party as a disqualification for employment by the state 64 years after the rule was imposed prompts us to revisit how anti-communist hysteria in the 1950s almost destroyed the University of California.
The measure by Assemblyman Rob Bonta (D-Oakland) narrowly passed the Assembly on Monday and is now before the Senate.
Its more than a reminder of the toll that the Red Scare exacted on our public institutions. The measure also lends some perspective to the debate going on today about free speech on university campuses. As we observed recently, the uproar over a few isolated cases of speakers being barred or shouted down obscures how in most respects the debate actually is a marker of free speech, not a sign of suppression. That wasnt the case in the 1950s.
The Legislature enacted its employment ban on communists in 1953. Bonta doesnt go so far as to declare that the states action then was wrong, though he told my colleague Melanie Mason that the communist label could be misused or abused, and frankly, has been in the past, in some of the darker chapters of our history in this country.
The Red Scare impinged on the University of California most directly through the loyalty oath controversy of 1949-54, which I recounted in my recent book Big Science, about the career and work of the Nobel-winning UC Berkeley physicist Ernest Lawrence.
The controversy began in June 1949 with a vote by the UC Regents to add a statement disavowing membership in the Communist Party to an oath of allegiance already required of UC employees.
At that point, anti-communist hysteria was in full cry in California and across the country. The state legislature had echoed congressional concerns about subversion by establishing its own Committee on Un-American Activities in 1941, but the committee moved into high gear only in 1947, when its chairman, Sen. Jack Tenney, stages a clownish investigation of ostensibly lax security at Lawrences Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley (now the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab).
Tenneys probe went nowhere, but at the same time the Atomic Energy Commission was stepping up its own red hunt by establishing local panels to investigate employees of AEC contractors including UC, which was running the Los Alamos atomic weapons lab in New Mexico for the government and which received heavy government funding for Lawrences lab. The chairman of the California AEC panel was UC Regent Jack Neylan, a renowned red-baiter. Lawrence was a dear friend of Neylan, and had to step in more than once to dissuade the regent from ordering the dismissal of Lawrence employees he suspected of communist sympathies.
In 1949, Tenney resurfaced with a package of 13 bills targeting suspected communists at the university and elsewhere in state government. Hoping to head off legislative interference in UC affairs, then-Chancellor Robert Sproul proposed a loyalty oath in which UC employees would disavow support of any organization advocating the overthrow of the United States government. The regents added the specific reference to the Communist Party.
Adding to political sensitivities within the UC administration was a speaking invitation tendered by UCLA to Harold Laski, a leftist political scientist from Britain. Sproul, who then had authority over UCLA as well as Berkeley, forced the campus to withdraw the invitation.
Neylan soon emerged as the outstanding hard-liner among the regents. In early 1950, when opposition to the loyalty oath already was coalescing among the faculty, he persuaded the board to fire any employees who refused to sign the oath. Among the majority siding with Neylan was Mario Giannini, son of A.P. Giannini, the founder of the Bank of America and himself a former regent; among those opposing the policy was newly elected Gov. Earl Warren, an ex-officio regent and the future chief justice of the U.S.
The loyalty oath split the UC faculty. A majority opposed the oath but nevertheless chose to sign. For many, being required to affirm ones political loyalty was so repugnant that the real choice became whether to stay at Berkeley at all. European-born scientists and other faculty faced a particular moral quandary: As I wrote in Big Science, even the most ardent anti-communists among them thought the oath an uncomfortably close reminder of the impositions on academic freedom they had suffered in their homelands.
The oath prompted a flow of resignations that sapped Berkeley of the core of its scientific faculty. Many had been attracted to the university by Lawrences fame as the inventor of the atom-smashing cyclotron, and were now appalled that his friendship with Neylan prevented him from speaking out against the oath in fact, even trying to enforce it in his lab.
One who left was the brilliant young particle physicist Wolfgang Pief Panofsky, who was granted a personal audience with Neylan at Lawrences behest. Instead of persuading Panofsky to stay, Neylan hectored him about the evils of communism for two hours straight. Panofsky fled to Stanford, where he taught for the next 56 years.
The loyalty oath affair reached its climax with the firing of 31 non-signers in 1950. That also marked the beginning of the end. Two years later, the state Supreme Court ordered them all reinstated; in 1954 they won back pay for the period of their dismissal. One, David Saxon, would later become president of the university.
The loyalty oath began a subtle transformation in the universitys reputation as a haven for pure science. Instead, it began to seem a place where ones views on the fraught politics of national security loomed over ones career prospects. The atmosphere at Lawrences laboratory and the university as a whole did not make people who dissented feel they were welcome, Saxon observed at a symposium marking the 50th anniversary of the affair.
What the episode really illustrated was the folly of trying to impose policies so central to the mission of a university by fiat.
Everybody lost, and no one won, David Gardner, a historian of the controversy and himself a former president of UC, said at the symposium. How could it be that a great university set out in 1949 to clarify a policy about communism and its place in the university, and a year-and-a-half later wind up dismissing 31 members of the faculty of the University of California against whom no charges were made?
At Berkeley, the loyalty oath experience continued to resonate through the 1960s and the birth of the free speech movement, which militated against Vietnam- and civil rights-era restrictions on political speech on the campus. And the issues continue to resonate today not least as a reminder that the loyalty oath affair was fueled at least partially by UCLAs speaking invitation to Laski.
