4 Ways to Inoculate Your Children Against Marxism

A man wearing a T-shirt with a portrait of the Marxist revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara in San Jose, Calif., in a file photo. Rodrigo Arangua/AFP/Getty Images

Commentary

In 2007, President George W. Bush dedicated a memorial in Washington to the 100 million people murdered by communism over the past century. Here is a portion of what he offered in remembrance of those victims:

“They include innocent Ukrainians starved to death in Stalin’s Great Famine or Russians killed in Stalin’s purges; Lithuanians and Latvians and Estonians loaded onto cattle cars and deported to Arctic death camps of Soviet communism. They include Chinese killed in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution; Cambodians slain in Pol Pot’s Killing Fields; East Germans shot attempting to scale the Berlin Wall in order to make it to freedom; Poles massacred in the Katyn Forest and Ethiopians slaughtered in the ‘Red Terror’; Miskito Indians murdered by Nicaragua’s Sandinista dictatorship; and Cuban balseros who drowned escaping tyranny.”

This horrific record doesn’t include the countless millions who were imprisoned, tortured, or saw their dreams and potentialities ruined by Marxism. Yet not only do countries such as China and North Korea remain communist, but here in the West—where we should know better by now—we have professors, teachers, corporate personnel, politicians, and ordinary citizens who salute the Red Star. They may not answer to being called Marxists, but they go along with the movement.

This being the case, it’s up to parents, grandparents, and mentors to inoculate the young against falling prey to this ideology. Below are some vaccines that we can give our young people to help prevent infection from this virus.

Read the Right Books

George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” is appropriate for middle schoolers. His classic “1984” should be on every high schooler’s reading list. Ayn Rand’s “We the Living,” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” Ruta Sepetys’s “I Must Betray You,” and other novels will give readers a look into life under communism. For a truly chilling look at how Marxism works in schools, read James Clavell’s overlooked short story “The Children’s Story,” now available online for free. YouTube also has a video drama of this story.

Teach them the truth about totalitarianism and communism through books such as these.

Listen to Real-Life Stories

If you know someone who grew up in a former communist country or who has escaped from a country such as China or Cuba, invite them to speak to your children. These first-hand accounts can provide a powerful witness.

If you don’t have access to such people, you can find interviews with freedom fighters and survivors online at the Victims of Communism Memorial Witness Project. Here, men and women from around the world share the stories of their ordeal and the miseries of life under Marxist governments.

Kitchen Table Learning

Discuss the daily news with your teens, both events abroad and here at home. Turn on the evening news and critique it. Point out that words such as “privileged,” “marginalized communities,” “the oppressed,” “gender identity,” and more are all terms associated with the left.

Within the United States are far-left groups that either declare themselves Marxist or follow Marxist precedents. Others conceal themselves under innocuous titles. The Party for Socialism and Liberation, for instance, takes an “old-fashioned” approach to Marxism with its radical support of Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong. Other far-left groups fly under a variety of banners, often seeking these days to forward radical agendas of race and gender. Make your children aware that these groups are rarely concerned about liberty or human rights for all people.

This election year provides the perfect opportunity to compare the platforms and candidates of our political parties. Make the most of this opportunity to teach your children about the issues debated and how they reflect on such concepts as freedom, collectivism, and tradition.

The Best Antidote of All

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Teach those words from our Declaration of Independence to your children. Explain that no government can grant or take away their unalienable rights—that they are a core part of what it means to be human.

Teach your children about the men and women who built this country, who fought against injustice where they found it, and who loved freedom. Teach them early on the stories of American explorers, scientists, soldiers, poets, and all the others whose work and sacrifices gave us the privileges we enjoy today.

Teach them that liberty and its many benefits demand responsibility. Do not let them confuse, as so many do today, liberty with license. Liberty means having the freedom to do the right thing, not simply to do as we wish. Responsibility implies duty, the obligation to be accountable for our actions and to step up when necessary and defend our rights as a free people.

Do these things with love, and the torch of American liberty will never be extinguished.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.