Let's take a moment and celebrate the thirty-year anniversary of the fall of the USSR — officially ending thirty years ago yesterday, December 31, 1991.  It was the end of a socialist regime that murdered 20 million of its citizens for political purposes and killed far more through the inefficiencies of its economic system.  Socialism resulted in mass starvation and abject poverty — killing a total estimated 60 million people in Russia alone.  We must never forget.

Ronald Reagan's strategy for defeating this ideological cancer was simple: "We win.  They lose."  Further explanation was unnecessary.  It was self-evident that socialism was a scourge on the Earth — responsible for the brutal subjugation of hundreds of millions of people.

John F. Kennedy likewise knew that socialism was an evil that needed to be put down — an ideology that ran directly counter to freedom, to prosperity, and to individual rights.  He knew this intuitively, well before Mao's cultural revolution of 1966 ran its course and resulted in an estimated 80 million deaths in China — again through political murder and economic inefficiencies resulting in mass starvation.  It wasn't until Deng Xiaoping introduced free market principles to China decades later that things turned around.

So why today are some young people again discussing the virtues of socialism?  Why do people like Sean Penn and Michael Moore hold up Venezuela's Chávez as a hero for reintroducing socialism — only to watch the inevitable decline, the spiral into starvation, and the need for totalitarian control as the population erupts into civil unrest?

How many more examples do we need to prove the failure of the system?  How many times can people fall for utopian promises of "equity for all"?  We don't need people like Bernie Sanders spreading lies about how Nordic countries are in fact socialist or "Democratic Socialist" when those countries are actually more free-market in many respects than the United States.  Even the Nordic leaders chastise Sanders for telling these lies.  When Sweden gave socialism a chance in the 1960s, that country went from having the highest level of individual prosperity in Europe to failure bankruptcy within a few short decades.  Since then, these countries have rejected socialism.

When are we going to stand up to socialism the way Reagan did, and the way that Kennedy did?  We are in an ideological battle.  It's time we put our foot down and say "enough!"  And that is especially true when people try to push it here within the United States through the teachings of critical theory.

The goal of Marxism is always to indoctrinate the vulnerable and uninformed, to spread hate and resentment, to divide people into groups, and to turn these groups against each other — all with the goal of tearing down society's institutions and creating a new order with these learned socialists on top.  Instead, we should focus on teaching our youth facts about freedom and free market principles.  Freedom and free markets brought more people out of poverty than any other system or ideology in the history of the world — it's not even close.

Image via Libreshot.