Mediaboss Marketing

Republican lawmakers introduced additions to a Cold War-era statute that bans educators from advocating for communism in schools to the House committee on Thursday. The statute dates back to 1949.Rep. Alicia Lekas, R-Hudson was looking to add Marxism and socialism to the ban, as well as any idea that the United States was founded on racism.Lekas said the intent of House Bill 1255 is to ensure teachers are educating and not indoctrinating."When I only accept an answer that says that my political beliefs are right and your beliefs are wrong, thats indoctrination, Lekas said.The intention here is to make certain that in our schools our teachers are doing what has happened for a long time teaching how to think not what to think, said Rep. Erica Layon, R-Derry.People opposed to the bill say teachers will be silenced and scared to cover certain topics in the classroom for fear of punishment."Critical thinking isnt being allowed because theyre afraid theyre going to be reported for something, National Education Association New Hampshire President Megan Tuttle said."The idea that I show up to work every day for low wages in unsafe conditions and Im not loyal I would love to know what your definition of loyalty is if its not that, history teacher Jennifer Given said. The sponsor of the bill said she did not have time to properly draft the bill and she is currently working on an amendment.

Republican lawmakers introduced additions to a Cold War-era statute that bans educators from advocating for communism in schools to the House committee on Thursday.

The statute dates back to 1949.

Rep. Alicia Lekas, R-Hudson was looking to add Marxism and socialism to the ban, as well as any idea that the United States was founded on racism.

Lekas said the intent of House Bill 1255 is to ensure teachers are educating and not indoctrinating.

"When I only accept an answer that says that my political beliefs are right and your beliefs are wrong, thats indoctrination, Lekas said.

The intention here is to make certain that in our schools our teachers are doing what has happened for a long time teaching how to think not what to think, said Rep. Erica Layon, R-Derry.

People opposed to the bill say teachers will be silenced and scared to cover certain topics in the classroom for fear of punishment.

"Critical thinking isnt being allowed because theyre afraid theyre going to be reported for something, National Education Association New Hampshire President Megan Tuttle said.

"The idea that I show up to work every day for low wages in unsafe conditions and Im not loyal I would love to know what your definition of loyalty is if its not that, history teacher Jennifer Given said.

The sponsor of the bill said she did not have time to properly draft the bill and she is currently working on an amendment.

Go here to see the original:
NH teachers react to proposed bill adding to Cold War-era 'Teachers' Loyalty' law - WMUR Manchester

Contemporary explanations of wokeness are always insufficient. Public intellectuals either pretend there has been no major revolution in values, or offer silly debates about whether wokeness is really neo-Hegelian anarchism, or neo-Freudian Romanticism, or double-backflip Puritanism with a dash of neo-neo Kantianism. The work of an obscure Italian philosopher who died in 1989 is perhaps an unlikely place to find clarity. But Augusto Del Noce provides an explanation at once straightforward and original: Marxism changed the trajectory of the West.

Del Noces work seems particularly current in the Anglosphere, perhaps, because it has only recently become available in English. Carlo Lancelotti, a New York-based math professor, first translated Del Noces The Crisis of Modernity in 2014; this month, his translation of The Problem with Atheism was published. The latter was written first between 1917 and 1945 and produced the thesis about Marxism that allowed Del Noce to see the future.

Del Noces take on Marxism was strange. It was, he believed, a stillborn ideology, dead upon arrival, yet its rotting carcass sprouted every 20th Century political movement. There is already at the onset of Marxism an insuperable contradiction, he wrote. Marxs view of history, according to Del Noce, was a consequence of his commitment to atheism, which can never be proved directly, and must therefore present itself as the outcome of an irreversible historical process mans liberation, via science and technology, from primitive superstition. Marx argued that the idea of God was a symptom of mans alienation through oppression; as society removed forms of oppression, the question of God would disappear. Societys values, Marx believed, were just expressions of its economic arrangements and that the development of these arrangements was leading to an inevitable destination: the march of history would culminate in Communism, which would be free of both oppression and the idea of God.