Free-speech challenges still erupt at Berkeley and other UC campuses, but wholesale disqualifications for ones political beliefs or even political statements havent been tried since. That doesnt mean they wont recur political attacks on university faculty members are common, generally as right-wing attacks on supposed liberal leanings of university professors.
The California Legislatures consideration of a bill to wipe communist sympathies off the roster of disqualifying attributes for state employment is a good step, but it passed only narrowly, against opposition from legislators still cherishing the mistakes of the past: The whole concept of communism and Communist Party members working for the state of California is against everything we stand for on this floor," said Assemblyman Randy Voepel (R-Santee) during floor debate. But the politics of the 1950s have no place in the politics of the 21st century.
Keep up to date with Michael Hiltzik. Follow @hiltzikm on Twitter, see his Facebook page, or email michael.hiltzik@latimes.com.
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A reminder: Anti-communist hysteria almost destroyed the University ... - Los Angeles Times
One of the things that makes this accusation so insane is that there are dozens of countries in the world with publicly operated national electricity distribution networks.
If public ownership of the electricity distribution network is an identifier of communism, then countries like Denmark, France, Finland, India, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden are all communist countries. Even various states and regions of the United States are a bunch of communists too.
Surely it's time for people to accept that they're guilty of mindlessly spewing toxic political diarrhea if their definition of "communism" is so dysfunctional that it defines Texas as a communist state because their electricity transmission grid is run as a not-for-profit entity which is accountable to the Texas legislature?
As a result of the Tory privatisation in 1990, and subsequent sales and sell-offs, one of the biggest stakeholders in the UK's national electricity transmission grid is now the Chinese state (through their CIC sovereign wealth fund)!
So anyone accusing Corbyn of "communism" for wanting to renationalise the national grid so that it can be used for the benefit of the British people and the British economy, is actually arguing that taking control of our public infrastructure out of the hands of the Chinese communists is some kind of evil communist plot!
The fact that so many people are parroting this kind of extreme-right propaganda nonsense about Corbyn's plan for the energy market just goes to show how easily programmed people are, and how irrelevant facts have become in modern political discourse.
If you tell them that Jeremy Corbyn's public ownership policy is "communism" they'll shriek and wail until they're blue in the face in favour of keeping things the way they are, and allowing the Chinese state to continue to own a significant stake in the UK energy distribution network!
It's both fascinating and terrifying how stupid people can be.
It's fascinating that these political sleepwalkers can be convinced to support foreign communists actually owning UK infrastructure simply by telling them that opposition to communist ownership is ... err ... communism!
It's terrifying because these deluded idiots are going to flock to the polls in their millions to vote for the Tories, and enable them to continue flogging off our public assets at bargain basement prices, to literally anyone who wants to buy them, including communist China.
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State operated energy grids are not "communism" - NOTTINGHAM CITY COUNCIL LOLS (blog)
Currently, hundreds of thousands are protesting in Venezuela due to government corruption, a lack of necessary resources and the collapse of the economy. North Korea faces pressure as escalating tensions involving the presence of U.S. warships near its waters yielded threats of war. Chinas government while communist in structure and function depends on the capitalistic consumption of its cheap goods, and allows the free market to influence and sustain its economy. Even Cuba has opened to the U.S., with the previous embargo being repealed and active trade restored between nations. These events in the eyes of the younger and older generations seem familiar, as they reflect on the recent history of other nations before them most notably the Soviet Union. When new reforms or revolts in these nations come, they act as an unwavering evidence that communism is unstable, and deprives its people of the rights and sustenance they deserve. Wherever communism is or has been its collapse has yielded a new hope for those living in current or post-communist nations.
Communism originally started as a ideology to represent downtrodden workers; but over the past several decades, it morphed into the workers nightmare. The conditions in which the working class lived not to mention the slim middle class that existed were so abysmal that they became a representation of common communist life. Lack of resources, goods that expired or deteriorated quickly, government corruption and the condition of civil liberties in communist countries what few existed all became common experiences of those living in said countries.
The cultural and social conflict communism created in countries that were partially occupied or invaded by the Soviet Union were substantial as well. To this day, echoes of the Vietnam War still affects U.S. veterans, Foreign Service members and Vietnamese refugees. While Vietnam has become more open to capitalist societies and consumerism, the state is still controlled by the same party and some of the same people that were part of that conflict.
There are other examples of the lingering effects of communist interference as well. For instance, the separation of families between East and West Germany resulted in heartbreak for many, and those who tried to escape or defect were often captured or shot. Another instance is the cultural changes that have taken place in the Korean peninsula, such as the gradual change in regional dialect and accent in the Korean language between north and south of the DMZ.
However, it seems that these nations are having a change of heart. While revolution may not come violently or even as a sudden event, the ability for governments to accept the free market even if gradually by allowing restricted enterprise is daunting to those who support it. In many ways, its why nations like China and Vietnam have existed for so long with communist governments, as it allows for the quality of living and average income to increase, as well as makes these nations part of a larger global marketplace. As these countries expand their economies, it is hoped that there will be a further push to promote civil rights such as freedom of speech, press and protection from legal injustice.
Once an ideological foe of the U.S. and its allies, communist nations seem to be liberalizing their relations to its former enemies. The current events unfolding in the remaining communist nations prove that this ideology as a form of governance cannot sustain itself, and that the survival of any nation is dependent on the free market and other forms of democratic government.
ILLUSTRATION BY ALEXX ELDER
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Not a bang but a whimper: Communism is dying for good - The Ledger