Re: "45 Communist Goals for America" - as read into the Congressional Record, Jan. 10, 1963
The conclusion should be obvious: anyone can write or say pretty much anything. Doesn't make it true. I can write up a list called "45 Conservative Christian Goals" with items like:
1. Eliminate or enslave all non-white people in America, and if possible the world, by any means necessary.
2. Elevate the wealthy into a permanent aristocracy that will rule autocratically over everyone else.
3. Gut the Bill of Rights.
4. Use schools as institutes to indoctrinate children into the ideals of evangelical Christianity.
5. Kill all homosexuals as soon as they are discovered.
6. Bring back Levitical law, including stoning for disobedient women and children
and so on. And they'd all ring true to certain segments of the population. But are those and other such actually goals of Conservative Christianity? Can I actually claim any real authority on the subject, since I am not a Christian and haven't spent very much time discussing what Conservative Christians actually want? The answer to those questions, it seems to me, is no.
Which, by the principle of parity of reasoning, means that we ought to be skeptical of the 45 goals listed for the Communist party. Take the first three items on the list Skousen wrote--all having to do with disarming the United States. What have
actual Marxist states done on that score? Russia, China, Cuba, etc. have all built up their military forces significantly. Marxists aren't interested in disarmament--it's just not in their playbook.
What the list is designed to do is to instill fear into people of basically anything that doesn't resemble far right economics and social policy. School lunch programs that take a small amount of tax money and use it to feed children who are starving are suddenly branded as Communist, and then by some tortured thinking, also branded as anti-Christian and anti-American and the first step on the road to hell--for gosh sakes, whatever we do, don't feed the damn starving children! And in that way, the ideology behind this list of 45 goals delivers all sorts of moral abominations.
The actual number of real Marxists in this country is vanishingly small--they're mostly aging college professors working in academic backwaters here and there. Most progressives and liberals recognize that pure communism/socialist do not work, and can lead to disastrous consequences that no one would want.
"Probably" Nice work(wink)
It would be impossible to know for sure that Skousen had or had not read anything substantive written by a real socialist. But given his views and his characterization of what socialists want, it's a pretty good bet he had never seriously grappled with socialist thought, and was merely responding to far right propaganda about socialism.