Since, in the Marxist framework, removing oppression is the primary way of bringing about the future, philosophy is subordinated to politics. As Marx wrote, Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it. In Marxism, reason is not something universally accessible to all; it is the tool that certain radically free people use to impose their will on existence. This creates a contradiction: how can anyone change the world if history is inevitably going to culminate in communism? And if all philosophy is just a reflection of economic arrangements, is the same not true of Marxism?

This contradiction bifurcated Marxism along two different paths. The first path embraced the revolutionary philosopher, while the other one embraced history. The first path led to Lenin, the revolution, and the Soviet Union. The second path led to us. Del Noce wrote, Marxism has ended up being a stage in the development of the technological and affluent society, which accepts all [of Marxisms] negations of traditional thought but at the same time eliminates its messianic and (in its own way) religious aspect. Marxs vision was achieved by his ostensible enemy.

Long before it became obvious, Del Noce wrote that the alliance between the technocratic right and the cultural left is there for everyone to see. He argued that liberalism sublimated, or absorbed, various aspects of Marxism, transforming into what he called the technological society. Bourgeois society always had two historical enemies: revolutionary thought and religious thought. As a synthesis of these opposites, Marxism provided bourgeois society with the tool needed to defeat both. Our society largely embraces Marxs historical vision: advancing technologies are viewed as de facto proof that the question of God, and all transcendent values, are irrelevant. Yet this vision of history is also turned onto Marxism itself. Communism was tried and it was a failed experiment. The technological society does not have to enlist any religious or moral claims to reject Communism. It simply dismisses Communism as inefficient.

The Leninist path of Marxism also stumbles through our society in a misshapen form. Del Noce argued that Leninism unleashed a type of post-Christian gnosticism which was an early Christian heresy that believed the world was evil and could only be saved by those with access to secret or esoteric knowledge. Lenin believed that the revolution wouldnt just happen spontaneously it had to be brought about by raising the consciousness of the proletariat. This required professional revolutionaries. Drawn from the people tasked with the job of modernising the Russian economy, these revolutionaries were an elect class that understands how the world really works. The British writer H.G. Wells understood the implications of this better than Lenin himself: in his 1928 book The Open Conspiracy, inspired by his trips to the Soviet Union, Wells called for the West to embrace rule by its own elect class of experts.

Everyone understands that a person is not wise by virtue of being an accountant, or a therapist, or an immunologist; we all understand that a person can have limited domain expertise, and be a complete fool outside of that area. Moreover, domain expertise is not the same as executive function: the act of governing a society is the act of choosing between competing goods, and this requires virtues like wisdom and prudence. And yet society has become enthralled by the expert, the idea of which works in the exact opposite way, suggesting that a person is equipped to make prudential choices between competing goods simply by virtue of possessing technical knowledge in some limited domain. Eventually this denigrates into absurdities, like the disinformation expert who is basically a truth expert.

Del Noce paints a landscape of a society that rejects all traditional values in the name of a supposedly neutral rationality, has a caste of revolutionary-cum-technocratic experts who function like gnostic priests, and engages in near-constant, system-approved revolution. This revolution was separate from Marxism, and was encapsulated in a sentence written by Friedrich Engels: the thesis that reality is rational leads, according to Hegelian dialectics, to this other one: everything that exists deserves to die. Del Noce wrote that the revolutionary is the executioner of a death sentence that history has pronounced. But since the radically bourgeois society rejects all transcendent values, its revolutionaries offer only negation. The global rebellion becomes an absurd revolt against what exists or what once existed. It becomes either a silly attempt to escape reality or a tool of the system it is revolting against. It should be obvious how this explains the woke, but it also shows how the anti-woke offer a mirror image.

