Early riser Tim Blair (well, he lives in Australia, which means he automatically rises hours before me) pokes fun at a group of lefties who are upset about the negative portrayal of commumism on an Italian graduation exam:
The evils of communism appear front and center in one of the themes that hundreds of thousands of Italian high school seniors could choose to write about in graduation exams given this month. That topic invited students to ponder "terror and the political repression in the totalitarian systems" of the 20th century and gives brief descriptions of fascism in Italy, Nazism in Germany and communism in the former Soviet Union and other countries.
Communism is blamed for the executions of about 100 million people, five times greater than the killings attributed in the exam to Nazism.
Yep, well, so far it's all...historically accurate, but politically incorrect. So, some teachers and left-wingers are upset, of course. One fellow taught his students that the "goal of communism was to unite" people, which isn't a problem unless he left out the inconvenient facts about the reality, which was that Stalin and Mao murdered tens of millions of their own citizens in the attempt to establish this "uniting" force.
Students avoided the question, it turns out, because they feared the biases of the item grader. If they'd had teachers who taught them that communism wasn't really all that bad, I don't blame them for shying away from a essay prompt that (correctly) identified both communism and fascism as totalitarian systems in the 20th century.
Posted by kswygert at July 2, 2003 08:39 AM