The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT): a venerated hall of higher learning from which some of the greatest achievers of the past century have emerged, including physicist Richard Feynman, mathematician Gilbert Strang, founder of the band Boston, Tom Sholz, the exciting bureaucrat and former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, and Oliver Smoot (the man who laid on the sidewalk of the Massachusetts Avenue Bridge 364 times in 1962 to provide measurements that are still re-painted each year). So with such an illustrious history of achievement in education, what logical step could MIT’s publishing arm take to shore up its bonafides?
Why, publish a schoolbook for kids to promote the obvious virtues of communism, of course!
As reported by Tiffany Gabbay, for TruthRevolt, the MIT Press has just published a children’s book called “Communism for Kids” and, despite MIT’s reputation for nurturing science and erudition, the book is not what one might expect. It is not an overview of the horrors wrought by political collectivism around the world. Instead, it’s a book promoting communism.
To kids.
Its author, Bini Adamczak is “…a German ‘social theorist and artist’ who writes on political theory, ‘queer politics, and the past and future of revolutions," writes Gabbay.
According to Adamczak, communism isn’t hard to grasp or implement (which is a shame, because if it had been more difficult to implement, millions upon millions of people would not have been killed by regimes practicing it).
The “Communism for Kids” author tells potential readers:
…This little book proposes a different kind of communism, one that is true to its ideals and free from authoritarianism. Offering relief for many who have been numbed by Marxist exegesis and given headaches by the earnest pompousness of socialist politics, it presents political theory in the simple terms of a children’s story, accompanied by illustrations of lovable little revolutionaries experiencing their political awakening.
Cute. But communism as a political ideology requires authoritarianism, because it is, by definition, to be established through the state. As a result, it is involuntary, as all states are, and is to be forced on people, whether they want it or not. This is a fundamental insight, and highlights the fact that those who promote “communism” as somehow “not authoritarian” have no clue what communism requires.
It is ironic that MIT and the author should sell a book about communism on the market. One would have thought that a writer in favor of communal property would just give his work away. Heck, how about just letting anyone get a diploma from MIT, whether they pay tuition or not?
It’s also ironic that a school in Massachusetts should publish a book promoting political collectivism, given that Massachusetts is home to the first example of the failure of collectivism in the history of America. That would be the Plymouth Plantation, where, as former Gov. William Bradford noted, they tried collectivism and it failed, leading to resentment among neighbors, anger, sloth, and starvation. So, rather than pay a supposed “communist” to publish an apologia for a political philosophy that led to death there, and to the deaths of nearly a hundred million people across the globe, why not just explain to kids what the Pilgrims did to survive after trying communism?
In fact, the Pilgrims are perennial subjects of kids books. Why not do something simple, and just tell them the true story of Thanksgiving, that it was, according to Bradford, a celebration of finding the wisdom to recognize the worth of the individual and his or her property?
That seems like child’s play and easily in the wheelhouse of the geniuses at MIT.