There are many, like James Lindsay and John McWhorter, who champion Enlightenment values in the face of the woke. They praise things like reason, rationality, and positivism in the face of a new religious fervor. The miracle of rationality fought off the forces of religious superstition, we are told, and we must be vigilant not to slide back into the shadows of irrationality. Del Noce might call this the Enlightenment after Marxism. It is a mythic narrative that its proponents fail to see as myth.

Carl Schmitt once wrote that American financiers and Russian Bolsheviks were engaged in a common struggle. That synthesis is now complete. Del Noce helps us see how this synthesis is at the root of todays most pressing issues, and how those who want to fight the woke cannot retreat into the static categories of the 20th century. Decomposed Marxism limits our ability to see a new horizon, and the future seems impossibly hopeless because so few are willing to reassess past mistakes.

Read more here:
How Marxism created the West - UnHerd

Communism is a form of government most frequently associated with the ideas of Karl Marx, a German philosopher who outlined his ideas for a utopian society in The Communist Manifesto, written in 1848. Marx believed that capitalism, with its emphasis on profit and private ownership, led to inequality among citizens. Thus, his goal was to encourage a system that promoted a classless society in which everyone shared the benefits of labor and the state government controlled all property and wealth. No one would strive to rise above others, and people would no longer be motivated by greed. Then, communism would close the gap between rich and poor, end the exploitation of workers, and free the poor from oppression.

The basic ideas of communism did not originate with Marx, however. Plato and Aristotle discussed them in ancient times, but Marx developed them into a popular doctrine, which was later propelled into practice. Marxs ideal society ensured economic equality and fairness. Marx believed that private ownership of property promoted greed, and he blamed capitalism for societys problems. The problems, he claimed, stemmed from the IndustrialRevolution. The rise of factories, the reliance on machines, and the capability of mass production created conditions that promoted oppression and encouraged the development of a proletariat, or a working class.

Simply put, in a capitalist system, the factories fueled the economy, and a wealthy few owned the factories. This created the need for a large number of people to work for the factory owners. In this environment, the wealthy few exploited the laborers, who had to labor in order to live. So, Marx outlined his plan to liberate the proletariat, or to free them of the burden of labor. His idea of utopia was a land where people labored as they were able, and everyone shared the wealth.

If the government controlled the economy and the people relinquished their property to the state, no single group of people could rise above another. Marx described this ideal in his Manifesto, but the practice of communism fell far short of the ideal. For a large part of the 20th century, about one-third of the world lived in communist countriescountries ruled by dictatorial leaders who controlled the lives of everyone else. The communist leaders set the wages, they set the prices, and they distributed the wealth. Western capitalist nations fought hard against communism, and eventually, most communist countries collapsed. Marxs utopia was never achieved, as it required revolution on a global scale, which never came to pass. However, as of 2020, five proclaimed communist countries continue to exist: North Korea, Vietnam, China, Cuba, and Laos.

See the article here:
Communism | National Geographic Society

The dismissal of Trotsky is the climax of a long struggle in the Russian Communist party the ruling and indeed the only open party in Russia. The old guard of the Bolshevik leaders whom Trotsky has assailed on points of policy has won, iron discipline has been enforced and the heretic, important as he is, cast out.

The story goes back some time. Trotsky has never been one of the straitest sect of Bolsheviks. In the days of violent theoretical discussion about tactics between 1905 and the first revolution of 1917 he was often opposed to the formulae of Lenin and Bolsheviks, and he only joined them in 1917 after he had made an abortive effort to bring about a working arrangement between them and the other Marxian sect of the Mensheviks.

His part in the October revolution, as chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, his achievements as War Minister, his brilliant oratory and inexhaustible energy gave him a position in the party second only to that of Lenin. But during the first years of the Soviet Government he was frequently in a minority, notably on the rejection of his plan for Sovietising of the trade unions and fusing them with the State and his plans for the militarisation of labour. He was an early supporter of the New Economic Policy, which marked the end of Communism and the transition to freer trading, and if he had had his way he would have extended it farther and given more authority to bourgeois specialists.

