Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [15]
We can learn a lot from the spread of propaganda in Europe that led to Hitler’s power. A key ingredient in that spread of propaganda was through the youth. And it’s not just Nazi Germany. Totalitarian regimes around the world have sought to spread their propaganda and entrench their power by brainwashing the children.10
Another contributor enthusiastically invoked the dreaded “slippery slope”:
I remember from history class that some other very prominent figures in history started out like this, all about education and change for the better. Capture the hearts and minds and all that. You can call it what you will but Obama Youth or Hitler Youth . . . This is much too slippery a slope, this day and age with the role of government becoming more invasive the last thing I want is for “them” to get a tooth into my kids.11
A Very Brief History of Corrupting the Youth
The fear of juvenile indoctrination goes way back. Way, way back. In 399 BC, the city-state of Athens executed the philosopher Socrates for corrupting the youth with subversive and impious ideas. Two millennia later, in 1547, the city of London banned playhouses for “corruptions of youth and other enormities,”12 which forced Shakespeare’s playing company to build the famous Globe Theatre outside the city limits.q In 1688, as a pretext for seizing the English throne, William of Orange formally protested Catholic activities in England, including the construction of “several colleges of Jesuits in diverse places for the corrupting of youth.”13
More recently, in 1946, Rep. George Dondero (R-MI) warned that the country was being “systematically communized” by left-wing teachers at public schools, resulting in “an entire generation of voters who do not appreciate our Constitution, or our national history.”14 In 1954, psychologist Fredric Wertham published a widely publicized book, Seduction of the Innocent, about the corrupting influence of comic books in which he alleged that Batman and Robin were gay lovers, Wonder Woman was a “cruel, ‘phallic’ woman,” and Superman was unrealistic:
He gives children a completely wrong idea of other basic physical laws. Not even Superman, for example, should be able to lift up a building while not standing on the ground, or to stop an airplane in mid air while flying himself.r15
The Segregation Academies
In 1954, the same year that Wertham published Seduction of the Innocent, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that segregated schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, setting in motion a chain of events that would lead to the birth of the persecution politics movement in the late 1970s.
One of the men who precipitated these events was a Baptist minister named Jerry Falwell. In 1956, at the age of twenty-three, Falwell founded a church in Lynchburg, Virginia. In his sermons, Falwell railed against the Brown v. Board of Education decision, proclaiming:
If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God’s word and had desired to do the Lord’s will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never have been made . . . The facilities should be separate. When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line.16
After the Supreme Court decision, white politicians and parents sought alternative means to uphold God’s “line of distinction.” They found it in the “seg academies”—all white private schools that blossomed like daisies across the South after public schools desegregated. Holmes County, Mississippi, was typical of “desegregated” Southern school districts. In the first year after public school desegregation, white enrollment in the county’s public schools dropped from 771 to 28. In the second year, it dropped to zero.17 Prince Edward County, Virginia,