Free Republic

It’s odd watching a group of left-wing academics buck up each other’s spirits after they’ve encountered the cold, cruel world outside academe. Such a gathering was on display at the Modern Language Association’s annual meeting in Chicago this month whenever the Radical Caucus of the MLA met. “The failure of communism did not result from Lenin, Stalin and Mao,” Grover C. Furr of Montclair State University told the group. “These were some of the greatest men in the world.” “Socialism preserved the contradictions of capitalism, such as differentiations in pay. We should abandon the term ‘socialism.’ Marx and Engels did...

For twenty years Grover Furr has been an English professor at Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey, where he educates students in his peculiar worldview, which is an updated Stalinism and in which America is the world’s biggest oppressor and greatest terrorist state. While his academic expertise is English literature, he presents himself as an expert on communism, and scours academic forums like the Historians of American Communism net, defending Joseph Stalin and calling America’s role in bringing down the Soviet Empire a moral outrage. “Was there something morally wrong in trying to bring down the Soviet Union? I...