Beginning of the disputeThe present storm broke out first in the autumn of 1923. An economic crisis was threatened, and Trotsky and some of his colleagues put before the Central Committee of the Communist party a programme of party policy. It sought to discredit the autocratic bureaucracy which controlled the party and to give scope for the toleration within it of groups of varying opinion. It sought also to bring in young members and to make the young students the barometer by which the party should be guided.

On the economic side the party was criticised for not going far enough towards meeting foreign capitalism. The discussions on the programme went on with great vigour. Trotsky, in a famous open letter, warned the Party of the danger of losing the revolutionary spirit through the ossification of the old guard leaders. The only way of meeting this danger, he said, is to make a serious, thorough, and radical change in the direction of democratisation of the party, and to bring into the party an influx of factory workers and youth.

The old guard deemed Trotsky and his friends as working against all the canons of Bolshevism, with seeking to break up the orthodox idea of the party as a monolithic whole, and with that greatest of all sins a petty bourgeois deviation in policy. The Oppositionists, as they were called, met with a smashing blow. Most of them were scattered or recanted. Even Trotsky himself seems to have submitted to the party.

This is an edited version

Read the original here:
Leon Trotsky dismissed from the Russian Communist party archive, 1925 - The Guardian

Country

United States of AmericaUS Virgin IslandsUnited States Minor Outlying IslandsCanadaMexico, United Mexican StatesBahamas, Commonwealth of theCuba, Republic ofDominican RepublicHaiti, Republic ofJamaicaAfghanistanAlbania, People's Socialist Republic ofAlgeria, People's Democratic Republic ofAmerican SamoaAndorra, Principality ofAngola, Republic ofAnguillaAntarctica (the territory South of 60 deg S)Antigua and BarbudaArgentina, Argentine RepublicArmeniaArubaAustralia, Commonwealth ofAustria, Republic ofAzerbaijan, Republic ofBahrain, Kingdom ofBangladesh, People's Republic ofBarbadosBelarusBelgium, Kingdom ofBelizeBenin, People's Republic ofBermudaBhutan, Kingdom ofBolivia, Republic ofBosnia and HerzegovinaBotswana, Republic ofBouvet Island (Bouvetoya)Brazil, Federative Republic ofBritish Indian Ocean Territory (Chagos Archipelago)British Virgin IslandsBrunei DarussalamBulgaria, People's Republic ofBurkina FasoBurundi, Republic ofCambodia, Kingdom ofCameroon, United Republic ofCape Verde, Republic ofCayman IslandsCentral African RepublicChad, Republic ofChile, Republic ofChina, People's Republic ofChristmas IslandCocos (Keeling) IslandsColombia, Republic ofComoros, Union of theCongo, Democratic Republic ofCongo, People's Republic ofCook IslandsCosta Rica, Republic ofCote D'Ivoire, Ivory Coast, Republic of theCyprus, Republic ofCzech RepublicDenmark, Kingdom ofDjibouti, Republic ofDominica, Commonwealth ofEcuador, Republic ofEgypt, Arab Republic ofEl Salvador, Republic ofEquatorial Guinea, Republic ofEritreaEstoniaEthiopiaFaeroe IslandsFalkland Islands (Malvinas)Fiji, Republic of the Fiji IslandsFinland, Republic ofFrance, French RepublicFrench GuianaFrench PolynesiaFrench Southern TerritoriesGabon, Gabonese RepublicGambia, Republic