‘Confederate’ leftists: Rewriting history for the Marxist lost cause
November is the month to remember that history is seldom written by the winners; instead, it is the losers who spend the most time and energy rewriting history, spinning their defeats on the battlefield into victories in the classroom.
Nov. 7 marks the 104th anniversary of one of mankind’s biggest defeats: the Bolshevik revolution imposing Marxism on Russia. Nov. 9 marks the 32nd anniversary of one of mankind’s greatest victories: the fall of the Berlin Wall, precipitating Marxism’s demise in Eastern Europe and Russia, ending what Russians mocked as “70 years on the road to nowhere.”
Belying its utopian theorizing, Marxism failed everywhere it was tried. No other ideology was more thoroughly repudiated in more places by more people’s experiences. As the “Black Book of Communism” details, Marxist regimes in the 20th century killed tens of millions of people, while savaging political, economic, religious, artistic and sexual freedom. In 21st century North Korea and China, the killings keep coming.
While capitalist democracies build walls to keep too many from entering, Marxist countries build walls to keep anyone from escaping.
Of course, as leftists rightly point out, even free societies oppress minorities. In the 1883-1927 heyday of the Jim Crow era, white Americans lynched more than 3,000 Black Americans in places from Rosewood, Fla., to Tulsa, Okla., names that live in infamy. Later, in the McCarthy era, hundreds of leftist actors, writers and professors lost their jobs. In Arkansas public schools, my kids learned about these horrors so that we will never repeat them.
Yet Marxism was exponentially worse. Unconstrained by courts, rights and markets, Marxist governments perpetrated vastly greater violence against minorities. From Nicaragua’s Miskito Indians to China’s Uyghurs, forced assimilation, mass imprisonment, appropriation of property, ethnic cleansing and outright murder have devastated communities. In the Holodomor alone, the planned famine that killed over 3 million Ukrainians, the Soviets likely murdered more people on individual days than the number of Blacks murdered during all of Jim Crow.
Most schools do not teach this history. The resulting ignorance has allowed rebranded Marxists to rise again — much like an earlier group of historical revisionists, Confederate apologists. Over a century ago, white southerners created the Lost Cause mythology about the Civil War, reinforced by artistic works such as the film “The Birth of a Nation” (based on the novel, “The Clansman”).
As historian Jonathan Zimmerman chronicled in “Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools,” in the early 20th century the United Confederate Veterans whitewashed the southern cause in school textbooks. The United Daughters of the Confederacy held student essay contests extolling slavery as “the happiest time of the Negroes’ existence,” as if Blacks had fled south to enjoy slavery, rather than north to escape it. As Zimmerman writes, many white southerners “challenged the entire concept of objectivity in history,” insisting that their subjective experiences offered unique insights that northern scholars with their so-called objective methods could never uncover.
Just three decades after suffering their own Appomattox with the fall of the Berlin Wall, Marxists are the new Confederates, replacing objective analyses with subjective stories. The paradigmatic example is activist professor Angela Davis, who now earns large sums speaking before groups such as my former organization, the National School Boards Association (NSBA).
Few school board members may know that Davis first gained fame for purchasing the guns an underaged radical used in an attempted prison break that left four dead, including a judge. Davis followed with decades of well-paid activism for the Soviet Union, which awarded her the Lenin Peace Prize in 1979. Davis argued that dissidents imprisoned by communists “deserve what they get,” even defending East German border guards whose job was to shoot those fleeing the “socialist homeland.”
Like Confederates defending slavery, Davis apparently never seriously pondered why people risked their lives to escape the system she loved.
Congress would never honor those who invaded the Capitol in January to disrupt the constitutional transition of power; neither should local elected officials pay someone who for decades advocated violent revolution against our Constitution. Parents must insist that our public schools teach the real history of Marxism. If we fail to teach that history, then we may repeat it. It can happen here.
Robert Maranto is the 21st Century Chair in Leadership in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, and from 2015-20 served on his local school board.