by Al Benson Jr.
I recently pulled a book off the shelf that dealt with the life of a “high officer of Soviet Intelligence” who ended up exposing life in the Soviet Union under the merciful and humane hand of the Communists. The book was called The Secret World and was written by Peter Deriabin and Frank Gibney. Deriabin was the one telling about his life in the Soviet Union. The book was published back in 1959. You don’t find very many books nowadays that deal with real life under communism. It’s not considered politically correct in our leftist age to criticize communism in any way, shape, or form.
What struck me was Deriabin’s commentary about how the Communists used the educational system in The Soviet Union to recruit the next generation into participating in the glories of the Communist revolution. It reminded me of some of what we see in our public education system in this country today. Makes you wonder if the current teachers unions took lessons from Lenin and Stalin. They wrote: “The school was a simple one-room proposition with only one teacher regularly assigned, but it was the channel through which the Communists could work most directly on the Russian people. As Moscow tightened its grip on the provinces a parade of Party bosses, Komsomol bosses, and other varieties of youth experts came to visit throughout the school year, giving their very explicit lessons…School and Communism came into Deriabin’s life together and increased their influence all the more proportionately…At the same time, all the praise for good schoolwork and the students’ enthusiasm were funneled into the service of the Party. This indoctrination had its own changes in emphasis. Deriabin’s very first schoolbook began with a noble-looking portrait of Lenin (‘our grandfather Ilich’)…Later editions began with pictures of Lenin and Stalin; then, Stalin held the field by himself.”
The book continued: “The indoctrination had the weight of new learning behind it, and it took. The first buds of idealism were equally directed into Communism’s service. Children glamorized the high-minded talks of their ‘intelligent and educated’ teacher, which contrasted happily with the bread-and-butter ruminations of their ‘illiterate’ parents. At an age where the concept of the group first becomes really attractive to the child, Communist instructors pounded home the futility of individual actions or individual development. Everything was to be done or thought shoulder to shoulder with the brave workers, collective farmers, Komsomol members, Young Pioneers or whatever group happened to be pertinent to the occasion.”
This Young Pioneers group mentioned was interesting. They write: “A good deed for the Pioneers, e.g. informing the teacher about children who still said their prayers, could help a boy’s school record as surely as good marks in school…The immediate job of the Young Pioneers was to visit each others homes and report on which families kept religious images, said prayers, or otherwise behaved in a suspicious manner. Like thousands of other Russian children, Deriabin was told by his teachers that the parents of the village were in error and grossly misled. The Bible was nonsense, written by the popy–Russian slang for priests–and everything in life could be explained by science.” How much different is this than the atmosphere in most of our public schools today.? No Bibles, you can’t even say Jesus’ name except as a cussword, and Darwin’s theory of evolution explains everything.
The book observed: “The godless campaign was only a tactic in the basic strategy of the Soviet school: to detach the students from the influence of their parents and re-create them as wards of the state.” And how much of that goes on in our public schools today? The election in Virginia last year for governor was between a socialist Democrat who basically said parents should have no influence over what happens in the school and a conservative Republican who felt parents should have some say. The Republican won handily. But there are lots of Educrats around who feel that parental involvement crimps their style. They can’t indoctrinate their students well enough in leftist propaganda if Mom and Dad are watching what goes on. One teacher I mentioned recently in an article said to someone: “I have 180 days to make them (his students) revolutionaries.” You can imagine what he meant by that!
To all intents and purposes, our public schools have been taken over by communist ideologues. You can’t reason with them or have any real dialogue with them because they have an agenda they go by and they will not be diverted from it. All you can do is to get your kids out of it. Parents who refuse to put up with this leftist indoctrination program can find better ways to educate your children. All teachers are not evil people, but those that are evil go a long way toward neutralizing the good that some teachers try to do.
We now get the same kind of propaganda in our public schools that the Russian kids got in their schools in the 1920 and 30s, although it has been working up to that for a long time here, going way back into the 1800s. Rev. R. J. Rushdoony called the public schools “a subversive movement.” He was right!