Comment on This Fall, Florida Students Will Be Forced to Take “Anti-Communist” Classes
Gorilladrums@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Communism IS a failed ideology in both theory and practice, and some of the most horrific atrocities in history have been committed following Marxist principles in order to achieve. That’s just objectively true.
However, I have problem with narrative driven education like this because you are guaranteed to have a lot manipulation and misinformation in there. History should always be taught objectively because the entire point of teaching it so we can learn from it. If the education is honest, how can we expect students to draw the right conclusions?
Education does play an important role in installing the right values, principles, and morals in the younger generations. However, it’s equally as important for the education to be unbiased, accurate, and taught critically. We can and should teach the flaws in communist theory, why communist attempts failed in history, and the atrocities committed in order to achieve it. However, we also must give an unbiased understanding of what the ideology is or at least supposed to be, what communist regimes ended up doing well, and an objective break down of our own history, flaws, mistakes, and atrocities.
The goal should never be to brainwash students into thinking communism is bad just because they’re told that it is. The goal should be to equip our future generations with accurate facts, critical thinking skills, and a broad understanding of themselves, their country, and the world so they’re prepared to face life in the best position possible. We shouldn’t fear facts, we shouldn’t fear criticism, and we shouldn’t use fear to teach. We want kids to today to reflect on themselves and their society and question things that they think are not right. That’s how societies improve and move forward. We can’t let these MAGA morons hinder the future of our kids or society’s progress because they’re insecure and ignorant.
Soup@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I agree with everything but the first paragraph, which unfortunately taints the rest. Communism can’t really be considered a failed system if it’s only ever existed in its infancy. Capitalism is a failed ideology specifically because it was given every possible advantage and has still completely and utterly failed to address the needs of any kind of remotely fair and just society. Any attempts to make the switch toward communism in this world are incredibly difficult undertakings because of how it is the antithesis of the existing structure, while capitalism only needed to make one easy step away from the feudalism is was created to replace. History is pretty clear on this if you look beyond the very surface level propaganda, to the point where you don’t even to “just google it bro” but can actually just see it all woth your own eyes.
I’m not a full-blown tankie communist, but I’m absolutely a socialist. My aims are toward the next step or two, not much further but certainly not so close as can be easily hand-waved by those with too much power.
Gorilladrums@lemmy.world 3 days ago
But is this not just a more sophisticated presentation of the No True Scotsman fallacy? You can’t dismiss every single attempt at communism with some variation of “that wasn’t real communism”. After so many attempts in so many countries over so many years, we have to accept that the idea itself is inherently flawed.
We have to establish a common standard that defines failure and success in an ideological system. You seem base your definition on perfection, where you think a capitalism is a failure because it’s an imperfect system while communism has never been tried because there has never been a perfect implementation of it. I disagree with this notion entirely because perfection can only exist in the abstract. Every system that has and will ever exist in the world is going to flawed. What separates a successful system from a failed system is how productive it is in practice.
I also don’t accept the premise that communism is the next in the evolution of economic systems. Society always has a bunch of competing ideas that all claim they’re the next big thing, however just because an ideology claims that it’s next in the evolutionary ladder that doesn’t mean that it is. Societal evolution is not defined by claims, but by the actual implementations that took place as well as their results.
As implied in my previous comment, I’m big on accepting history objectively. The statements you’re presenting go against this notion. I don’t like the idea of pretending that ideological claims are historically accurate or objectively true while dismissing the criticism against them as propaganda. If you have case to present to prove otherwise, please do present it. Otherwise, I have a hard time accepting communism as anything other than a proven failure.