Dec 3, 2017 3 min read

In addition to loving to write about history, I write this column because I am worried about our nation’s historical ignorance – especially that of our young. Polls show that large numbers of students can’t name the three branches of our government, or who were our allies, and enemies, in our two world wars.

Knowledge of our past, good and bad, is critical to our future. We are inspired by the good, we learn from the bad. The eminent historian David McCullough once wrote, “A nation that forgets its past can function no better than a man with amnesia.” President Ronald Reagan said, “If we forget what we did, we won’t know who we are. I am warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result in, ultimately, an erosion of the American spirit.”

And then I read this headline describing a recent poll: “Millennials would rather live in a communist or socialist nation than under capitalism.” Some 53 percent of those polled felt that way.

Regular readers of this column know I prefer telling stories about history-making people than citing facts and figures, but the undeniable fact is that nearly 100 million people have died in communist nations. In communist China, 65 million people died, while in the Soviet Union it was 20 million, and neither number includes war casualties. These are deaths ordered by the government, or because of murderous policies, such as government-caused famines, sometimes purposeful, sometimes due to the unfeasibility of command economies. North Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam … the list goes on.

Democracy and capitalism, for all their faults and inequities, have improved and saved far more lives than they have ended.

But let’s close with a true story, told by Clifford May, president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracy. As a young exchange student at Leningrad University, he had a conversation with an old woman who spent 10 years in a Siberian labor camp during Joseph Stalin’s “Great Terror,” and when he asked why, she replied, “They don’t bother to come up with a charge.”

But she got off lucky, because, she told him, “They executed my daughter.” Again, May asked why. “She formed a Marxist-Leninist Study Group,” the woman replied. How could that be a crime in the Soviet Union, May asked, astonished. Because, she replied, “It wasn’t a Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist study group.”

Suppose, as was probably true, the daughter was in her late 20s or early 30s, the age range of today’s millennials. She decidedly would not have been among those American millennials preferring to live – or in her case, die – under communism.

Kauffmann’s e-mail address is bruce@historylessons.net @BruceKauffmann