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California may end a decades-old ban on members of the Communist Party working in its government, after the state Assembly approved a bill that would delete references to the party from its employment requirements.

The bill's sponsor, Assemblyman Rob Bonta, D-Oakland, said that California's laws should focus on individuals' actions and evidence rather than political affiliations and what he termed "empty labels."

Speaking on the floor of the Assembly, Bonta called the legislation a "cleanup bill that removes archaic and outdated references to the Communist Party in our state laws, specifically those stating that a public employee may be dismissed from employment if he or she advocates or is knowingly a member of the Communist Party."

The bill passed in a 41-30 vote, after a debate that touched on the Cold War, the U.S. history of fighting communism and the potential for future conflicts.

While Bonta called the measure "an appropriate step forward" for the state, three of his Republican colleagues in the California Assembly rose to speak against the bill, AB 22.

"This bill is blatantly offensive to all Californians," said Assemblyman Travis Allen, R-Huntington Beach, who said his constituents include people who fled Vietnam's Communist regime. "Communism stands for everything that the United States stands against."

Allen concluded, "To allow subversives and avowed Communists to now work for the state of California is a direct insult to the people of California who pay for that government."

Assemblyman Randy Voepel, R-Santee, also opposed the bill, noting America's history of going to war to combat communism.

"There are 1.9 million veterans in California," Voepel said. "Many of us fought the communists. They are still a threat. We have North Korea, that wants to do us in. We have China, who is a great, great threat to the United States."

After those objections were raised, Bonta told his colleagues that the legislation includes a provision that allows the dismissal of any state employee "if that public employee advocates or is knowingly a member" of an organization that works toward "the overthrow of the government of the United States or any state by force or violence."

The Northern California chairman for the Communist Party USA, Juan Lopez, has pushed to roll back similar bans in recent years including one that forbids teachers from being in his party.

The Communist Party isn't a registered political party in California, Lopez told the Daily Bulletin back in 2013.

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California Assembly Votes To Allow Communists To Hold State Jobs - Aspen Public Radio

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By Elias Atienza

In the Now, a Russia Today news project, released a video saying that the far right is distorting the facts about the Soviet Union and trying to make them worse than Nazism. The fact is, this just plain wrong. The Soviet Union, along with the other communist nations that emerged in China, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, and other places, killed tens of millions and ruined the lives of hundreds of millions.

The Soviet Union alone killed millions of peoplebeforeWorld War II. The Holodomor, which is recognized as genocide by Ukraine and 15 other countries including the United States, was the man-made famine that killed an estimated 7.5 to 10 million people in the 1930s, which is just under the amount of people that died in the Holocaust. Or the Great Purge, when Stalin liquidated the Red Armys leadership and killed between 600,000 people and 3 million and lead to the Soviets being humiliated in the Winter War and being unprepared for the German invasion in World War II. Two to three million people are believed to have perished in the gulags and labor camps set up by the Stalin regime.

Though he disagrees with the estimates above, (he argues that Stalin killed only six million people, still horrifically high before World War II) Timothy Snyderargued that Stalins motives were just as bad as Hitlers:

At the same time, we see that the motives of these killing actions were sometimes far more often national, or even ethnic, than we had assumed. Indeed it was Stalin, not Hitler, who initiated the first ethnic killing campaigns in interwar Europe.

The only reason that we ended allying with the Soviet Union over Hitler, is because Hitler was the more aggressive of the two. With his intent focused on conquering Europe in the name of Nazism. He hated communism and used the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact only to avoid fighting a two-front war and focus on knocking out the Western Allies. Indeed, the Soviets invaded Western Poland, dooming the Eastern European country and the millions to Nazi oppression and death camps, along with killing tens of thousands of Poles in shootings.

The Nazis systematically murdered at least eleven million people, including up to six million Jews. The death counts are comparable. But communism usually escapes this because the Nazis sought to murder an entire religious and ethnic group based on their religious views while communism was widespread in their net of death.

As Dennis Prager puts it for why communism isnt viewed as just as bad as Nazism:

The Nazis carried out the Holocaust. Nothing matches the Holocaust for pure evil. The rounding up of virtually every Jewish man, woman, child, and baby on the European continent and sending them to die? It is unprecedented and unparalleled. The communists killed far more people than the Nazis but never matched the Holocaust in the systemisation of genocide. The uniqueness of the Holocaust and the enormous attention, rightfully paid to it, have helped ensure that Nazism has a worse name than communism.

