Young people naïve to horrors of communism
Our education system is failing to inform young people about the true horrors communism has visited upon our world, says Chris Everett.
The New Culture Forum has released an excellent study into the perception of the revolutionary far-left among 16-24 year olds, in anticipation of the 100 year anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Surveying 883 youths and young adults, the study's findings are shocking. Genocidal Cambodian dictator Pol Pot is considered responsible for fewer crimes against humanity than President Bush and Tony Blair, while Reagan and Berlusconi are considered by more to have been dictators than the Romanian monster Nicolae Ceaușescu, a man responsible for the deaths of untold thousands (there is no accurate estimate).
You're probably noticing a pattern by now – that each of these hard-line communist rulers is deemed less bad than their capitalist, democratically elected counterparts. While this could be put down to lack of name recognition from a couple of the lesser known brutal dictators, the paper's author, Dennis Sewell, goes on to reveal that socialism was the most positively viewed ideology among the respondents – as well as being the least negatively viewed. Point being: something has happened to young British people to make them at best sympathetic, and at worst supportive, of the murderous ideology of socialism: 'the creed of ignorance' responsible for nearly 100 million deaths in the 20th century alone.
Somewhat amusingly, the insult that the male dominated left is more 'brocialist' than socialist appears to hold true. Brocialism is left wing thinking being left up to the boys, visible in Corbyn's multiple cabinets and staffing choices, in leading authors, film makers and artists of the hard left, and even in the causes modern day socialists find themselves being attached to.
The study shows that 29 per cent of males (compared with 15 per cent of females) believe the Russian revolution was "Something well-intentioned but then went horribly wrong", while 8 per cent (6 per cent of females) think it was "Something that showed it is possible to build a fairer society without capitalism". More than 20 million are estimated to have been killed as a direct result of communism in the Soviet Union, with the last forced labour camp closing just two years before the Berlin Wall fell. Give me unfair capitalism any day.
Perhaps in a week in which the centre right Conservative Party has crowned it's second female PM out of the last four, most Tories should welcome the fact that young men seem inclined towards socialism while young women treat it with scepticism.
The point remains, though, that both male and female youths have clearly been failed in their education regarding the crimes and horrors of socialism. That men or women are more susceptible is irrelevant if a majority still believes that the experiments in tyranny that took place in Russia, China, Eastern Europe, Cambodia, Somalia, Iraq, Cuba, and a myriad of other places were not an overall negative for humanity, but instead represent the latest in a series of moral 'grey areas' that are not for the likes of individuals to pass judgement upon. Most concerning in Sewell's report is the moral ambivalence of my peers – that cannot be tackled in the classroom alone.
