Republicans sometimes introduce a bit of humor into public life, even if they have no intention of being funny.
A recent example is Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. Undoubtedly catering to Cuban-Americans in the hope of garnering their votes, DeSantis recently signed a bill establishing November 7 as “Victims of Communism Day” to honor the millions of people who have suffered under communist regimes.
Licensed under Creative Commons.
.jpg){kind=link}
No, that’s not the funny part. The funny part is what follows. According to DeSantis’s website, the bill “calls for public schools to observe the day. High school students will be required to receive at least 45 minutes of instruction in their required United States Government class on topics related to communist regimes and how victims suffered at the hands of these regimes.”
Is that funny, or what?
Of course, your standard Republican wouldn’t laugh or even smile because he would have no idea why such a measure would be funny to libertarians.
It would be difficult to find a better example of a socialist program than public (i.e., government) schooling. The state makes attendance mandatory. Funding is through coercion, i.e., taxation. Everyone in the system, including the teachers, works for the state. The state decides on the textbooks, the curriculum, and the textbooks. Everything is politicized. (See FFF’s award-winning book Separating School & State: How to Liberate America’s Families by Sheldon Richman.)
As I point out in my new book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story, the most important aspect of public (i.e., government) schooling is its purpose. Its mission is to mold the minds of children into having a deep reverence for the state and a mindset of deference to authority of government officials. That’s what those classes in “United States Government” to which DeSantis refers are for. The public-school experience becomes a 12-year sentence of indoctrination, regimentation, and obedience to orders. It’s an army-lite version of the life of a draftee in the U.S. military.
By the time students graduate from high school, they hate education but they love the government, eagerly trust government officials, believe whatever government officials tell them, and blindly do whatever public officials say, just like your standard military draftee. Good examples are the JFK assassination, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, the twenty years of lies relating to the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, and those infamous but nonexistent WMDs in Iraq.
There is something important to note about Cuba and other communist regimes: They have public (i.e., government) school systems there too. The big difference, however, is that people in communist nations know that public (i.e., government) schooling is a socialist system. Americans, on the other hand, have been taught to believe the public schooling, at least here in the United States, is an inherent part of a free and democratic country. The American mindset brings to mind the words of the great German thinker Johann Goethe: “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
Many years ago, I traveled to Cuba. I went into a museum that was dedicated to exposing the horrors committed on the Cuban people by the CIA, the Pentagon, and other U.S. departments and agencies. There was a group of elementary school students visiting the museum and listening to a lecture on the U.S. assassination (i.e., murder) plots, invasion, terrorism, sabotage, and U.S. embargo against Cuba.
Yes, it was indoctrination, no doubt about that. But it was also true, even if Americans students are not taught such things in their “United States Government class.” That’s what public-schooling is all about.
There is another humorous aspect of DeSantis’s bill. It provides for $25 million of state funds to be given to Miami Dade College “to support preservation and enhancement of the Freedom Tower.”
Let’s see now. State funds are collected from people in the form of taxes. So, DeSantis is celebrating the fact that the state is forcibly taking money from one group of people in order to give it to another group of people, in the name of freedom and that “Freedom Tower,” of course.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t it Karl Marx who enunciated the Marxian principle, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”? In other words, socialism is based on the idea of taking money from Peter and giving it to Paul. Obviously, DeSantis doesn’t realize the dark irony in his celebration of socialism relating to that $25 state million funding for that “Freedom Tower.”
But of course, socialism is what Republicans have advocated for decades, not only in terms of public (i.e, government) schooling, but also with respect to such welfare-state programs as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, farms subsidies, welfare, public housing, foreign aid, education grants, and just about every other welfare-state program. In fact, if truth be told, the only welfare-state programs to which some Republicans object are food stamps, NPR radio, and aid to the arts.
But at least in the midst of crises in foreign policy, monetary policy, and fiscal policy — with people suffering the ravages of monetary debasement at the hands of the Federal Reserve, at least Republicans sometimes do us a favor by making us smile and laugh with their inane and hypocritical “freedom-fighting” programs.