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So I asked him if he ever lived in a communist country, that it’s always the a-holes who never lived under communism who are most for communism, and of course he never answered me.

As an Army Brat who lived in South America and Asia while a child, I agree 100%. I loved Venezuela but it was such a powder-keg even before Hugo Chavez and now, after 22 years, it is unrecognizable except that the slums have become the default!

If I were a teacher today, I fear I'd be a slave to an imposed curriculum, but if not, I'd teach the benefits of communism by stating all class grades will be by the most disadvantaged student. Who that student is/was depended upon how the power-structure felt that day/week/month and NO there will be no identification either. Oh, and yes, extra ration points will be awarded for obedience and bribery!

A few years back I got to talk,at length,to a middle aged German guy. He was a physician and we talked,at length,about the fall of the Berlin Wall. He was young at the time but he remembered that East Germans were amazed by how readily available bananas were in West Germany.

If one wants to see the best laboratories in which to compare capitalism vs communism they can look at Germany and Korea.

>>>If I were a teacher today, I fear I’d be a slave to an imposed curriculum, but if not, I’d teach the benefits of communism by stating all class grades will be by the most disadvantaged student. <<<

I am a teacher, and for many years I taught senior English. We read Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” A great book, very accessible to a high school senior, and a good inoculation against leftist thinking.

We learned that communism sought to abolish private property. So I had everyone give me their backpacks, and I started to distribute the contents according to need. When students complained, they were sent to the office, where the assistant principal who was in on the lesson told the offended student the point of the exercise. It didn’t take long for the students to realize the futility of banning property in any society.

Then we had grades. I gave everyone a C, since that was average, and everyone shared the grades together. That lasted about three minutes until the smart ones realized what I was doing.

Just to mirror my colleagues who are cultural Marxists, I’m talking the long march through THEIR institutions. There’s actually a bunch of us out here, too. Some of the more virulent leftists I’ve run into have tried to give me the boot or file complaints. My strategy is to always up the ante and threaten them using the same teaching code of conduct they’re accusing me of violating. Bonus: afterwards, they no longer talk to me.

Then there was this one classroom in California where I had the 10-year-olds taking the California Achievement Test scribble across the race and ethnicity box, “This is racist.” That was in 1999! I had the largest achievement growth of any classroom in the school.

I tell me current principal that my father was willing to volunteer and risk death to fight the fascists, so experiencing discomfort in the workplace confronting the American version is the least I can do.

Somewhere out there, several thousand students are looking at the current madness of our culture with a vague feeling that it’s wrong, and maybe several dozen can articulate what to do in response and embrace Enlightenment values. That’s enough.