[News] Congress Revives Cold War Tactics With New Anti-Communism Curriculum

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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Congress Revives Cold War Tactics With New Anti-Communism Curriculum
By Alan MacLeod, MintPress News.
December 14, 2024
------------------------------

Above photo: A girl tours an exhibition dedicated to the day of new
regions’ reunification with Russia at the Victory Museum on Poklonnaya Hill
in Moscow, Russia. Kirill Zykov | AP.

Congress has just passed a new bill that will see the U.S. spend huge sums
of money redesigning much of the public school system around the ideology
of anti-communism. The “Crucial Communism Teaching Act
<https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/5349>” is now
being read in the Senate, where it is all but certain to pass. The move
comes amid growing public anger at the economic system and increased public
support for socialism.

The Crucial Communism Teaching Act, in its own words, is designed to teach
children that “certain political ideologies, including communism and
totalitarianism…conflict with the principles of freedom and democracy that
are essential to the founding of the United States.”

Although sponsored by Republicans, it enjoys widespread support from
Democrats and is focused on China, Venezuela, Cuba and other targets of
U.S. empire. The wording of the bill has many worried that this will be a
centerpiece of a new era of anti-communist hysteria, similar to previous
McCarthyist periods.

The curriculum will be designed by the controversial
<https://thegrayzone.com/2017/11/22/black-book-of-communism-debunked-antisemitic-nazis/>
Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and will ensure all American high
school students “understand the dangers of communism and similar political
ideologies” and “learn that communism has led to the deaths of over
100,000,000 victims worldwide.” It will also develop a series titled
“Portraits in Patriotism,” that will expose students to individuals who are
“victims of the political ideologies” in question.
A Discredited Book

The 100 million figure originates with the notorious pseudoscience text,
“The Black Book of Communism.” A collection of political essays, the book’s
central claim is that 100 million people have perished as a result of the
communist ideology. However, even many of its contributors and co-writers
have distanced themselves from it, claiming
<https://www.dukeupress.edu/red-hangover> that the lead author was
“obsessed” with reaching the 100 million figure, to the point that he
simply conjured millions of deaths from nowhere.

Its methodology was also universally panned, with many pointing out that
the tens of millions of Soviet and Nazi losses during World War II were
attributed to communist ideology. This means that both Adolf Hitler himself
and many of his victims are counted towards the vastly overinflated figure.
The book was condemned by Holocaust remembrance groups as whitewashing and
even lionizing genocidal fascist groups as anti-communist heroes.

The principal organization promoting the 100 million figure today is the
Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which has shown a similar level
of both anti-communist devotion and methodological rigor. The group, set up
by the U.S. government in 1993, added all worldwide COVID-19 deaths to the
victims of communism list, arguing that the coronavirus was a communist
disease because it originated in China. It is these people who will be
designing the new curriculum that will be taught in social studies,
government, history, and economics classes across the country.
China Hawks

One of the central goals of the bill is also to “ensure that high school
students in the United States understand that 1,500,000,000 people still
suffer under communism.” This is a clear reference to China, a rapidly
developing country that, in just two generations, has gone from one of the
poorest on Earth to a global superpower, challenging and even surpassing
the United States on many quality-of-life indicators.

The bill goes on to detail how the school curriculum will “focus on ongoing
human rights abuses by such regimes, such as the treatment of Uyghurs in
the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region” by the Chinese “regime” and its
“aggression” towards “pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong,” and Taiwan, who
it labels “a democratic friend of the United States.”

Furthermore, many of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation’s “Witness
Project <https://victimsofcommunism.org/programs/witness-project/>” case
studies – likely the source for the “Portraits in Patriotism” series – are
from China. This includes Rushan Abbas, the founder and executive director
of the Campaign for Uyghurs, a pressure group funded
<http://us.china-embassy.gov.cn/eng/zgyw/202205/t20220507_10683090.htm> by CIA
front organization
<https://www.mintpressnews.com/documents-reveal-us-ned-spent-22m-promoting-anti-russia-narrative-ukraine/279734/>,
the National Endowment for Democracy. Abbas was also previously employed as
a translator at the notorious Guantánamo Bay torture camp.

The U.S. is currently engaged in a quickly-escalating Cold War against
China that includes channeling money and support to separatist movements,
including those in Xinjiang
<https://www.mintpressnews.com/china-uighur-genocide-behind-us-government-propaganda/276085/>,
Hong Kong
<https://www.mintpressnews.com/hong-kong-protest-united-states-destabilize-china/261712/>
and Taiwan
<https://www.mintpressnews.com/think-tanks-taiwan-cash-funding-push-war-china/276799/>,
as MintPress News has reported. In September, the House of Representatives
passed a bill <https://responsiblestatecraft.org/china-cold-war-2669160202/>
that authorized $1.6 billion to be spent on anti-Chinese messaging
worldwide.
Latin America: A Model And A Target

The other major target of the bill will likely be socialist or
communist-led governments in Latin America. The act’s sponsor is Maria
Elvira Salazar, a Republican Congressperson representing Miami. A part of
Florida’s famously conservative Cuban-American community, in 2023, she
introduced the FORCE Act
<https://floridianpress.com/2023/01/florida-republican-lawmaker-reintroduces-the-force-act/>,
which attempted to block any U.S. president from normalizing relations with
Cuba unless its government is overthrown. She has repeatedly condemned
<https://salazar.house.gov/media/press-releases/salazar-condemns-biden-administration-allowing-oil-companies-finance-maduro>
President Biden for easing the (illegal) U.S. sanctions on Venezuela. And
in July, she denounced
<https://salazar.house.gov/media/press-releases/chairwoman-salazar-denounces-socialist-curse-central-america-and-caribbean>what
she described as the “socialist curse in Central America and the
Caribbean,” singling out Cuban, Venezuela, Honduras, and Nicaragua as
countries requiring regime change.

