[LFC Comments: From LewRockwell.com, we have this great article that shows how average citizens have paid for the destruction of their own country. Be prepared to ingest another big red pill. This one will be “hard to swallow”.]

Your Marxist Revolutionary Sons and Daughters

By Thomas DiLorenzo

October 16, 2020

The violent riots, looting, arson, and even public execution of Trump supporters over the past six months has been primarily the work of the self-described communist revolutionaries associated with “Antifa” and Black Lives Matter (BLM).  Mug shots of some of the Antifa/BLM criminals that have appeared in the news and online show that some of them are seriously mentally deranged; some are hardened criminals with long criminal records; there seems to be a preponderance of convicted sex offenders and pedophiles among them; and what seems to be hundreds of pyromaniacs.  They are always accompanied by mobs of rather ordinary, run-of-the-mill, urban underclass looters, the products of the state’s life-destroying and crime-infested inner-city government schools, its family- and work-incentive-destroying welfare state, and its war on drugs.

Then there is the large army of useful idiots – the thousands of mostly white college-age or slightly-older kids.  They don’t seem to dominate the criminal mug shots published by urban police departments, but they appear to have comprised at least half of many of the mob scenes broadcast on American television over the past several months.  I lost count how many times I watched the boob tube as a chubby white girl dressed like a masked homeless person screamed in the faces of black police officers about “white supremacy” and racism, as though these mostly middle-aged black men were unaware of racial discrimination.  Then there’s that Ivy League co-ed whose parents own several multi-million dollar homes who was arrested for setting fire to police cars during one of the riots in New York City.  One suspects that she was not the only one who fit that description.

The criminals and the underclass looters are in it (rioting) for fun and profit, but the white college kids are there because they think they are being good Marxist revolutionaries by associating themselves with BLM, whose founders have proudly proclaimed that “we are trained Marxists” (and who also advocate the abolition of the family, as did Karl Marx himself).   How on earth, one may ask, have so many college students and graduates been convinced that totalitarian communism, of all things, is what they want for their future?

I am not speaking of all college students and recent graduates, of course, but a very large and vocal segment of that population – the so-called social justice snowflakes.  The answer to this question is obvious:  They have been thoroughly indoctrinated by the socialist indoctrination academies known as “American colleges and universities,” and also by their middle-school and high school teachers who themselves were indoctrinated there first.  They have been indoctrinated in textbook Marxism, in techniques and ideologies that were pioneered by Marx, Engels, Lenin and others, and carried forward first by the “60s Marxist radicals” and then by the radicals’ students who now dominate nearly every university.

Socialism Means Destructionism

Ludwig von Mises wrote in his 1922 classic, Socialism, that “the socialist idea is nothing but a grandiose rationalization of petty resentments” and “destruction is the essence of it,” the “spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created.”  Private property, free enterprise, the rule of law, the civil society, constitutionalism, religion, the family, tradition, history, are all today routinely denounced and destroyed by the useful idiots rioting in American streets.  What else would one call the riots, looting, arson and mayhem in certain American cities but Marxist destructionism?

Everything Mises said about the “revolutionary Marxists” of the early twentieth century applies to the American Left today.  “Instead of refuting” his critics, Mises said of Marx and Marxists, “his disciples have faithfully imitated the master’s example, reviling their opponents but never attempting to refute them by argument.”  This is one Marxist creed that today’s college students are very well schooled in indeed.  It is now almost routine that if a student group invites a conservative or libertarian speaker to campus he will be met with a loud mob shouting insults at him, prohibiting him from speaking, and, in the case of the University of California at Berkeley, home of “the free speech movement,” setting campus buildings on fire.  Consequently, very few dissenting voices are ever invited to campus in the first place.  Only the “oppressed” classes deserve the right of free speech, today’s college students are taught from the writings of twentieth-century Marxist academic crank, Herbert Marcuse.  Everyone else is to be smeared, libeled, and slandered as a “racist, “sexist,” “fascist,” etc., etc.  The “oppressed” classes are defined by today’s academic Marxists as everyone except  white heterosexual males who are not outspoken Leftists.  All white people are assumed to be inherent racists according to today’s Left, but being an outspoken campus commie earns one a get-out-of-jail card.

