Why Obama's Communist Connections Are Not Headlines

Paul Kengor

The history and truth about communism is not taught by our educators.

There's a lot of frustration among conservatives over how Barack Obama's radical past seems to be making no impact whatsoever among the American public. His connection to communists in particular, from communist-terrorists like Bill Ayers to the communist agitator-journalist Frank Marshall Davis to fellow travelers like Saul Alinsky, has simply failed to resonate beyond the political right. Quite the contrary, the more information that becomes available on Obama's radical associations, the more he seems to widen his lead over John McCain, a man who was tortured by communists in Vietnam.

I understand these frustrations completely. I'm also not surprised.

I have seen for quite some time that although we won the Cold War — and defeated the Soviet communist empire — America is vulnerable to varying degrees of collectivism, wealth redistribution, "creeping socialism" (Ronald Reagan's phrase), class-warfare rhetoric, and generally milder, more palatable (but still dangerous) forms of disguised Marxism. Why? How? The answer is simple: The history and truth about communism is not taught by our educators.

That total failure to remind and understand means that Americans are painfully vulnerable to repeat mistakes that should have been forever tossed onto the ash-heap of history.

Communism and the Cold War has been my area of research for years. I've written books on the subject. I lecture on the subject at Grove City College and around the country. The book I'm currently researching with Peter Schweizer is a Cold War book, which, ironically, inevitably brought us into contact with Marxist characters who allied with and even mentored Barack Obama.

Of all the lectures that I do around the country, none seem to rivet the audience as much as my discourse on the horrors of communism. In these lectures, which are usually connected to my books on Ronald Reagan, I do a 10-15 minute backgrounder on the crimes of communists-from their militant attacks on private property, on members of all religious faiths, and on basic civil liberties, to their total death toll of over 100 million bloodied, emaciated corpses in the 20th century.

As I do these presentations, the young people, especially on college campuses, are locked in, amazed at what they are hearing. I think they are especially struck that I always ground every fact and figure in reliable research and authorities — books published by Harvard University Press and Yale University Press, quotes from the likes of Mikhail Gorbachev and Vaclav Havel and Alexander Yakovlev, anti-Soviet appraisals from certain Cold War Democrats like Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy and even early liberals like Woodrow Wilson. I rarely use right-wing sources because I don't want the professors of these students to be able to later shoot a single hole in my presentation — a potential tactic to undermine the overall thesis.