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Millennials haven’t forgotten Mao, Stalin or Lenin. They never knew them.

Millenials are aged 25 – 39. In Australia four out of five are not even “familiar” with Mao. Half have never heard of him, even though he caused the deaths of twice as many people as Adolf Hitler.

Political ideologues control our education system. We teach kids identity politics, and how to control the weather with light globes, but not the most important political lesson of the 20th Century.

We won the cold war, then lost the peace.

Why Millenials are embracing Socialism

Tom Switzer, Sydney Morning Herald

The survey evidence is clear. In a YouGov poll commissioned by the Centre for Independent Studies last year, 58 per cent of Australian millennials have a favourable view of socialism, with only 18 per cent having an unfavourable one. These findings reflect Millennial attitudes in Britain and the US.

What’s going on?

Part of the problem is plain ignorance. Most Millennials were hardly alive when Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire”.

According to the CIS poll, only 26 per cent of Millennials are familiar with Vladimir Lenin and 34 per cent with Joseph Stalin. Only 21 per cent of those questioned said they knew well who Mao was. Never mind that these men were responsible for the deaths of tens of millions and the impoverishment of hundreds of millions.

Whatever excuse explains Millennials’ ignorance of communism, they should at least know about Venezuela where the socialist regime of the past two decades has led to repression, an economy in free fall, widespread disease and starvation and mass emigration.

Tom Switzer is executive director of the Centre for Independent Studies and presenter at the ABC’s Radio National.

Here’s what failure looks like:

Politics, Historical figures, CIS, Graph, education, millenials, familiarity with dictators.

Only one in five people aged 25-39 in Australia are familiar with Mao, Stalin and Lenin.

Time to say “No”.

Here’s a radical idea, no child should get a high school certificate if they can’t answer the question “which political party caused the most deaths in the last 100 years”? The answer starts with C, and if you say Capitalism you have to repeat a year, and so do your teachers.

h/t David B.

REFERENCE

Tom Switzer, Charles Jacobs (2018) Millenials and Socialism, Centre for Independent Studies, Policy Paper 7.

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