The “socialist parties” of Mises’ time perfected “the technique of agitation, the cadging for votes and for souls, the stirring up of electoral excitement, the street demonstrations, and terrorism.”  There is nothing new under the sun when it comes to being a Marxist revolutionary, in other words.  The purpose of “revolutionary socialism,” wrote Mises, “is primarily concerned to clear the ground for building up a new civilization by liquidating the older one.”  Of course, the whole history of Marxist revolutions is that the older civilization, which may have evolved over centuries, is in fact destroyed and then replaced with nothing but totalitarian thuggery, corruption, violence, and mass killing.  Today’s college students learn little or nothing about this – the real history of socialism – but are well schooled in utopian pipe dreams such as The Communist Manifesto.  I once used the Manifesto in a class called “Capitalism and its Critics” where I treated it as an historical artifact.  One student complained that it was the fourth time he was assigned to read it during his college career, but the first time it was not portrayed as a roadmap for the future.

Many Americans were not surprised when the revolutionary Marxist rioters, looters and arsonists (RMRLA) began toppling statues of Confederate soldiers and said nothing.  Many mocked President Trump when he predicted that the mob will move on to Thomas Jefferson and other founders. They were (and are) befuddled, however, when the same gang began destroying statues of Christopher Columbus, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, New England abolitionists, and just about every other kind of statue commemorating America’s past.  They have chopped off the heads of Virgin Mary statues at Catholic churches and spray painted vulgar graffiti on countless churches.  Once again, this is all textbook Marxism as taught to your sons and daughters in the institutions of “higher education.”  Tradition is merely “a tool of the bourgeoisie,” said Marx.  “In bourgeois society the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past.”  Marxists will have none of that business about learning from the mistakes of history for they – and only they – know all the answers.

Marx and Engels called for the “Abolition of Religion” in The Communist Manifesto along with a plea to “abolish the present state of things.”  “The forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions” was their goal.  “Communists everywhere support the revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things,” they said, something that was probably said many times over in American university classrooms in the past year.

“Ruthless criticism of all that exists” was also called for by Marx, who bloviated that “the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.”  Communism “abolishes eternal truths,” Marx boasted, and “acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.”  As F.A. Hayek wrote in The Road to Serfdom, in a totalitarian society truth is not determined by research, investigation, discussion, debate, and education but is handed down by the state in the form of statist platitudes.

Today this is called “critical theory” in the academic world and is quite prevalent.  When a business school professor (actually a lawyer hired to preach left-wing politics to business students) initiated a new course called “Critical Thinking” at my former university I asked her what academic discipline she would be drawing on – philosophy, logic, political philosophy, economics, etc.  Her answer was “Oh none of that; we will just criticize people like you.”

Talking with many of her students over the years I have learned that they were taught nothing about how to structure a criticism by using logic, facts, and theory.  Instead, they are taught to condemn, slander, libel, denounce, and smear anyone who voices disagreements with any of the standard leftist platitudes that all college students are bombarded with and have been since elementary school.  Ruthless criticism, in other words, just as Marx himself advocated.

“Communism begins where atheism begins,” wrote Marx and Engels, and “communism is incompatible with religious faith.”  Marx would be proud indeed of his contemporary American minions.  A June 1 Catholic News Agency article reported that “churches in 6 states were damaged by violent protests.”  Cathedrals were defaced and damaged and spray painted with “God is Dead” and “There is No God.”  In Europe, some 3,000 Christian churches and other buildings were vandalized, looted and defaced in 2019.

While American parents slept, university Leftists have turned millions of their children into uneducated, empty-headed, slogan-chanting useful idiots for the most despicable political tyrants and would-be dictators on the planet.  Way to go, American parents.

Dr. Thomas DiLorenzo [send him mail] is a senior fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. His latest book is The Problem with Lincoln.

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