I found the run-of-the-mill “hippies” to be just bored, spoiled brats who’d grown up with everything handed to them without having to put out much personal effort themselves. Oh, a few were “true believers,” but MOST of them went to “protest rallies” and “demonstrations” to meet members of the opposite sex…FOR sex. (Which seemed to be available to everyone EXCEPT returning Vietnam vets who weren’t inclined to talk down about the war, the government and the military.) A few, like Ayers, Dorhn, Angela Davis and Jane Fonda with hubby and former SDS president, Tom Hayden, took their roles as “revolutionaries” VERY seriously. Many of these, who internalized what passes for leftist “thought,” turned to education as a career. Ayers, Dorhn and Davis are all currently “professors” at various institutes of “higher learning.” University professorships were attractive for several reasons. A PhD was relatively easy to obtain–especially where schools judged doctoral theses by weight, instead of by actual content and rationality, and, best of all, the whole thing could be obtained on someone else’s nickel–Mom and Dad or the nanny State–the very people they so disdained. All they had to do was keep their figurative noses clean until achieving tenure and they were then free to promote and teach our children any crackpot idea they wanted to without fear of even mild reprimand. Most of ‘em chose to teach and promote Marxist theory–often disguised as a legitimate subject of study. One of the most obvious of these is the current fad of teaching “black studies,” in which black history has quite literally been invented out of whole cloth…such as the introduction of Kwaanza, which no African-born black person ever even heard of before coming to America, or the teaching that the Egyptian pharoahs “were all black,” which is a provable, historic lie. (They were mostly of Greek ancestry. It wasn’t just the best-known and most violent of these radicals who chose this route. Hardly a university in the nation exists without a virtual plethora of such “teachers.”

One would think that the fact that all those “communes” established by these 60′s hippies have completely disappeared would be proof enough to the left that socialism just doesn’t work, but they’ve invented all sorts of rationalizations as to why they all failed miserably. Instead, the indoctrination of our youth continues unabated.

Virginia D, you cannot hold a candle to the enormous amount of reading I’ve done across all of the important minds in Marxism. I was a Marxist for ten years of my life, from age 22 up until I was 32 years of age. I was an aspiring academician who happened to take the critiques of socialism coming from the theologian Michael Novak seriously. Essentially, utopia is nonsense. There can be no socialist utopia because it is not consistent with or compatible with human nature. We are flawed in every respect and there is always going to be evil and evil people ruining every attempt at building heaven on earth. Dive into developmental psychology, genetics, and neuroscience as I have and you will realize that EVIL has an organic and cosmological basis.

Socialism is based on a lie, and anyone with any brains will eventually figure this out. It was personally liberating for me when I could finally make a break with it. Prior to that moment, I had to endure a fair amount of cognitive dissonance. The evidence of history is conclusive and decisive on the issue of the viability of socialism. It has failed to bring material prosperity and spiritual liberation to human beings. It did not result in The New Moral Man. If you go and look at the countries and societies where it has been tried, you will find rampant corruption, criminality, and evil of all kinds.

As for the muslim issue. I have a cousin who was married into the muslim community for 25 years and I have talked to many muslims in my travels in and out of Europe over the past 10 years. This is what we have been told by almost every muslim we have talked to-When the day of the prophet comes all muslims are obligated to rise up and kill all infidels(non muslims)or be killed themselves, and that the people of the Book(Jews and Christians-read any non muslim)were replaced by the muslims because we all screwed up and the muslims are now god’s chosen people, and that it is their job to rid this planet of the scourge that we have become and to repopulate this planet with the only right way/religion-as in islam.

There is a similarity in the intolerance, which might explain why the anarchist movement doesn’t see the muslim terroists as the problem. However, just as in the Cold War, the Communists used ‘fellow travelers’ only as long as they were useful, then eliminated them, the same would be true for the muslims with the anarchists.-Fellow traveler-someone who helped to enable the actual sabatour, and was sympathetic toward the cause involved, but were not themselves a sabatour or spy.

Nixon’s mistake was to conduct a fighting retreat rather than instantly withdrawing and letting S. Vietnam collapse. Ironically, Obama may have to do the same thing in Southwest Asia. He may even have to widen the war for a time, as Nixon did. But all this demonizing of Nixon is totally irrational, as there is no arguing with it.