Communism...huh?

It's sad, but I'm sure that's the way it is in most of the world. If you are 20 years old, you were only 4 when the Soviet Union fell. You weren't old enough to remember the Iron Curtain, the Berlin Wall, the deprivations of the Soviets in Afghanistan, the gripping fear that a country which massacred millions of its own citizens had nuclear weapons pointed at every American city, the uncertainty that basic freedoms like speech and religion would exist, or the violence which had been committed in the Gulag or by the Khmer Rouge or in Eastern Europe.

Part of the spite directed towards the United States is from those who have either forgotten or never knew the horrors from which the United States protected the free world. People forget the atrocities associated with the Communists and, more specifically, the Soviets. So, they don't understand the role the United States had in ensuring that they never faced those atrocities.

Americans shouldn't be pointing back at Germany and pointing out the U.S.'s role in defeating Hitler. They should be pointing back at the Soviet Union and pointing out the U.S.'s role in defeating Soviet Communism.

Swedish teens don't know what communism is: study

A majority of Swedish teenagers don't know what communism is and don't know which countries neighbour their own, a poll published Wednesday showed, raising questions about Sweden's education system.

Ninety percent of teens aged 15 to 20 don't know which foreign capital is closest to Stockholm, 90 percent don't know what the Gulag is, and 40 percent think communism has increased prosperity in the world.

"They have a lack of understanding for basic concepts such as dictatorships and democracy, and that is unsettling. There must be a major change in their level of knowledge, and schools in particular must take responsibility," Camilla Andersson, the head of the Information About Communism organisation that commissioned the study, told Swedish news agency TT.

Schools Minister Jan Bjoerklund agreed.

"It is very worrying that Swedish history teaching is so limited. Many people have suspected that there are problems with (students') knowledge of history," he told TT.

He said he planned to propose more history lessons for students, and would recommend that the Holocaust and crimes committed in the name of communism in the Soviet Union be mandatory elements of the history curriculum.

The results of the study, published in daily Dagens Nyheter on Wednesday, also showed that 50 percent of the 1,004 teens questioned didn't know that Berlin was the capital of a country bordering the Baltic Sea, 82 percent didn't think Belarus was a dictatorship and 43 percent said they thought communism had claimed fewer than a million victims in the 20th century.

Fifty-six percent said they didn't know if Western market economies were democratic societies, and 22 percent said communism was a democratic social structure.