The Communist International started its worldwide campaign of subversion and sabotage circa 1920.  The goal was always the same: wage a disciplined, low-budget attack on soft targets such as foundations, unions, universities, education, and media.  The M.O. was the Fabian three-step: take a job, work up to higher management, overthrow the country.

Globalsecurity.org, a think-tank concerned with international security, concludes:

The Communist International was a tool or weapon such as no other country possessed, and the Soviet Union never hesitated to use it when the occasion demanded. Masquerading as a political party in a country permitting it to operate openly, a communist party was in fact a fifth column as much as any Bund group, except that the latter were crude and ineffective in comparison with Communists.

People who joined the Comintern were expected to be subservient to Moscow and fiercely committed to communism's first principle: the ends justify the means.  The name "Comintern" is no longer in use, but this aggressive, amoral mentality lives on.  The same sort of militants continue their warfare against the world.  They are the reason for many of the intractable problems in the U.S.

Their particular brand of fanaticism, unmodified by any of the Anglo-Saxon traditions of compromise, was too fierce and too jealous to envisage any permanent sharing of power.  From the Russian-Asiatic world out of which they had emerged they carried with them a skepticism as to the possibilities of permanent and peaceful coexistence of rival forces.  Easily persuaded of their own doctrinaire "rightness," they insisted on the submission or destruction of all competing power.

So these are the fanatics who descended on our society in 1920.  John Dewey and his Progressives softened up the battlefield in the preceding decades.  But the heavy hitters, the ideological demolition teams, fought under the banner of the Comintern.

The Bolshevik triumph in Russia was really a powerful stimulant to the '"world revolution," because it proved the ability of a determined, ruthless minority to impose its will upon a disorganized society devoid of capable leaders, and thus encouraged revolutionary minorities everywhere to hope that they might do the same thing[.]

Point is, the Comintern brought an unprecedented sort of aggression to civil society in the United States.  Is there anything, no matter how vicious, these extremists would not do?  Not that I can see.

For example, if you wanted to make American citizens weak and unpatriotic, who gets this assignment?  If you want children to be illiterate and without ambition, whom are you going to call?  If you hope to make children ignorant, almost devoid of cultural knowledge, who is just right for that project?

Clearly, all these things come back to education.  And wherever you look in K–12, you will find strange artifacts and an agenda put in play by a cunning opponent.

"A Nation at Risk," a report published in 1983, honored this heritage when it proclaimed: "The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people[.] ... If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war."

It was a foreign power, and it was an act of war.

The paradigm for a wide array of educational sabotage was the relentless plot to eliminate phonics and instead make children memorize sight-words.  Soon American literacy was in free fall.

The professors of education knew that sight-words do not work.  Dr. Samuel Orton conducted elaborate research and concluded in 1927 that this method was counterproductive and would permanently damage children.  But the communists were on a roll, around the world.  When the stock market crashed in 1929, these anti-capitalists felt vindicated.  They eliminated phonics from one public school after another, starting in 1930.  This project continues unabated.  As fast as a school dares to prefer phonics, the cult fights back.

The war against phonics was just one of many hostile projects. The pattern is always the same.  Discredit and dismiss any methods known to work.  Replace them with shoddy contrivances.  But the reading saga is particularly illustrative because the victims suffer so greatly.  Imagine that you are a ten-year-old boy who still cannot read, and you have no idea why.  They give you drugs to keep you quiet, and you watch the other children advance into a smarter world.  Now imagine the cold hearts needed to impose this torture on children.  Year after year, you have to withhold from students any knowledge of what works and force them to learn what does not work.  Only someone who believes that the ends justifies the means could perform such sadism.

Everything runs parallel in math, where the professors came up with New Math, Reform Math, and now Common Core Math, all much the same designed-to-fail curricula.  Content courses such as history, geography, and science are taught in ways that guarantee that children learn little history, geography, and science.  You have to be a vicious Pavlovian to concoct this dreck.  But the true Comintern spirit is shown in the perennial infliction of psychopathic nonsense on defenseless children. 

The media should be telling parents how to defend themselves.  But as noted, the media were also infected by the Comintern.  How can parents find out what to do when schools and newspapers are aligned against them?

The key insight to understanding the last hundred years is that the communists were always on offense.  Anything that might be a threat needed to be neutralized.  The Nazis had their concentration camps and their ovens.  The communists had something perhaps more powerful: thousands of lifelong fanatics, toiling every day on tiny assignments in order to bring about the downfall of America. 

This elaborate obsessiveness became the marching orders for our Education Establishment.  Even the tiniest success must be expunged.  The stupidest ideas in the history of education were brought into the schools and made to seem normal.

Bruce Deitrick Price's new book is Saving K–12: What happened to our public schools? How do we fix them?

Image via Pexels.

To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.