Ted Cruz: Marxists Have Always Aimed To Infiltrate Education | Opinion

The following essay is an adapted excerpt from Ted Cruz's new book, Unwoke: How To Defeat Cultural Marxism in America, out Nov. 7 from Regnery.

Marxism doesn't work.

Any college student with sense who reads enough world history will eventually reach this conclusion. Study for even a few minutes, and anyone can detect the rot at the core of Karl Marx's central thesis.

This presents a problem for the woke totalitarians of today. If anyone can find out that your core ideas are built on a fraudulent, evil system just by reading, then even the most sophisticated propaganda campaign will not be enough to win hearts and minds.

Their solution?

Begin the indoctrination process before people can read.

In this, they are following in the footsteps of communists throughout history, who have understood the importance of beginning their revolutions with children. In my father's home country of Cuba, one of the first moves of Fidel Castro and his fellow revolutionaries was to dismantle the education system and rebuild it from the ground up, beginning almost immediately after they seized power in 1959. No longer would parents be the ones who taught their children values. The parents wouldn't even decide when and in what manner their children could leave the house and begin working. Every child in Cuba, according to Castro, now belonged to the revolution.

A few years earlier, while hiding out in Mexico City to plan his revolution, Castro had met a young doctor from Argentina named Che Guevara. Today, most people would recognize Che Guevara from the sketch of his face that adorns T-shirts and dorm room posters—the one that shows him looking skyward in a decaled hat and military uniform, usually accompanied by the phrase "Viva La Revolución." At some point in the 1980s, for reasons that defy understanding, Che Guevara became a cult figure to young leftists who liked his clothes and his politics.

According to Guevara and Castro, getting the children while they were young was one of the most important goals of the revolution. Children were, in Guevara's words, "malleable clay with which the new man, without any of the previous defects, can be formed."

By "defects," communists mean the things that get in the way of violent revolution—things like religion, traditional values, and a belief in the family as the basic structural unit of society. Castro and his allies believed that if children could be taught early enough to reject those things, they would become loyal and unquestioning soldiers in the revolution, willing to defend the principles of communism and Marxism forever.

The idea wasn't new. From the moment that Karl Marx and his disciples first began writing about their vision for the world in the mid-1800s, they dreamed of a society in which it was the state, not families, that would take care of educating children. Both Marx and his partner Friedrich Engels viewed the nuclear family as a corrupting force on modern society—a "money relation" that should be supplanted by the state. In The Communist Manifesto, they stated plainly that the education of children, "from the moment they can get along without their mother's care," should be handled by the government rather than parents.

Typically, you find very few mentions of things like mathematics, economics, or critical thinking in the curricula of Marxist institutions. Those subjects take a back seat to "free love" and "the archaic nature of bourgeois family codes." Some communist schools may never get around to them at all. Of course, many of these Marxist education systems—and the regimes that attempted to implement them—didn't last very long. The Hungarian Soviet Republic, for instance, operated for only 133 days before shutting down.

The rare exception, of course, is Cuba, where Fidel Castro and Che Guevara exerted brutal control over the entire country. In 1960, they established state-run preschools to teach children about Marxism. This was the year that my father returned to his native country to find that his home and his family had been devastated by the new Castro regime.

In his childhood home, he sat with my abuela and listened to stories about what she had been forced to endure as an elementary school teacher after the communists took over. She told him about the spies, the soldiers, and the constant sense that someone was watching her every move, making sure that every word she said was perfectly in line with the revolution. It was there, sitting at the kitchen table of the house he'd grown up in, that my father first heard the stories of the soldiers who had barged into his mother's classroom and told the young students to pray to Fidel Castro for candy—a story that affected me so deeply when I heard it as a child that it still comes readily to mind whenever I hear some left-wing activist extol the virtues of state-dictated education or other neo-Marxist principles. He also heard about how she had feigned insanity, kicking over chairs and foaming at the mouth, to avoid joining the revolution without being thrown in jail or shot.

When my father left Cuba for the last time in 1960, he was leaving behind a country that was about to be radically transformed. Most of that transformation would come about through education. Throughout the 1960s, as my grandmother endured the scorn of her neighbors (only some of whom believed she was truly insane, leaving her open to the incredibly dangerous charge of being a counter-revolutionary), Castro nationalized every educational institution in Cuba. The Communist Party established a children's auxiliary club and built boarding schools in the more rural areas of the country, where men only slightly younger than my father would be sent to learn revolutionary politics and agriculture. By the late 1960s, according to a recent history of Cuba, about 85 percent of high school students attended those boarding schools.

This total overhaul of the educational system was the first step in the grand plan of the leftist revolutionaries who had taken control of the country. Their mission, as Che Guevara put it in his most famous essay, "Man and Socialism in Cuba," was to do away with everything that had come before. "The new society in process of formation," he wrote, "has to compete very hard with the past."

Ted Cruz, a Republican, is the junior U.S. Senator from Texas.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.