She is, however, an avid supporter of the far-right President of Argentina,
Javier Milei, accepting his invitation to attend his inauguration.
Argentina, she said
<https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-nightly/2023/12/18/javier-mileis-friend-in-washington-00132357>,
“is going to set the course and point of reference for the rest of Latin
America as to the way that a country should be governed… Free market
economy, small government, individual liberties, freedom, private sector,
no corruption, that’s what we’re trying to do.”

Perhaps the only foreign country she praises more than Argentina is Israel,
whose actions she has supported at every step, even going so far as to
denounce
<https://salazar.house.gov/media/press-releases/salazar-joins-speaker-mike-johnson-republican-leadership-stand-israel-and>
what she called the “one-sided pressure for a ceasefire” in Gaza.

Salazar’s bill passed easily, 327-62, with limited opposition from
Democrats or Republicans, who voted for and against it in roughly equal
measures. Even many members of the Progressive Caucus voted in favor,
proving that anti-communism is as popular on the left as it is on the right.
A New McCarthyism?

The imminent passing of the Crucial Communism Teaching Act harkens back to
earlier anti-communist periods in American history, namely the Red Scare of
the 1910s and the McCarthyist era of the 1940s and 1950s. During those
times, organized labor movements were ruthlessly attacked, workers from all
professions, including professors, government officials, and teachers, were
fired en masse, and some of America’s brightest minds had their careers
derailed due to their political leanings. This included singer Paul
Robeson, actors like Charlie Chaplain and Marilyn Monroe, playwright Arthur
Miller and scientist Albert Einstein.

The point of these operations was to break any opposition to the power of
the state and big business and ensure the United States maintained its
capitalist course. Today, however, fewer Americans than ever are happy with
the current political and economic system. A recent Gallup study
<https://news.gallup.com/poll/1669/general-mood-country.aspx> found that
only 22% of the public are satisfied with how things are going, with a
majority responding that they are “very dissatisfied.” Living standards
have been stagnating or dropping for decades, and alternative economic
systems are becoming more desirable. A 2019 poll
<https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6145923-Axios-Tabs-1/> from Axios
found that 48% of adults under 35 prefer socialism to capitalism, including
57% of female respondents.

There are some signs that Washington is slowly moving towards a new
McCarthyist era. President Trump, for example, has promised
<https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/06/28/lpun-j28.html> to carry out
mass deportations of leftists once he becomes president, stating:

I will order my government to deny entry to all communists and all
Marxists. Those who come to join our country must love our country. We
don’t want them if they want to destroy our country… So we’re going to be
keeping foreign Christian-hating communists, socialists, and Marxists out
of America.”

“At the end of the day, either the communists destroy America, or we
destroy the communists,” he explained. But he also stated that American
citizens espousing anti-capitalist views would be purged. “My question is,
what are we going to do with the ones that are already here, that grew up
here? I think we have to pass a new law for them,” he said.

That Trump would actually deport millions of American citizens en masse
appears like too drastic a step right now, but it is clear that both
Democrats and Republicans are serious in their anti-communist convictions.
Therefore, the Crucial Communism Teaching Act will likely only be the start
of this campaign.

*Alan MacLeod <https://twitter.com/AlanRMacLeod>* is Senior Staff Writer
for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two
books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting
<https://www.routledge.com/Bad-News-from-Venezuela-Twenty-years-of-fake-news-and-misreporting/Macleod/p/book/9781138489233>
and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent
<https://www.routledge.com/Propaganda-in-the-Information-Age-Still-Manufacturing-Consent-1st-Edition/MacLeod/p/book/9781138366404?fbclid=IwAR2xQQWJd98C25wapG4ynmlEnGvL5wxG_mp5RwpBwtwPDxInjNZ1Oo7KD-E>,
as well as a
<https://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/65/56>
number
<https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0306396818823639#articleShareContainer>
of <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/blar.12940>academic
<https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2018.00064/full>articles
<https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0896920518820934>. He has
also contributed to FAIR.org <https://fair.org/author/alan-macleod/>, The
Guardian <https://www.theguardian.com/profile/alan-macleod>, Salon
<https://www.salon.com/writer/alan-macleod>, The Grayzone
<https://thegrayzone.com/author/alan-macleod/>, Jacobin Magazine
<https://jacobinmag.com/author/alan-macleod>, and Common Dreams
<https://www.commondreams.org/author/alan-macleod>.
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