http://tebrewton.redstate.org/story/200 ... /34218/976

Radicalizing Students: Liberals Poison the Well
By: tebrewton · Section: Diaries


By Thomas E. Brewton
Liberalism in our schools is like the AIDS virus. Having been taught no understanding of the founding principles of our nation, students have no immunity to the falsehoods of secular materialism. To stretch the metaphor further, liberalism is like arsenic: small doses of it aren't lethal, but keep ingesting it long enough and you die.
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This article is scheduled for publication in the forthcoming edition of the Republican Voices newsletter.
http://www.republicanvoices.org/

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Most people, even some Democrats, find it hard to understand liberals' eagerness to destroy President Bush, even at the cost of our servicemen's lives, by emboldening Islamic terrorists to redouble their suicide attacks. One might assume that today's liberals don't know what happened in the Vietnam War thirty years ago. Maybe liberals don't know that the enemy forces told us after the conflict's end that they could never have defeated us militarily, but had to do it by sapping the will of the American people on the home front to continue fighting.

Sadly, that is not the case. American educators know exactly what they are doing and openly declare their hatred for the United States. They are intent upon warping the minds of their students just as Soviet educators did after the 1917 Revolution:

"We must hate -- hatred is the basis of Communism. Children must be taught to hate their parents if they are not Communists."
V. I. Lenin -- speech to the Commissars of Education, Moscow, 1923.

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Following the 9/11/01 terrorist destruction of the World Trade Towers and part of the Pentagon, with the loss of approximately 3,000 civilian lives, a Rutgers University professor told her students that "We should be aware that, whatever its proximate cause, its ultimate cause is the fascism of U.S. foreign policy over the past many decades."

In March 2003, an estimated 3,000 students and faculty members at Columbia University held a rally to protest America's impending military action in Iraq. Professor Nicholas De Genova told the Columbia rally, "The only true heroes are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military. I personally would like to see a million Mogadishus." (Mogadishu was the location in Somalia where in 1993 Al Queda terrorists killed American soldiers and dragged their bodies through the streets to entertain the townspeople).

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The truly devastating threat to survival of Constitutional government, indeed of civilization itself, is liberal control of education. As Thomas Jefferson and many others in the founding era noted, preservation of political liberties depends upon an educated public that understands the nature and source of its freedoms. Liberal-controlled, multi-cultural, and secular education deliberately obscures that understanding.

In today's cut-and-run clamor from the liberal mobs and socialist media we see the poisonous effects of public ignorance about foreign policy, geography, economics, and political history. Too many people have no comprehension of the enormous potential costs of abandoning our front line military pressure on Al Queda. Because of our abysmal educational system, hardly anyone is aware of the trade-offs that must be taken into account in determining our Middle Eastern policies.

The average American voter looks at the war on terror as if it were just another cable channel. People are bored and want to switch to the channel playing "Sex and the City."
It's a cliche, but nonetheless a fact, that young people are the future. If our children all become converts to the secular religion of socialism, if they are all radicalized to believe that the Constitution and its principles are crimes against humanity, the United States is doomed. This is precisely the goal of the liberal jihad.

Liberals' sympathies lie with the third-world peoples who, they believe, are deliberately oppressed by an imperialistic United States. Just as the religion of secular socialism teaches that people everywhere would live in tranquility and abundance if societies were no longer structured to protect private property rights, secular socialism teaches that capitalist nations' survival and prosperity require imperialistic exploitation. When American teachers start with such presumptions, then every current event can be seen by them as "proof" of American evil.

Today's massive waves of immigration make this a particularly dangerous potentiality. Millions of immigrants, legal and illegal, are coming into our nation, many from cultures with no established systems of constitutional government based on the rule of law. Some immigrants come from cultures in which the only obligations of honesty and good faith are within the family or the clan. In the cultures from which some immigrants come, there is no tradition of mutual respect for liberties and no tradition of civic duty to society as a whole. Liberals support this massive influx, because they have been able to convert such immigrants into voters for liberal, welfare-state candidates.

