Mark R. Levin's "Obama Temptation"

Dan Friedman forwarded Mark R. Levin's excellent National Review article, "Obama Temptation". Levin notes:

"I honestly never thought we'd see such a thing in our country - not yet anyway - but I sense what's occurring in this election is a recklessness and abandonment of rationality that has preceded the voluntary surrender of liberty and security in other places."

He goes on to discuss the incredible frenzy of media distortion and bias associated with the Obama campaign. He asks "whether this election will show a majority of the voters susceptible to the appeal of a charismatic demagogue."

I believe that America's gradual descent into socialism is more than symptomatic of Senator Obama's meretricious rhetoric, media bias and public naivete. America was once the freest nation in the world, and this is no longer so. The process has been a long one. There has been a century of descent. In 1912 Walter Weyl predicted that it would take 50 years for social democracy to be transformed into socialism. Ninety-six years have passed since then, and Senator Obama is but the realization of Weyl's vision of a Frankified America.

There are many causes of America's socialization, certainly to include the media, the lack of public interest in freedom, and the education system. Certainly the education system indoctrinates students into believing that capitalism is exploitative. Moreover, the fallacious ideology of Keynesian economics is the core of economics and business programs. Students are taught that the "authority" of a professionally educated elite and the PAM media is to be accepted over common sense.

Today in a graduate class I was discussing utilitarian versus deontological ethical systems, and I used the mass killings in Cambodia as an example of a misapplication of utilitarianism. The students were master's students in the economics program at Brooklyn College. I was startled to learn that the students were unaware that there had been mass killings in Cambodia; that Stalin had murdered millions of peasants through mass starvation; or that Mao Tse Tung had murdered 25 million people. As well, the students had never heard of the "Cultural Revolution" and the "Red Guard".

In other words, New York City school children go through 12 years of lower education and four years of college at the City University of New York, plus another year of graduate school, without ever having heard that communism was responsible for mass murder. However, they are taught that capitalism and freedom are the source of poverty and intolerance.

This inculcation of ignorance through the education system has occurred during Republican as well as Democratic administrations. Mayor Giuliani and George Pataki were Mayor and Governor during these students' educational years, but neither bothered to ensure that the students had been educated about communism, socialism or capitalism.

Is it surprising that Americans are susceptible to a tinpot demagogue like Senator Barack Obama when the education system is in the business of denying history?