In the Now tries to paint the picture that the far right is responsible for people trying to say that communism and the Soviet Union is just as bad as Nazism. And yet people like Dennis Prager, myself, and countless others, communism is just as bad as fascism and the Soviet Union was just as bad as the Third Reich. We are not far-righters nor are we Nazi apologists. We hate nazism, fascism, and communism equally.

As I wrote forMustang News:

So if you want to punch a Nazi, fine. Do it. I dont condone it nor would I ever punch someone for their political beliefs, but I wont shed a tear for an idiot who thinks white people are the greatest thing to walk the Earth and has some deeply seeded desire to deport me back to the Philippines (even though I was born in the U.S.) But I also wont shed a tear for the communists who hate private property, think people deserve to be shot for thinking capitalism works, condone mass murder from communist figures and believe in state control of everything.

Communism has committed great evils. We cannot be blind to this. The Soviets did much of the heavy lifting in the war against German nazism and paid a heavy price and for that, we should be grateful. But we should also recognize that the Soviet Union was evil as well.

CommunismCubaevilfascismgermanyhistoryHitlerholocaustnaziSoviet UnionStalin

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No Difference in the Amount of Evil Between Communists and Nazis - The Libertarian Republic

Amazing.

The Early Reds

And speaking of this small 1919 sect, Im reminded of one of my favorite movies: Reds (1981). I could watch it another 20 times. It explores the lives of the American Communists of the turn of the 20th century, their loves, longings and aspirations. The focus is on fiery but deluded Jack Reed, but it includes portraits of a passionate Louise Bryant, the gentile Max Eastman, an edgy Eugene ONeill and the ever inspiring Emma Goldman.

These people werent the Progressives of the mainstream that history credits with having so much influence over policy in those days. These were the real deal: the Communists that were the source of national frenzy during the Red Scare of the 1920s.

The movie portrays them not as monsters but idealists. They were all very talented, artistic, mostly privileged in upbringing, and what drew them to Communism was not bloodlust for genocide but some very high ideals.

They felt a passion for justice. They wanted to end war. They opposed exploitation. They longed for universal freedom and maximum civil liberty. They despised the entrenched hierarchies of the old order and hoped for a new society in which everyone had an equal chance.

All of that sounds reasonable until you get to the details. The Communists had a curious understanding of each of these concepts. Freedom meant freedom from material want. Justice meant a planned distribution of goods. The end of war meant a new form of war against the capitalists who they believed created war. The hierarchies they wanted to be abolished were not just state-privileged nobles but also the meritocratic elites of industrial capitalism, and even small land owners, no matter how small the plot.

Why be a Communist rather than just a solid liberal of the old school? In the way the movie portrays it, the problem was not so much in their goals but in their mistaken means. They hated the state as it existed but imagined that a new dictatorship of the proletariat could become a transition mechanism to usher in their classless society. That led them to cheer on the Bolshevik Revolution in its early stages, and work for the same thing to happen in the United States.

The Dream Dies

Watching their one-by-one demoralisation is painful. Goldman sees the betrayal immediately. Reed becomes an apologist for genocide. Bryant forgets pretending to be political and believing in free love, marries Reed and tends to his medical needs before his death. ONeill just becomes a full-time cynic (and drunk). It took Max Eastman longer to lose the faith, but he eventually became an anti-socialist and wrote for FEE.

The initial demoralisation of the early American Communists came in the 1920s. They came to realise that all the warning against this wicked ideology having been written about for many centuries prior, even back to the ancient world were true.

Eastman, for example, realised that he was seeking to liberate people by taking from them the three things people love most in life: their families, their religion and their property. Instead of creating a new heaven on earth, they had become apologists for a killing machine.

Stunned and embarrassed, they moved on with life.

But the history didnt end there. There were still more recruits being added to the ranks, generations of them. The same thing happened after 1989. Some people lost the faith, others decided that socialism needs yet another chance to strut its stuff.

Its still going on today.

As for the Communist Party in America, most left-Progressives of the Antifa school regard the Party as an embarrassing sellout, wholly owned by the capitalist elite. And when we see their spokesmen appear on television every four years, they sound not unlike pundits we see on TV every night.