Many immigrants make major contributions to our nation with industrious work habits and often with highly developed skills and technical knowledge. But they deserve, and the nation must have, ways to teach them the fundamentals of our historical traditions of personal morality and responsibility. Immigrants' children will not get any of this in our educational madrasas controlled by liberal mullahs. Instead they will be radicalized with anti-American socialism. They will be told that the only "value" is called "tolerance," which means the absence of any standards to judge conduct. They will be taught the socialistic dogma of welfare-state social justice.

Education has ceased to be about teaching academic subjects, particularly those involving American history and constitutional government. Indeed, since the 1960s, every generation of students, for the first time in American history, has been less well educated than the generation that came before it. American public education has become a system designed to encourage ethnic, religious, and racial separatism under the banner of multi-culturalism. The net effect is a public education system that deliberately prevents immigrants from being assimilated into American society.

This stands in sharp contrast to an earlier era. From the 1880s until our 1917 entry into World War I, roughly twenty-million immigrants, mostly from non-English-speaking countries, flooded into this country. Yet the public and parochial education systems in those days managed rather well to Americanize them.

Astonishingly, even a few members of the Democratic Party, the home of liberal-socialism, have become concerned. In September 2003, a report called Education for Democracy was released by the nonpartisan Albert Shanker Institute. The late Mr. Shanker was a prominent liberal and founder-president of New York City's United Federation of Teachers, a perennial stronghold of liberal-socialism. The report concludes that American schools offer history and civics instruction that overemphasizes America's shortcomings and fails to emphasize America's good aspects, especially by failing to compare our society to those of repressive nations. Students instead are radicalized by a picture of American history made up entirely of Vietnam, Watergate, rotten campaign financing, and what is described as American imperialism. The impression is given to students that the United States could easily eliminate world poverty by sharing its unfair portion of the world's wealth, but fails to do so owing to the greed of "the rich."

A Washington Times September 10, 2003, article about this report notes that the hostility and cynicism generated by anti-American education contributes to apathy and to diminishing citizen-participation: "Over the past 30 years," reporter Ben Feller observed, "the percentage of people under 25 who vote has dropped 15 percentage points, the report says. It cites other signs of apathy and disengagement, such as when children touring Washington said they knew Memorial Day as `the day the pools open'."
Clearly public policies should be subject to legitimate criticism, but there should be some balance, with both sides of the argument fairly presented. There is a lack of such balance today, especially at the college level, because such a significant number of teachers are the former student anarchists who in the 1960s and 1970s engaged in or supported terrorist bombings, murders, and riots aimed at destroying "the establishment."

The appeal of anti-American and pro-socialist teaching is enhanced by the normal rebelliousness of teen-agers and young adults who are eager to assert independence from their parents. Liberalism's radical paradigm captures the romantic imagination and rebellious spirit of these youthful students who are by nature inexperienced and ignorant of the past. Radicalized students feel self-important when they participate in teach-ins, sit-ins, strikes, and demonstrations, particularly so when they interfere with the lawful rights and property of other people. Protesting the very system of industry and commerce that raised the world's living standards and enabled them to be in college classes, they storm into the streets, with great élan to burn automobiles, smash store-front windows, assault policemen, destroy campus computer records centers, and dismantle administrative offices, while waving placards with slogans they couldn't explain if they had to do so. They are following the path of their Baby Boomer parents and teachers whose militant anti-Constitutional chant in the Vietnam War era was, "Death to Amerika! Bring home the war; kill your parents and ice the pigs!"

Hitler knew what he was doing when he organized the Hitler Youth. Get `em when they are young, brain-wash `em, and they remain warped for life. Make no mistake about it. If the liberals' relentless jihad against American history and traditions continues, the United States will become, like France and Germany, a third-rate, has-been, socialist nation. With liberal jihadists in charge of education, there soon will no longer be a United States.