Let’s see… What would be a really good way to screw up our country, big-time? How might we squander our prosperity, our stability, and our greatness?
Oh, I know! Teachers’ unions! It can’t miss—hire a bunch of Far Left Crazy schmendricks to teach whole generations of Americans that their country is “10 percent better than garbage,” as Congresswoman Alexandria O’Crazyo Cortez says, and see if we can get them to grow up hating it. Because a country that hates itself just isn’t going anywhere good.
As hard as it may be to believe this, the Chicago Teachers’ Union recently sent a “delegation” to Venezuela to, er, “learn” from the failing socialist regime and demonstrate their “solidarity” with its dictator. They came home overflowing with praise for a tyrannical regime which has turned what used to be a reasonably prosperous country into a limping, starving, failed economy propped up by violence and intimidation—everything, in short, that makes a socialist’s life worth living.
But then everything that’s wrong with Venezuela, the union delegates insist, is America’s fault and no one else’s.
Can it be that these teachers are truly that ignorant, that stupid?
History tells us that throughout the 1920s and Thirties, Western intellectuals and journalists flocked to the Soviet Union to observe its utopia in the making. Wow, Uncle Joe! What a spectacular job you’re doing! Walter Duranty of the New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for his incessant Stalinist cheerleading.
Hint: the Soviet Union did not cease to exist because it was just too good for this fallen world.
Russia’s communist government took pains to make sure that visiting nitwits saw only what the government wished for them to see. They set up fake collective farms, fake factories, and fake folk festivals stocked with cheerful, happy, well-fed, jolly workers energetically reveling in this wildly successful socialist experiment. These stage sets came to be called “Potemkin villages,” a term which has survived to denote any put-up job created to fool people who really do want to be fooled. Satisfied with what they were being shown by their government guides, the visitors never came within miles of the gulags, the starving farmers, or the towns depopulated by the regime’s economic follies.
You’d think they’d be smart enough to see through it—but they didn’t want to see through it. They wanted communism to work, wanted to import it to their own countries, and refused to see the truth. A few, like Malcolm Muggeridge, later admitted they’d been had. But then he wasn’t a member of a teachers’ union.
The Chicago teachers, reported some outfit called the “Radical Education Collective,” were especially “impressed” by Venezuela’s many communes—more Potemkin villages. Your school taxes pay teachers who join radical collectives. But then they had high praise for every aspect of Maduro’s travesty of a country. Again, anything that was wrong with it was America’s fault, not Venezuela’s.
Are we crazy? These dunderheads are teaching America’s children. “Communism has a lot of good ideas, class! And it’s the only form of government that can save us from Climate Change!” It’s shocking, what we pay them to do this.
One can spend many hours wondering how anyone in his right mind can see in Venezuela anything but sheer disaster. Well, they don’t see. They refuse to see. Leftism is a false religion with a dingbat dogma in which the answer to anything is always more government, more control over people, more slogans, more coercion.
Seeing things that aren’t there is worse than being blind. Knowing things that aren’t so is worse than knowing nothing.
And hiring people who fit that description to teach our children is, quite simply, inexplicable.
I have discussed these and other topics throughout the week on my blog, http://leeduigon.com/ . Stop in for a visit; a single click will get you there. You can also find my articles at www.chalcedon.edu/.
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E-Mail Lee Duigon: leeduigon@verizon.net
