“Two cohorts of 5th-graders in the Finnish municipality of Pirkkala were indoctrinated with Marxism. Their teaching included faux protests and poverty simulations, among other things. Communist indoctrination had lasting harms: As adults, their incomes were considerably lower!” That’s the observation of Crémieux.
He was citing a study, “Communism in the Classroom:Long-Run Effects of an Experiment,” by Jaakko Merillainen and Matti Mitrunen, professors in Stockholm and Helsinki. That study’s abstract explains:
This paper documents the long-term economic effects of a psychological experiment in Marxist-Leninist classroom indoctrination conducted in a Finnish municipality between 1973 and1975. As part of the experiment, two cohorts of fifth-grade students were exposed to a Soviet-influenced history and social studies curriculum aimed at shaping a “functioning [socialist] worldview,” while others followed the national standard curriculum. Using administrative data and a difference-in-differences design, we find that exposed cohorts, as adults, had significantly lower incomes, reduced labor supply, and were more likely to enter more left-leaning … occupations.
Universities have been teaching Generation Z to love socialism, Campus Reform says: “At Williams College in Massachusetts, the course “Introduction to Capitalism” …defines capitalism as a system…that can ‘leave the poor threatened by starvation.’….The University of Maine offers a “Marxist and Socialist Studies” minor that encourages students to ‘challenge’ capitalism and “look at the world from a variety of Marxist and Socialist perspectives.” Harvard University offered the course ‘Marx at the Mall’… which blames capitalism…for climate change.”
It’s stupid for colleges to suggest Marxism is better for the environment. Marxism caused man-made famines such as the Great Leap Forward, which caused as many as 55 million deaths due to starvation, and the Holodomor, which killed 3.5 million to 5 million people in the Soviet Union.
Under socialism, Russia slaughtered much of the world’s whales, at least 180,000 of them. It killed far more indiscriminately than other whaling nations, and unlike them, it largely wasted the whales it killed, leaving their carcasses to rot. It has been called the most senseless environmental crime of the 20th Century. The Russians destroyed whole humpback whale populations — secretly, in violation of a treaty that Russia’s socialist government had signed during the Soviet Union. Why did Russia kill so many whales and then waste their flesh? Socialist central planning required whalers to kill the numbers of whales set by bureaucrats, regardless of whether Russia actually had any use for most parts of the whales killed.
Government ownership of economic sectors, such as agriculture, harms the environment. In Soviet Central Asia, the vast Aral Sea largely disappeared, leaving behind a vast ecologically-ruined wasteland, after a massive cotton project by the socialist government ravaged the regional environment. As the London Daily Mail noted, “The shrunken sea has ruined the once-robust fishing economy and left fishing trawlers stranded in sandy wastelands, leaning over as if they dropped from the air. The sea’s evaporation has left layers of highly salted sand, which winds can carry as far away as Scandinavia and Japan, and which plague local people with health troubles.”
Cornell University has had a class called “Queer Marxism.” Occidental College offers the course “Black Queer Thought,” which critiques “the demands” of “patriarchy and capitalism.”
“To love capitalism is to end up loving racism. To love racism is to end up loving capitalism…Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist,” says Ibram Kendi’s book How to Be An Antiracist, which has been assigned reading for many students.
