In a recent column, Dennis Prager argues that American students know next to nothing about the evils of Communism and do not recognize the terrorist threat we face today. The column was inspired by an encounter with a UC Santa Barbara student who told Prager that Communism was never a real threat, and neither is terror now. Observes Prager, ”I suspect this young woman represents many college students. If one wants to understand what left-wing dominance in university social sciences departments produces, one merely had to meet this young woman.”

Prager continues:

At most universities, communism is a non-evil, indeed, largely a non-issue. The most enslaving and murderous movement in history is almost never taught as such. When communism is mentioned at all, it is usually solely in order to show how vile anti-communists were. Thus, as little as students may know about McCarthyism, most students far more readily identify it with evil than they do communism. Indeed, more could probably identify Joseph McCarthy than Joseph Stalin.

This is true. The curriculum focuses on the sins of America and does not tell the truth about the horrors abroad. Even WWII history is more likely to focus on the Japanese internment camps in the U.S. than on the atrocities inflicted by the Japanese.

Regarding the second evil of which the student was ignorant, however, namely terror, and what is still sometimes called the War on Terror, here the Right has also been at fault, at least somewhat, in being unwilling to recognize the true nature of Islamic jihad.

But Prager is certainly correct that now that Communism is mostly on the ash-heap of history (not entirely, though — there are still Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam), we are not informing young people about its history of horrors. Here is Prager again:

Does one in 10.000 students know of the communist terror-famine that took about 6 million Ukarainian lives. How many know about the communist Pol Pot, who butchered nearly one-third of his fellow Cambodians? Or how many innocents were murdered in the Gulag Archipelago (or could even identify it)? Or that China’s communist tyrant Mao Zedong killed about 60 million of his fellow Chinese? Or that Communist North Korea is essentially a concentration camp in the guise of a country?

Yes, and excerpts from The Gulag Archipelago should be required reading in colleges (lots of luck with that, I guess). Prager finishes by mentioning some tortures perfected under the hideous Mao Tse Tung that are too awful to repeat here.