WASHINGTON—Most people aren’t aware of the full extent of the brutality and deaths under communist rule, according Dr. Paul Kengor, executive director of the Center for Vision and Values and anti-communist expert.
“The grisly history of Red Terror is too often neglected in the modern classroom at the typical American university,” he said, speaking at the news conference “Communism in the Classroom” at the National Press Club on Aug. 20.
The ideological struggle between the West and the Soviet Union was dominant for four decades following World War II. Many intellectuals in the West, however, still fail to acknowledge the Soviet Union’s concentration camps (the gulags), artificial famines, purges, deportations, executions, and its hatred for anything that resembled religious devotion, Kengor asserts. Such reluctance continues into the 21st century in the case of China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba, he says.
Kengor is professor of political science at Grove City College, Pennsylvania. He concerns himself with how communism is regarded in universities, and the trickle-down effect this has when professors write history and civics textbooks for U.S. high school students. He cites a 2002 study of 20 textbooks representative of the phenomenon used in Wisconsin.
