Congress Considers Neocon Lesson Plans to Keep Kids Off Communism

In the latest front in the culture war over school curricula, the House of Representatives is set to vote Friday on a bill that would give a congressional stamp of approval to the lesson plans of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a group closely linked to fervently hawkish corners of the foreign policy blob. 

The Crucial Communism Teaching Act, also known as H.R. 5349, would direct the VOC Foundation to develop an educational curriculum it could offer to school districts to help instruct students on atrocities both historic and contemporary carried out by communist regimes.

Inspiration for the bill came to its sponsor, Rep. María Elvira Salazar, R-Fla., when she learned of a 2020 survey — published, as it so happens, by the VOC Foundation — showing that 28 percent of Gen-Zers and 22 percent of millennials held favorable views of communism.

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“The bill neglects to mention our country’s long history of using the label ‘Communism’ to enflame, scare, and pit Americans against one another,” said Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., in a Rules Committee hearing on the bill Tuesday. “If we want students to examine the effect of Communism on the world, it would be negligent not to warn against the dangers of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the vitriol of Joseph McCarthy, and the negative impact of the Red Scare on many innocent Americans, particularly those seeking racial progress in the Civil Rights era.”

In an attempt to round out the focus of the bill, Scott and other Democrats put forward an amendment that would add lessons about the dangers of fascism, but it was unanimously rejected by GOP committee members.

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At the VOC Foundation, meanwhile, work on a broad anti-communist civics curriculum is already underway. On its website, the VOC Foundation lists lesson plans covering the origins of communism — including an exercise instructing teachers to “take a student’s favorite pencil or pen, backpack, phone, etc.” [asset forfeiture?] and ask them to reflect on the confiscation of private property — up through the eve of World War II.

While the full curriculum around World War II is not yet published — a number of planned chapters are listed as “Coming Soon” — the material available so far shows a laser focus on the atrocities of Communist forces, including repression of the clergy during the Spanish Civil War and the Katyn massacre of Polish prisoners of war by Soviet troops during the German-Soviet partition of Poland.

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Under the guise of promoting freedom, organizations like the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations often acted as a vehicle for fascist emigres to regroup and exploit Cold War tensions — and legitimate grievances against communist dictators — in the West to rewrite history in a way that would equate communist atrocities with the Holocaust, Boeckner said.

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Founded in 1993 by congressional charter, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation is an offshoot of the National Captive Nations Committee, a Cold War advocacy group led by prominent conservative intellectuals and proponents of a belligerent stance toward the Soviet Union. Its founder, Lee Edwards, was a high-ranking member of the Heritage Foundation, and under his aegis, the group committed itself to carrying the torch into the 21st century to continue fighting a Cold War that, to the foundation’s leaders, never really ended.

In 2022, the last year for which financial documentation is available, the group received nearly $4.5 million in government contributions and over the past five years has been awarded grants by USAID, the State Department, and the U.S. Embassy in Havana totaling more than $3 million for efforts to highlight government repression in Cuba and China. In the past, it has also received funding from conservative grantmaking groups as well as from the Polish National Foundation, a state-funded nonprofit that has been accused of diminishing Poland’s role in the Holocaust.

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DESPITE THE FACT that H.R. 5349 is nonbinding and provides no funding mechanism for the VOC Foundation’s work, its passage would be a victory for Salazar, the daughter of Cuban exiles who has been trying to get the legislation through since 2021, when she introduced an earlier version of the bill that failed to gain traction. There is already a companion bill in the Senate introduced earlier this year by Sen. John Kennedy, R-La.

Did Salazar’s family “lose” their sugar plantation or something?

It passed to the delight of the Ukrainian World Congress: Education bill on communism history moves forward in US Congress

Related:

Lies about the Holodomor, Joseph Stalin, & the U.S.S.R.

‘Captive Nations’: The Forgotten Origins of the ‘Victims of Communism’