It would be nice if any article written about Communism were purely retrospective. That, sadly, is not the case. There seem to be new brands of Marxian thought codified every few years, and still more versions of its Hegelian roots that take on ever more complex ideological iterations (the alt-right is an example).

Why do people become Communists? Because human beings are capable of believing in all sorts of illusions, and we are capable of working long and hard to turn them into nightmares. Once weve invested the time and energy into something, however destructive, it can take a very long time to wake us up. Its hard to think of a grander example of the sunk-cost fallacy.

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Why Do People Become Communists, And Why Do They Stick With It? - Swarajya

FrontPage Magazine

The Left's Continuing Homage to Communism FrontPage Magazine Why is fascism or right-wing an epithet, but communist or left-wing isn't? Why do the media, even those considered conservative, use a phrase like extreme right or hard right, but seldom use extreme left or hard left? Why is Le Pen's ...

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The Left's Continuing Homage to Communism - FrontPage Magazine

The New York City Department of Education is investigating a taxpayer-funded secondary school principal in Brooklyn for allegedly promoting communism and recruiting students for radical political causes.

The principal, Jill Bloomberg of Park Slope Collegiate, has responded by filing a federal lawsuit seeking to stop the investigation, reports New York public radio station WNYC.

The New York City education department initiated its investigation into Bloombergs alleged communist and communist-recruitment activities based on a tip from someone who remains anonymous.

The tipster told officials that Bloomberg is affiliated with the Progressive Labor Party, a revolutionary communist political party based in Brooklyn.

Court documents filed by the education department say that the investigation is focused on allegations that Bloomberg has worked to promote the agenda of the Progressive Labor Party by recruiting students to participate in organizational activities, including marches for her political organization.

According to the Progressive Labor Partys website, the groupseeks to foment violent revolution. Only the dictatorship of the working class communism can provide a lasting solution to the disaster that is todays world for billions of people. This cannot be done through electoral politics, but requires a revolutionary movement and a mass Red Army led by PLP.

Also: Communism means the Party leads every aspect of society. For this to work, millions of workers eventually everyone must become communist organizers. Join Us! (RELATED: These Mugshots Of Commie Trump Protesters Will Make Your Day)

The Progressive Labor Party fights to destroy capitalism and the dictatorship of the capitalist class by organizing workers, soldiers and youth into a revolutionary movement for communism.

Court documents filed by New York Citys education department allege that students who disagree with Bloomberg and her comrades are not allowed to express their political views.

In addition, the school district says, Bloomberg and her husband used footage of Park Slope Collegiate students and staff in documentary for a Progressive Labor Party-affiliated group without authorization from the students or staff members.

The policies of New York Citys school district prohibit the use of school facilities, equipment and supplies on behalf of political organizations, according to the education departments court filing.

Bloombergs lawsuit concerning the investigation filed Friday contends that the investigation into her alleged communist activities is retaliation because she opposes racism and has criticized the New York City Board of Education for, she says, practices that amount to segregation.

Earlier this year, Bloomberg charged the education department with discrimination because, she said, a school with many white students received more sports equipment than Park Slope Collegiate did. The students at Park Slope Collegiate are primarily black and Latino.

Supporters of Bloomberg packed a Lower Manhattan courtroom for a hearing related to Bloombergs lawsuit. Many of them all wore the same t-shirts.

After the hearing, Bloomberg and her supporters spoke.

What speech is prohibited? Bloomberg asked, according to Chalkbeat, an education news outlet.

The speech I am most known for is anti-racism, the principal also said.

Bloombergs supporters recited her message in remarkably similar fashion.

A Park Slope Collegiate eighth grader named Maya showed up at the court proceedings to declare that Bloomberg only wants to fight against racism.

Its just upsetting that shes being accused of stating her own political views when shes just stating the facts that racism is here, Maya informed Chalkbeat.

A special education teacher, Sarah Vega, swore that Bloomberg never tries to indoctrinate students with revolutionary communist propaganda.

Ive worked for her for over a decade, Vega told Chalkbeat. Ive never seen her furthering any political agenda whatsoever. She fights against racism, but I dont really consider that partisan politics.

Bloomberg has indicated that she does not belong to the Progressive Labor Party.

This week, a federal judge is expected to decide whether to allow the investigation by school officials to proceed.

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Brooklyn Principal Investigated For Promoting Communism | The ... - The Daily Caller