of theGeorgiaGermanyGhana, Republic ofGibraltarGreece, Hellenic RepublicGreenlandGrenadaGuadaloupeGuamGuatemala, Republic ofGuinea, RevolutionaryPeople's Rep'c ofGuinea-Bissau, Republic ofGuyana, Republic ofHeard and McDonald IslandsHoly See (Vatican City State)Honduras, Republic ofHong Kong, Special Administrative Region of ChinaHrvatska (Croatia)Hungary, Hungarian People's RepublicIceland, Republic ofIndia, Republic ofIndonesia, Republic ofIran, Islamic Republic ofIraq, Republic ofIrelandIsrael, State ofItaly, Italian RepublicJapanJordan, Hashemite Kingdom ofKazakhstan, Republic ofKenya, Republic ofKiribati, Republic ofKorea, Democratic People's Republic ofKorea, Republic ofKuwait, State ofKyrgyz RepublicLao People's Democratic RepublicLatviaLebanon, Lebanese RepublicLesotho, Kingdom ofLiberia, Republic ofLibyan Arab JamahiriyaLiechtenstein, Principality ofLithuaniaLuxembourg, Grand Duchy ofMacao, Special Administrative Region of ChinaMacedonia, the former Yugoslav Republic ofMadagascar, Republic ofMalawi, Republic ofMalaysiaMaldives, Republic ofMali, Republic ofMalta, Republic ofMarshall IslandsMartiniqueMauritania, Islamic Republic ofMauritiusMayotteMicronesia, Federated States ofMoldova, Republic ofMonaco, Principality ofMongolia, Mongolian People's RepublicMontserratMorocco, Kingdom ofMozambique, People's Republic ofMyanmarNamibiaNauru, Republic ofNepal, Kingdom ofNetherlands AntillesNetherlands, Kingdom of theNew CaledoniaNew ZealandNicaragua, Republic ofNiger, Republic of theNigeria, Federal Republic ofNiue, Republic ofNorfolk IslandNorthern Mariana IslandsNorway, Kingdom ofOman, Sultanate ofPakistan, Islamic Republic ofPalauPalestinian Territory, OccupiedPanama, Republic ofPapua New GuineaParaguay, Republic ofPeru, Republic ofPhilippines, Republic of thePitcairn IslandPoland, Polish People's RepublicPortugal, Portuguese RepublicPuerto RicoQatar, State ofReunionRomania, Socialist Republic ofRussian FederationRwanda, Rwandese RepublicSamoa, Independent State ofSan Marino, Republic ofSao Tome and Principe, Democratic Republic ofSaudi Arabia, Kingdom ofSenegal, Republic ofSerbia and MontenegroSeychelles, Republic ofSierra Leone, Republic ofSingapore, Republic ofSlovakia (Slovak Republic)SloveniaSolomon IslandsSomalia, Somali RepublicSouth Africa, Republic ofSouth Georgia and the South Sandwich IslandsSpain, Spanish StateSri Lanka, Democratic Socialist Republic ofSt. HelenaSt. Kitts and NevisSt. LuciaSt. Pierre and MiquelonSt. Vincent and the GrenadinesSudan, Democratic Republic of theSuriname, Republic ofSvalbard & Jan Mayen IslandsSwaziland, Kingdom ofSweden, Kingdom ofSwitzerland, Swiss ConfederationSyrian Arab RepublicTaiwan, Province of ChinaTajikistanTanzania, United Republic ofThailand, Kingdom ofTimor-Leste, Democratic Republic ofTogo, Togolese RepublicTokelau (Tokelau Islands)Tonga, Kingdom ofTrinidad and Tobago, Republic ofTunisia, Republic ofTurkey, Republic ofTurkmenistanTurks and Caicos IslandsTuvaluUganda, Republic ofUkraineUnited Arab EmiratesUnited Kingdom of Great Britain & N. IrelandUruguay, Eastern Republic ofUzbekistanVanuatuVenezuela, Bolivarian Republic ofViet Nam, Socialist Republic ofWallis and Futuna IslandsWestern SaharaYemenZambia, Republic ofZimbabwe

View post:
Letter to the editor: Biden policy hinders those escaping communism - Huntington Herald Dispatch