ASU Student Club Calls for Socialist Revolution

Barrett Faculty Silent

ASU begins its fall semester, and a student communist club calls for a socialist revolution. There are many student clubs on campus and ASU gives wide freedom to them as it should. Yet this specific club used images of Karl Marx and the hammer and sickle to refer to the violent and failed communist revolutions of the 20th century. They are purposely connecting themselves to those revolutions and calling for more of the same. You may remember that when conservatives spoke at ASU last February, the vast majority of the Barrett Faculty called them bigots and purveyors of hate speech. ASU fired two people involved in that event. Professors used their class time and ASU resources to denounce the event. Will they do anything in this case? Or do they only target peaceful conservatives?

The communists who rallied around the hammer and sickle in the 20th century were the perpetrators of more deaths than any other political movement in history. Karl Marx is responsible for more human suffering than any other political philosopher. To use these images is to invoke that pain and hardship. It is to callously neglect the hurt it would inflict on ASU students or faculty who fled communist countries for the freedoms of the West. 

Solzhenitsyn famously brought these horrors to the attention of the West. Western liberals were in denial at that time, and some of them even proposed we in the West adopt Soviet practices. The Western university professors who say they are worried about social injustices should especially be troubled by calls for a return to communist revolution. And yet here we are. Another case of “do as I say not as I do.” The honors faculty call conservatives “bigots” and turn a blind eye to a call for communist revolution on campus.

Parents, this is what you are sending your students into. Students, do you know the history of communism so that you can recognize it when professors teach it in your classrooms? Legislators, please help.