Seminar at U Texas-Austin Will Encourage Scholars to Teach About Evils of Communism
“Much needs to be done to empower educators to tell an accurate history of the crimes and destruction wrought by communist revolutionaries and governments.”
This should have been happening for decades now, but better late than never.
The College Fix reports:
‘Too easily forgotten’: Seminar encourages scholars to teach about evils of communism
The University of Texas at Austin will host a two-day seminar on communism to encourage professors to host their own classes on the subject and ensure that, as one professor put it, the “destructive” ideology is not “easily forgotten.”
“Too often, courses on communism focus on theory at the expense of real-world outcomes,” UT Austin Professor Alexander Duff told The College Fix.
“Communism is among the most destructive ideologies in history with regard to personal liberty, prosperity, and the rule of law. Reckoning with the truth of this is of utmost urgency, given that such mistakes are too easily forgotten,” Duff said in a recent interview.
The conference, “Teaching the Twentieth Century: Communism and Dissent,” will take place this October.
The event is a partnership between the university’s School of Civic Leadership and the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. The foundation, authorized by U.S. Congress in 1993, works to educate the public about the 100 million people who have died as the result of communism’s human rights abuses.
Eric Patterson, president and CEO of the foundation, told The Fix in a recent email that the purpose of the conference is to “empower university faculty with the resources needed to teach about communism — its history, its ideology, and its terrible legacy.”
The seminar aims to prepare professors to teach classes on communism from within various disciplines. The conference is free, but professors who participate must agree to teach a related course following the seminar.
Patterson, (pictured) a foreign policy expert and former U.S. Department of State official, told The Fix that professors “have an important role to play to analyze the claims and evidence of communism, because for the past century it has been the main alternative worldview to the Western moral order.”
“Much needs to be done to empower educators to tell an accurate history of the crimes and destruction wrought by communist revolutionaries and governments,” Patterson said.
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Comments
a conference that will probably be shouted down by antifa blmplo rioters
For those that harbor the notion that communism and personal freedoms are compatible, consider the following chilling 1922 quote given in routine language by Vladimir Lenin as related in Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago”:
“The basic concept, I hope is clear, notwithstanding all the shortcomings of the rough draft: openly to set forth a statute which is both principled and politically truthful (and not just juridically narrow) to supply the motivation for the essence and the justification of terror, its necessity, its limits. The court must not exclude terror. It would be self-deception or deceit to promise this, and in order to provide it with a foundation and to legalize it in a principled way, clearly and without hypocrisy and without embellishment, it is necessary to formulate it as broadly as possible for only revolutionary righteousness and a revolutionary conscience will provide the conditions for applying it more or less broadly in practice.”
yeah
but thats their whole game
talk equality and imprison >>>murder dissenters
an obama/fjb wet dream
55 years ago, we had exactly such a course at MIT. It was a freshman seminar course on “The Twentieth Century: Revolution and Totalitarianism,” and helped satisfy the humanities requirement (one course per semester). This is how my bookshelf developed its “Bad Boys” corner (Mein Kampf, Communist Manifesto)
This is surprising. I wonder if “The University of Texas at Austin” is feeling some competition from “The University of Austin”.
https://www.uaustin.org/
Yeah, I really wish schools wouldn’t do that. It took me quite a while after I moved here to carefully distinguish between the University of Arizona and Arizona State University, especially given that they’re both state colleges. Northern Arizona University — somewhat better.
Louisiana did the same thing with USL and LSU, endless confusion for their grads.
Yes, like the similarly confusing terminology to newcomers: UA = University of Alabama and AU = Auburn University. Of course, after about a minute immersed in the local culture, the difference is obvious and a show of allegiance is expected.
.
Are universities now supposed to be indoctrinators of conservative thought and philosophy?
Whatever happened to “teaching how to think, not what to think. “?
Reminds me of how when Populists took control of Kansas they harried conservative professors just like conservatives had harried liberal ones before.
William Jennings Bryan was right.
“A man cannot command a salary for saying what his employer does not want said.”
Meet the new boss.
Same as the old boss.