For true evil, look not to Israel or America but to communism

Michael Barone writes for the Washington Examiner highlighting rising Marxism in American education and the Victims of Communism Museum’s role in exposing communist atrocities.

“For those dismayed at how many college and university students and faculty, even, or especially, at selective and prestigious institutions, have been cheering Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities and calling, in only slightly veiled language, for the destruction of Israel and genocide of Jews, the question is how this vicious line of thought gained hold in American secondary and higher education.

The answer seems to be that students have been infected, in high schools and colleges, with a virus that enables them to see history only as a struggle between oppressors and the oppressed, between vicious exploiters and virtuous victims.

This obviously owes something to Marxism, which teaches that an oppressed and exploited proletariat will inherit all power — or at least be the beneficiary of the intellectuals who grab it. But that version has had to be revised because contemporary working classes refused to play their assigned roles and mouth the lines that leftist intellectuals dictated to them.

Instead, the script has been adapted to attack other targets, with the vicious oppressors depicted as settlers coming into a new land and the virtuous oppressed depicted as previous residents and indigent peoples. This has the advantage of defining, if you twist the history a few times, the United States and Israel as villain regimes rather than as the historic leaders they have been and are in advancing religious tolerance, freedom of expression, rule of law, and electoral democracy.

One way to put this into perspective is to visit one of Washington’s newest and least known museums, the Victims of Communism Museum, on McPherson Square in Washington, a few blocks from the White House. There you will get an idea of what true oppression is like — and how it has slaughtered a hundred million people and blighted the lives of hundreds of millions of others.”

Read the full article from the Washington Examiner here.

Michael Barone is the senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, a resident fellow emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute, and the longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.