American universities and schools do not teach about Communist, Nazi, or Islamic regimes because their dominant neo-Marxist model of the world and of America has identified the greatest evil in the world as America. This is made explicit in the dominant theory of the social sciences and humanities: postcolonial theory, which argues that all of the ills and misdeeds in the world, everywhere in the world, are the result of Western and American imperialism and colonialism.
Postcolonial theory is not historically oriented; it ignores the hundreds of imperial regimes throughout history, identifying only the West as imperialistic and colonialistic. An early and influential example is the explicitly Marxist Europe and the People Without History, by the acclaimed anthropologist Eric Wolf. The expansion of European peoples into North and South America during several recent centuries, the responses of local peoples, and the social and political consequences are set out in considerable detail. What Wolf does not include in this work are the concurrent imperialisms and colonialisms of non-Westerners, such as the Russian Crown and Soviet Union, spreading across Asia and Communist China, gobbling up Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and Chinese Turkistan (Xinxiang). Nor are any earlier, but still continuing imperialisms mentioned, such as that of Islam, originally spreading from Arabia to South Asia in the East, all of North Africa in the West, the Iberian Peninsula and Sicily in the North, and East and West Africa in the South.
Western imperialism and colonialism are credited with inventing all local cultures around the world: for example, tribes in East Africa and castes in India, the better to subject and control local peoples. So that when we find tribalism or the caste hierarchy inhibiting socialist projects in those countries, the West is blamed for destroying the natural socialism and good-hearted communities of local peoples around the world. No credit is given to the historical facts of pre-existing local cultures, hierarchies, and imperialisms all around the world.
In our schools and universities, America is taught as being the heart of evil. It is not just America’s terrible imperialism, but its evil soul resulting from America’s “most important” characteristic: slavery. No less than the New York Times, infamous as apologists for the Soviet Union and ignorers of the Holocaust, claim in its 1618 Project that slavery was the foundation and evil heart of America. The discussion of slavery in America often implies that it was not only terrible, but uniquely horrible, and even that America invented slavery. Once again, historical reality is entirely ignored.
Slavery was an important institution around the world, throughout all of history, with many tribal societies and kingdoms, and all empires, hundreds of them, depending upon slavery. The slaves who were exported to America were initially captured and enslaved, not by Americans, but by their fellow Africans. Slavery has been a mainstay of the Islamic world since its inception 1400 years ago, right up to and including the unmourned Islamic state. Russia rested on its quasi-enslaved serfs, and Indian civilization on its heavily constrained “untouchables.” The Roman Empire depended upon slaves, as did the ancient Greeks of Athens. The reason for this is obvious: until the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions in the 18th century, production was so inefficient and consumables so rare, that it was easier to take from others by force than to increase one’s own. Slaves provided quasi-uncompensated production, the products of which could be consumed by citizens and the elite. With the vast increase of production due to the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, slavery became largely redundant, leaving mainly sex slavery in the Islamic world.
With the education and media systems deciding that the only villain in the world worth talking about is America and the West, everywhere else in the world appears benign. Those who have adopted Marxist and neo-Marxist perspectives feel no compulsion to start pulling on the threads of Soviet and Chinese Communist (and Cuban and Cambodian) history. The closing of eyes has been aided by such doctrines as “cultural relativism,” now widely adopted in universities and schools, which argues that we cannot judge people in other cultures, because they have their “own truths.” Add to that the idea that any critical comments about anyone of another race is RACISM!, and it is clear that there is no taste for interrogating the history and present actions of Communist China. Communist totalitarianism, failed economic collectivization, cultural terrorism, and the hundreds of millions of citizens imprisoned, locked in concentration camps, killed in famines, and outright murdered are not deemed to be suitable subjects for inquiry in our increasingly Marxist universities, or taught in now far-left-wing colleges and school systems. Our media parrots Chinese Communist Party propaganda, all the while demeaning the duly elected government of the United States.
The ideological transformation of our school and “higher education” institutions to Marxism and neo-Marxism is a response to social movements of the past sixty years. Counterculture enthusiasts of the 1960s became the Marxist and communist professors of the 1970s-1980s. Feminists from the 1960s forward jettisoned the idea of equality, replacing it with neo-Marxist identity class-conflict theory; America was redefined as a male supremacist “patriarchy” oppressing innocent female victims. Race activists adopted the neo-Marxist identity class-conflict model, claiming that people of color are all and everywhere oppressed victims of white supremacist racism. LBGTQ++ sexuality activists not only claimed to be the innocent victims of oppressive heterosexuals, they claimed that the distinction between males and females was fraudulent.
The overall picture of America advanced was that of a privileged white and male elite victimizing helpless “marginalized minorities,” such as people of color, people of Spanish descent, females, and LBGTQ++. Western Civilization, invented and built by white men, has been ipso facto declared racist and sexist, and a legitimate object of rejection and destruction. That is why Western Civilization is no longer taught in schools and universities. Selection by merit was replaced by gender, racial, sexual, and disability preferences. Ironically, the only minority racial category discriminated against was East Asians, who had offended by succeeding too well on grounds of merit. So, while criticizing the Chinese Communist Party is deemed RACIST!, discriminating against Asian Americans is regarded as “social justice.”
Our universities, including the teacher training education departments, have adopted an anti-American ideology, viewing America as inherently evil, and everyone else, around the world, as pure and decent. In universities having adopted a Marxist model of society, not a discouraging word is ever said about communist societies, including Communist China, and questions about Communist regimes and China are discouraged. It is no wonder that Americans know nothing about Communist China.
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